# Blue Ammonia, The New Face Of Hydrogen Fuel



## Robert Zwilling (Oct 2, 2020)

Saudi Arabia shipped "blue ammonia" to Japan so it can be tested as a way of producing and using electricity without any harmful emissions.

Is this a practical example of cold water fusion power? It's nowhere near as exciting, but room temperature fusion for the foreseeable future might only be herding massive amounts of hydrogen atoms around, no real fusion, just the generation of electricity and this certainly seems to do the trick.

Ammonia is rich in hydrogen and has no carbon in it. Three atoms of hydrogen tethered by one nitrogen atom. It couldn't be simpler. To make it work as a clean fuel, its use has to be made cheaper or we have to start paying more for energy so that it can be used as a replacement for oil. As fertilizer, ammonia is cheap, but processed as a fuel for fuel cells it goes for 10 times the price it gets as fertilizer. Probably industrial grade versus high purity contaminant free grade. Ideally it should not see such a difference in cost if it is to be used as a global fuel source. If the price can't be cut down and it works as a method of easily transporting large quantities of hydrogen, then the price of energy has to go up. The dream of free energy might only be a pipe dream even if it is generated by renewable naturally generated power.

It is called blue ammonia, which is made using renewable energy sources, to distinguish it from regular ammonia produced the old fashion way, which is very dirty and not very efficient. The old way of making ammonia, which is created in enormous quantities as fertilizer for the global agricultural industry, creates a lot of pollution. Ammonia production consumes about 2% of the world's energy and generates 1% of its CO2.

Blue ammonia is used to create green hydrogen which is a fuel for fuel cells. Japan is still making a determined effort to use fuel cells instead of electrical batteries for powering cars. The rest of the world is looking towards rechargeable batteries which are already generating a specter of pollution, a trail of hard to treat industrial waste from manufacture, use, and disposal of the batteries and fallout from the sources of electricity powering the batteries. Undoubtedly some electric cars are being recharged by electricity generated by coal fired plants and other sources of not so clean energy. Even natural gas, once the darling of the green world as a safe fuel, has fallen on bad times.

The push for rechargeable batteries based on the need for speed and ease of use could be reminiscent of the way gasoline powered engines completely demolished the competing steam and electrical powered vehicles 120 years ago.

The article gives a good description of what is happening in the newly emerging ammonia fuel based industry. Ammonia is a far simpler way of transporting, handling, storing and using hydrogen than any other method being used. I can imagine it being created and transported in the same vein that Arthur C Clarke imagined giant spaceship fuel tankers would travel out to the big gas planets, fill up, and then scoot back to Earth.

The blue ammonia is made by running a fuel cell in reverse. The fuel cell running in reverse is powered by renewable energy, the clean energy that currently can't be stored without converting it to electricity where it has to be stored in a battery as it can't just be pumped into the power grid. The fuel cell running in reverse produces ammonia, with no pollution, which is far easier to store than electricity. It can stored without refrigeration in the same tanks that store oil and LPG. Right now, when an engine burns clean, the only thing coming out of the tail pipe is water.

While it would be nice that everything could be powered by electricity coming straight out of the air, that is only possible for small amounts of electricity. One of the main stumbling blocks of renewable energy is the instant need for enormous amounts of power that is required to power the world's use of energy. To solve this, the energy is currently stored as a petroleum product as a liquid (oil, other fuels) or a gas (propane, methane, etc.) because you can easily store and convert the petroleum product into instant energy. While we can control the release of the energy (a gallon of gasoline is like a stick of dynamite), we can not control the resulting deterioration of the environment from the excessive use of petroleum products as a fuel. 

It is very interesting to note that Saudi Arabia, one of the largest producers of petroleum, is making the blue ammonia that makes the green hydrogen. It doesn't matter to them if the massive ships are shipping petroleum products or ammonia. Either way a vast amount of product that can be used as an instant fuel needs to shipped around the world to fill the needs of everything that requires energy on a global scale.

The actual process is not described in too much depth. No mention of how Saudi Arabia produced the blue ammonia except to say that is was made by converting hydrocarbons into ammonia. The actual ammonia production plant powered by a renewable energy power plant is a 5 billion dollar project not yet built.

How practical is this as a future source of hydrogen?

One question not answered is hot much ammonia does it take to power a large city. Would these ammonia storage tanks be a couple of hundred feet in diameter like the oil storage tanks, but unlike the old oil tanks, which ended at ground level, would the ammonia tanks go a thousand feet deep into the ground?

The fuel cell running in reverse project that is producing ammonia, while actually existing, is still in the design being changed every month to increase the efficiency. It has gone from 1 percent to 70 percent but the output has suffered greatly in the process.

Imagine a car that when the fuel cell engine is run in reverse it producers its own fuel by just adding water to it, plus some nitrogen that is carried in a small spare tank, powered by a solar cell roof, or plugged into an electric outlet.

Other ways of producing the ammonia using processes that are cleaner than the current hundred year old process are being developed. Most still use a lot of energy. One ultimate design envisions tanker size ships parked off the coast, powered by electric cables coming off the land, taking in sea water and taking hydrogen out of the sea water, and adding it to nitrogen being taken out of the air and producing ammonia.





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						Science | AAAS
					






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