TLDR Ammonia, generated with renewables (hydrogen from electrolysis and nitrogen extracted from atmospheric air combined with the Haber Bosch process).
Are there more direct methods? It seems like ammonia would be much easier to transport than hydrogen, but at the cost of another loss of efficiency is a big hit. Though it might be cheaper for cargo ship operators who have a lot of capital investment.
Doesn’t have to be efficient with renewables that otherwise would’ve been curtailed (throwing away that clean energy). Still more energy dense than batteries (for marine vessel use).
Last time I searched papers on catalysts for ammonia synthesis and for hydrolysis, most of the papers were from research labs in China. ResearchGate might be a good place to start.
Eh, depends on the concentration. I'm pretty sure your introductory chemistry teacher asked you to smell a dilute solution of it. And it's a common reagent in introductory chemistry classes so you've had plenty of chances of smelling it.
“They are also used as a form of stimulant in athletic competitions (such as powerlifting, strong man and ice hockey) to "wake up" competitors to perform better. In 2005, Michael Strahan estimated that 70–80% of National Football League players were using smelling salts as stimulants.”
What soil bacteria? Modern agriculture tills soil microorganisms to death then is forced up to make up the difference in fertility with oil-derived nutrients. Oops.
Okay I'm obviously being hyperbolic, there is still soil bacteria. But cool is not the word I would use to describe such a practice...
Regardless of misgivings about American farm practices, it is undeniably cool that ammonia-saturated water can have its ammonia fixed so very quickly by bacteria that have not in thousands of generations encountered saturated ammonia solution.
Use of ammonia fixed by local wind power should be less objectionable than numerous other common farm "inputs". In particular, injecting nitrogen deep under the surface should result in much less nitrate-saturated runoff to streams and thus, ultimately, algae blooms offshore, than we get with spraying.
That said, the tragic loss of buckwheat from world diets is a direct consequence if it not yielding more in response to fertilizers. That is tragic because it has better protein than any other grain. A buckwheat that produces more when fertilized would be a great gift to the world.
It’s a fairly common household (glass) cleaning product. If you’ve used window cleaner you’ve probably inhaled ammonia. Hence the warnings on the bottle about ventilation.
Indeed. Household ammonia is only about a 3% solution. No big deal. 30% ammonia can give you a nosebleed if you sniff it. Break a couple bottles of 30% ammonia in a closed room, and people entering that room without an air supply will likely die. TFA doesn't mention the concentration they would use for fuel, but surely the higher the better. I wouldn't want to work on a ship running that stuff. Small leaks of various things are way too common, and ammonia is way too dangerous.
The thought of working in the confines of a ship's engine room with such a hazardous fuel is horrifying. One reason for the widespread use of diesel oil is that it's relatively safe for human operatives.
The article mentions that large amounts of ammonia are routinely transported as cargo. Storing ammonia safely isn’t easy, but it’s mostly a solved problem.
Gasoline vapors are pretty bad. A long time ago I had a little ski boat, and was pretty concerned about running out of gas. So I put a gallon jug of emergency gas in the boat. Now, the boat was completely open to the breeze. No matter how tightly I closed the cap on that jug (and it was a standard gas can) the fumes made me nauseous. I finally gave it up.
The same goes for filling a gas can at the station to transport to the boat to fill its tank. I would not spill a drop of gas, and driving it home I'd have all the windows open on the car and drive with my head out the window and it would still make me sick.
It's amazing how many people came out to dispute this point -- often in the most 'I am very smrt' way possible.
Ammonia concentrated for use as fuel (or other industrial processes) is not the same thing as window cleaner, just as hydrogen peroxide concentrated for use as rocket fuel is far, far more dangerous than the hydrogen peroxide diluted for use in first aid kits.
