Earth, Wind, and Fire
Fuel cells are a clean, safe emission way to use hydrogen as a fuel.
The Korean and Japanese companies are working on combustion engines to burn hydrogen or ammonia.
Most likely the reason they are looking into Amogy's system of using hydrogen as a fuel is to copy the method of extracting the hydrogen from the ammonia and then feed it into a combustion engine. There are also plans for simple diesel engines running on ammonia. The first ammonia-powered, four-stroke marine engine to be made available for order, debuted this past November from Finland-based marine technology company Wärtsilä.
Neither of those combustion solutions are anywhere near clean. Even a "supposedly clean" diesel engine is creating harmful particulate pollution by its very operation.
Even the fuel cell system has some nitrous emissions, though I suspect the combustion engines are much worse. The nitrous emissions are complex and hard to handle.
Amogy is still working on controlling that problem. Since it only happens in the process of splitting the ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen, it is probably doable. But it also adds another layer of technology to the Amogy setup which could seriously impact its operation the same way the regular car gasoline engine went from being a simple and reliable machine into a dual machine system where failure in the emission control system disables or seriously impacts the operation of the engine.
Japan is working on a plan to dilute their fossil fuels for generating electricity by adding a 20 percent component of ammonia. Eventually they want to increase it to a 50/50 mixture. This will extend the lifetime and use of coal fired plants all over Asia and anywhere else coal and fossil fuels are used to generate electricity. The US use of ethanol shows how little this strategy improves anything. This will create a situation where there will be no loss of power generation when switching from coal to a less polluting fuel and probably result in the continuing use of coal.
Japan uses around 1 million tons of ammonia per year for various non power related uses. Most of that is produced inside Japan. To achieve a country wide use of 20 percent ammonia mixture for all power generating fuels 10 years from now, Japan will have to increase it’s use of ammonia from around 1 million tons per year to 20 million tons a year. Japan won’t be the only country needing more ammonia.
The exceptional increase in demand for ammonia will only raise the price of it from a fertilizer based commodity to an internationally traded fuel that won’t have a cheap price tag. The farming industry will have to find another source of fertilizer as the price of ammonia becomes unaffordable for growing crops.
People will never stop using cement. The only thing that can be done is to contain the emissions at the source of manufacture. Ammonia has the same situation. Saudi Arabia is working on producing clean ammonia from their vast methane deposits and is setting up a global transport system for their replacement for fossil fuels. It could be said that ammonia is a carbon free fossil fuel. To make the cement or ammonia emissions at the point of manufacture, that requires a lot of energy. A requirement that Saudi Arabia can easily meet. But even the energy required to power that process can either be dirty or clean.
Perhaps Big Tech is not capable of creating solutions that don't need a lot of energy to make them work. Solutions that end up using more energy than they save and the savings exist only on paper based on future events that might never happen. Crypto, AI, Carbon Credits, Carbon Capture, Nuclear Energy, versus solar energy, wind power, geothermal power, and now there is Ammonia. Which side of the equation will it land on? Earth, Wind, and Fire, real basic natural forces, versus empty inventions that are full of broken promises for whatever anyone thinks can make a few short term bucks. Sounds like an epic comic book story. Something the money from the game of thorn bushes would have been better spent doing.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-460717071-5897fc363df78caebc90d713.jpg)
www.thoughtco.com
