Site items in: Content by Author Trevor Brown

Article

2025 is a critical year for the adoption of ammonia fuel in shipping. Here, we preview important upcoming meetings of the International Maritime Organization, what regulatory gaps are being filled by this work, potential candidates for decarbonization measures, and progress in engine development. All this sets the scene for incredible progress to be made in the coming years.

H2Global: a clean ammonia market maker
Article

To open the AEA’s 2024 Annual Conference in New Orleans, H2Global Managing Director Timo Bollerhey presented updates from the “green market maker”. To meet global climate targets, we need to accelerate market creation and maturation, and push past key tipping points. H2Global does this by bridging the green premium gap between sellers and buyers and facilitating transactions for clean commodities. A successful first ammonia auction was concluded in 2024, informing plans for a second, larger, truly global auction round that will be launched in the near future.

Call to action: what governments must now do to support demand
Article

The AEA and like minded organizations delivered two urgent calls to action at COP29. These documents outline practical actions needed from governments in the next one-to-two years to stimulate demand for clean hydrogen and ammonia. Now through 2025 and 2026, the AEA, its coalition partners, and all our industry members need to channel these messages into national and local policies to scale demand for clean molecules.

Japan's Road Map for Fuel Ammonia
Article

This month, the Japanese Ministry for Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) began promoting an updated Road Map for Fuel Ammonia, focused on the use of ammonia in thermal power plants and as a shipping fuel. By 2030, Japan expects to import 3 million tons of clean ammonia, with demand rising to 30 million tons by 2050. To secure these volumes, Japanese companies are now making investments up and down the supply chain. These are ambitious numbers, matching Japan’s recent commitment to reach net-zero emissions, but still they miss the big picture. The broader economic opportunity arrives when Japanese companies export their fuel ammonia technologies, decarbonizing coal-fired power plants across Asia, and then supply the fuel to these newly sustainable shipping and electricity sectors. By 2050, the METI Road Map expects Japanese trading companies to supply the wider region with 100 million tons per year of clean ammonia.

Hydrogen Forward, as the United States pivots to clean energy policy
Article

At the start of this month, a coalition of eleven corporations launched a new advocacy body, Hydrogen Forward, with the explicit purpose of lobbying the United States government to pursue a national hydrogen strategy. "While Europe and East Asia have committed to investing hundreds of billions of dollars into hydrogen solutions, the U.S. is the only major market without a national hydrogen strategy. A comprehensive approach is critical because it provides a much-needed framework to enable fast, large-scale adoption."

Hydrogen Council publishes Life-Cycle Analysis of Decarbonization Pathways
Article

The Hydrogen Council has published a valuable report with a rigorous life-cycle assessment (LCA) of greenhouse gas emissions from various hydrogen applications. It illustrates the report with eight specific examples, two of which focus on ammonia. With green hydrogen as an input to ammonia used in fertilizer production, we could deliver a 96% reduction in emissions. With blue hydrogen exported and combusted as ammonia for electric power generation, we could deliver an 84% reduction in emissions. As the report states at the start: “Life-cycle emissions are coming into focus with scaling-up of hydrogen … To deliver on the sustainability promise, it is … not only important to make it economically viable, but also maximize its decarbonization potential.”

Carbon intensity of fossil ammonia in a net-zero world
Article

In discussions of carbon capture technology for low-carbon ammonia production, there are two informal rule-of-thumb numbers: 60% and 90%. We know we can capture, at very little additional cost, over 60% of the CO2 from a natural gas-based ammonia plant because this is the process gas (the byproduct of hydrogen production). Many ammonia plants already utilize this pure CO2 stream to produce urea or to sell as food grade CO2. The remaining CO2 emissions are in the much more dilute flue gas (the product of fuel combustion to power the process). For some decades we have assumed we could capture most of this but the lingering question has always been: how much of that flue gas is economically feasible to capture? A team of researchers at Imperial College London has just published a fascinating study into this question, entitled “Beyond 90% capture: Possible, but at what cost?” The paper quantifies the tipping point — ranging from 90% to 99%, depending on flow rates and concentration — beyond which it is easier to capture CO2 directly from the air than it is to capture more flue gas emissions.

Full electrification: Yara plans 500,000 tons of green ammonia in Norway by 2026
Article

Green ammonia projects continue to be announced at dizzying speed and scale. A few weeks ago, Origin Energy disclosed its feasibility study to develop 500 MW (hydro) / 420,000 tons per year of green ammonia in Tasmania, with first production targeted for mid-2020s. This week, a consortium led by Haldor Topsoe and Vestas announced 10 MW (wind+solar) / 5,000 tons of green ammonia in Denmark, which could be operational in 2022, making it the first green ammonia plant at this scale. Also this week, Yara made a significant corporate announcement, detailing a “transformation of its commercial business models, sales channels and offerings,” with the full decarbonization of its Porsgrunn plant at the heart of its strategy to use green ammonia “to enable the hydrogen economy.”