True story: while delivering some computers to the Pittsburgh Paint & Glass refinery near Lake Charles, the guard gave me a colored hard hat and a filter. When I asked what it was for he said it was in case of an ammonia leak. He said put the filter in your mouth, use the clip to close your nose and follow anyone wearing a given hardhat color out of the plant
When I asked him some question about this potential disaster, he said "Ah don't worry about it, you'll be blind from the ammonia anyway." Yeesh.
Another option which I don't see mentioned often is using formic acid to solve the volumetric capacity problem of storing hydrogen.
Compared to ammonia and methanol, formic acid is less energy dense, but due to recent advances in catalysts it has the potential for simpler and smaller systems in less demanding circumstances (heat, pressure) [1].
The only party I know of that is trying to bring this to market is Dens [2], formed out of a student group at the University of Eindhoven [3]. Their website is a bit high on the rhetoric (including trying to coin "hydrozine"), and their mockups looks like, well, mockups, but there are real technology advances behind this, for example their trial with a city bus [4] (Dutch).
Formate can also be used directly for biomass generation, meaning you can feed it to a vat of cells instead of glucose or sunlight. If you’re willing to eat cells, kinda solves a lot of food generation issues.
You wouldn't burn the ammonia, but use a process to 'crack' ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen gas, for example [1]. No oxygen is involved.
Edit: Upon rereading, I found that the article actually states: "There are challenges. Burning ammonia can create polluting nitrous oxides, therefore the exhaust needs cleaning up", which would indicate they're burning it. So either the reporter misunderstood or it's really a non-innovation then.
It's going to be both: It's not cheap to convert a ship to fuel cell power, so in the short-term a lot of them will just burn ammonia as a fuel. Longer-term, converting ammonia into H2 and N2 will be the more common strategy.
This is the problem with lumping all pollution together: NOx is harmful to humans and animals in the short term, causing lung irritation. So yes, you really don't want a bunch of ships pumping NOx near human populations. I don't know if a ships funnel would be enough to get the fumes away from the crew of a ship while it's running in the middle of the ocean.
Excess CO2 is not especially harmful to humans in the short term (unless you are in a confined area), but it does contribute to global climate change.
Not necessarily. Ammonia burns to water and nitrogen, primarily. But the process is complicated, goes through many intermediate compounds and radicals, and won't have time to complete in a piston engine. The exhaust will therefore contain both some nitrogen oxides and some unreacted ammonia.
The good news is that catalytic converters to destroy NOx are established technology, and they happen to use ammonia as a reductant. This is definitely doable for ships, probably doable for heavy trucks, and a bit annoying for smaller cars.
Ammonia is different. It will dissolve into water, get diluted quickly, and bacteria will degrade it. A fuel leak on an ammonia fueled ship is just like fish peeing into the water. Admittedly, a whole lot of fish, so it's still a local problem that takes a while to solve itself.
Likewise, a fuel spill on land would be a brief local problem. Today, if a truck spill its guts, we have to scramble to absorb the fuel oil before it contaminates soil or gets into the sewage system. With ammonia, we'd just flush it down with an excess of water. In soil, it is fertilizer, and in a sewage treatment plant, it gets biodegraded.
Burning anything in atmosphere creates NOx emissions (really, just heating anything enough; NOx emissions from vehicles are from heating atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen, not from the fuel)
The great thing about ammonia is you can make it with just water, air, and electric power, and run the conversion only when you have excess power to burn.
The next great thing is that, made under a wind farm, it is directly useful, on the regular farm often found underneath, as both fuel and fertilizer. Excess can be sold to the next farm over. So, no fuel or fertilizer transport costs.
The third is that it provides a sink for power generation a long ways away from any power grid termination. So, it opens up huge swaths of territory where windmills would not be built, despite plentiful wind and space.
“Around 90% of all goods traded globally are transported by sea...Marine transport produces around 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
Sounds like a bargain to me, frankly.
2% would make marine fuel about 7% of transport greenhouse gas emissions. BUT marine fuel is insanely dirty. Easily 10X worse than land transport fuels and engines, and with no emissions mitigation.
