US funding for decarbonised ammonia production

Via a new round of funding from the US Department of Energy, several ammonia production projects will advance.

GTI Energy to embark on pre-FEED work at Mosaic Fasutina

GTI Energy, Blue Sky Infrastructure, and Aker Carbon Capture will start a $1.5 million pre-FEED study to apply CCS to steam methane reforming (SMR) based ammonia production at the Mosaic Faustina facility in Louisiana. Located next to CF’s Donaldsonville complex, the Mosaic plant is one of North America’s largest ammonia production facilities, with a capacity of 500,000 tons per year. This ammonia is immediately onsite to produce DAP and MAP fertilisers.

Together, the partners will work to apply Aker’s liquid amine solvent system to capture post-combustion CO₂ from SMR flue gas, before sending the CO₂ to transport and storage facilities operated by RPS Capture. The combustion of gas to power the SMR process accounts for approximately 43% of overall emissions. The bulk of the remaining emissions are found in a highly concentrated (and much more easily capturable) state in the “process gas” stream.

This project has a high potential for impact by advancing state-of-the-art SMR CO₂ capture using a replicable modularized system, no net consumption of water, and a 10-fold reduction in solvent losses, enabling extremely low energy use for capture.

From the DoE’s official funding announcement, 8 Jan 2024

Ammobia: combining synthesis and separation steps in the production of ammonia

Together with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Clariant, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Ammobia will use $3 million in funding to progress and scale-up its new version of the Haber Bosch process. In the conventional HB process, the synthesis reaction and ammonia separation steps are separate, but Ammobia’s technology will combine synthesis catalysts and product adsorbents within one vessel.

By integrating both steps, the process can utilize lower pressure and temperature conditions while being capable of higher conversion of hydrogen and nitrogen to make ammonia compared to the traditional Haber Bosch (HB) process. This process intensification technology has the potential to reduce energy consumption and emissions by 70-95% compared to state-of-the-art HB.

From the DoE’s official funding announcement, 8 Jan 2024

$3 million was also awarded to E2H2NANO, Johnson Matthey, SUNY University at Buffalo, and the University of South Carolina to scale up a membrane-based reactor to produce ammonia with improved performance compared to conventional Haber-Bosch. Similar to Ammobia’s technology, this concept integrates the reaction and separation steps into one vessel at moderate temperatures and pressures, reducing emissions and energy consumption by 70-80%.