It might be simpler to require cleaner marine fuel, but marine fuel is currently a polluter at a large multiple of its share of greenhouse gas emissions.
Also, ammonia is a very good candidate for an economically viable energy storage and transport medium for renewable energy generation. Hydrogen is expensive to store and embrittles metal containers and pipelines.
Can they use it in the same engines? AFAIK ships that have Diesel engines use regulation Diesel near ports and then cheap as fuck, nasty Diesel out in the open ocean to save costs.
were made from transparent originals using UV lamps on paper that developed through being exposed to ammonia vapours.
Any architect/engineer would have (instead of a plotter) one of these machines, with a transparent glass or perspex/lexan pipe with inside one, two or three UV "neon" tubes in which you fed the transparent coupled with the reactive paper, a motor and a large belt would make the paper travel some 270 ° around the UV illuminated pipe, thus impressing the paper.
Higher end machines had an internal "developing station" (basically a perforated pipe inside which small quantities (drops) of ammonia were slowly pumped and around which only the UV impressed paper passed), and there was a fan extracting air to a vent pipe leading outside.
The earlier and lower end machines had a separate "developing station" consisting in a box (more sort of a large pipe) with a container of ammonia on top and a flap like door on the bottom through which you inserted the UV impressed paper rolled up. There was a small tap to regulate a flow of drops of ammonia from the container into the box/pipe.
The first kind of machine, if properly operated, was almost odourless because the ammonia vapours were distributed on the paper and the fan did take out most of what was not absorbed by the paper, the second was a nightmare, the inside of the box/pipe was impregnated with a lot of ammonia (as the copy was rolled and had to be developed everywhere) and everytime you opened the flap (to remove already developed copies or to insert one to be developed) if you didn't hold your breath and/or you weren't very quick you would taste it for good, and anyway often you opened just a little too much the little tap and the copy would be wet from ammonia.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 26.8 ms ] threadThe Haber-Bosch process isn't very energy efficient, though.
Looks like ammonia is mostly produced from hydrogen stripped from natural gas: https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-a...
The Chinese are doing a great deal of good work developing catalysts.
Hydrogen liquefaction is less than 50% energy efficient. Haber-Bosch compares favorably to that.
It also is used as a stimulant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelling_salts:
“They are also used as a form of stimulant in athletic competitions (such as powerlifting, strong man and ice hockey) to "wake up" competitors to perform better. In 2005, Michael Strahan estimated that 70–80% of National Football League players were using smelling salts as stimulants.”
It didn't smell great, but we didn't die.
Everyone who has encountered the smell of urine has inhaled some ammonia fumes too.
Okay I'm obviously being hyperbolic, there is still soil bacteria. But cool is not the word I would use to describe such a practice...
Use of ammonia fixed by local wind power should be less objectionable than numerous other common farm "inputs". In particular, injecting nitrogen deep under the surface should result in much less nitrate-saturated runoff to streams and thus, ultimately, algae blooms offshore, than we get with spraying.
That said, the tragic loss of buckwheat from world diets is a direct consequence if it not yielding more in response to fertilizers. That is tragic because it has better protein than any other grain. A buckwheat that produces more when fertilized would be a great gift to the world.
The thought of working in the confines of a ship's engine room with such a hazardous fuel is horrifying. One reason for the widespread use of diesel oil is that it's relatively safe for human operatives.
The same goes for filling a gas can at the station to transport to the boat to fill its tank. I would not spill a drop of gas, and driving it home I'd have all the windows open on the car and drive with my head out the window and it would still make me sick.
Ammonia concentrated for use as fuel (or other industrial processes) is not the same thing as window cleaner, just as hydrogen peroxide concentrated for use as rocket fuel is far, far more dangerous than the hydrogen peroxide diluted for use in first aid kits.
When I asked him some question about this potential disaster, he said "Ah don't worry about it, you'll be blind from the ammonia anyway." Yeesh.
Compared to ammonia and methanol, formic acid is less energy dense, but due to recent advances in catalysts it has the potential for simpler and smaller systems in less demanding circumstances (heat, pressure) [1].
The only party I know of that is trying to bring this to market is Dens [2], formed out of a student group at the University of Eindhoven [3]. Their website is a bit high on the rhetoric (including trying to coin "hydrozine"), and their mockups looks like, well, mockups, but there are real technology advances behind this, for example their trial with a city bus [4] (Dutch).
[1] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110536423-002
[2] https://dens.one/products/
[3] https://teamfast.nl/technology/
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20200808210727/https://www.volks...
Edit: Upon rereading, I found that the article actually states: "There are challenges. Burning ammonia can create polluting nitrous oxides, therefore the exhaust needs cleaning up", which would indicate they're burning it. So either the reporter misunderstood or it's really a non-innovation then.
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja5042836
Excess CO2 is not especially harmful to humans in the short term (unless you are in a confined area), but it does contribute to global climate change.
The good news is that catalytic converters to destroy NOx are established technology, and they happen to use ammonia as a reductant. This is definitely doable for ships, probably doable for heavy trucks, and a bit annoying for smaller cars.
Fuel leaks would be a disaster.
Not at all. Fuel leaks are a disaster today.
Ammonia is different. It will dissolve into water, get diluted quickly, and bacteria will degrade it. A fuel leak on an ammonia fueled ship is just like fish peeing into the water. Admittedly, a whole lot of fish, so it's still a local problem that takes a while to solve itself.
Likewise, a fuel spill on land would be a brief local problem. Today, if a truck spill its guts, we have to scramble to absorb the fuel oil before it contaminates soil or gets into the sewage system. With ammonia, we'd just flush it down with an excess of water. In soil, it is fertilizer, and in a sewage treatment plant, it gets biodegraded.
The next great thing is that, made under a wind farm, it is directly useful, on the regular farm often found underneath, as both fuel and fertilizer. Excess can be sold to the next farm over. So, no fuel or fertilizer transport costs.
The third is that it provides a sink for power generation a long ways away from any power grid termination. So, it opens up huge swaths of territory where windmills would not be built, despite plentiful wind and space.
It might be simpler to require cleaner marine fuel, but marine fuel is currently a polluter at a large multiple of its share of greenhouse gas emissions.
Also, ammonia is a very good candidate for an economically viable energy storage and transport medium for renewable energy generation. Hydrogen is expensive to store and embrittles metal containers and pipelines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteprint
were made from transparent originals using UV lamps on paper that developed through being exposed to ammonia vapours.
Any architect/engineer would have (instead of a plotter) one of these machines, with a transparent glass or perspex/lexan pipe with inside one, two or three UV "neon" tubes in which you fed the transparent coupled with the reactive paper, a motor and a large belt would make the paper travel some 270 ° around the UV illuminated pipe, thus impressing the paper.
Higher end machines had an internal "developing station" (basically a perforated pipe inside which small quantities (drops) of ammonia were slowly pumped and around which only the UV impressed paper passed), and there was a fan extracting air to a vent pipe leading outside.
The earlier and lower end machines had a separate "developing station" consisting in a box (more sort of a large pipe) with a container of ammonia on top and a flap like door on the bottom through which you inserted the UV impressed paper rolled up. There was a small tap to regulate a flow of drops of ammonia from the container into the box/pipe.
The first kind of machine, if properly operated, was almost odourless because the ammonia vapours were distributed on the paper and the fan did take out most of what was not absorbed by the paper, the second was a nightmare, the inside of the box/pipe was impregnated with a lot of ammonia (as the copy was rolled and had to be developed everywhere) and everytime you opened the flap (to remove already developed copies or to insert one to be developed) if you didn't hold your breath and/or you weren't very quick you would taste it for good, and anyway often you opened just a little too much the little tap and the copy would be wet from ammonia.