New Oxford research finds that over 60% of global shipping fuel demands could be met by renewable ammonia in 2050, which can be achieved by targeting renewable ammonia fuel supplies at the “top 10 regional ports”. The team also predicts that conventional maritime fuel production could be replaced by a more “regionalised industry”, producing up to 750 million tons of renewable ammonia per year in tropical and sub-tropical countries.
A research team from Griffith & Oxford Universities concludes that, with the right approach, multiple world-scale, renewable ammonia plants could operate on the Queensland coast, supporting the deep decarbonisation of the electricity grid. Flexible plants can provide “green ammonia value chain-based” demand response services, representing a potential answer to Australia’s winter energy problem.
Among the many challenges for cracking researchers is their choice of material to build their catalysts from. There is hope that cheaper, more readily-available materials will replace the Ruthenium-based catalysts that have dominated the field up to this point. This week two new pieces of research suggest a way forwards using alkali metal-based materials: Lithium and Calcium.
Techno-Economic Challenges of Green Ammonia as an Energy Vector, a new textbook, was issued in September by scientific and technical publisher Elsevier. The 340-page volume was written by Agustin Valera-Medina of Cardiff University and Rene Banares-Alcantara of Oxford University. The book is a valuable consolidation of knowledge across the many aspects of ammonia energy, and seems destined to become a go-to reference for current and future technologists, project developers, and policy makers.
The Guardian newspaper in the UK this week published a comment piece on ammonia's potential as a "unicorn technology," which the authors define as a technology that can "deliver a reduction of at least a billion tonnes of CO2 a year." The article focused on the UK's opportunity, as host of the upcoming COP26 meeting in Glasgow this November, to take a leadership position in solving climate change. The authors, all based at the University of Oxford, outline a strategy by which the UK government could leverage existing British business and academic expertise to build global coalitions, to develop, demonstrate, and roll out "the 'hydrammonia' economy."
The 2018 NH3 Energy Implementation Conference, the first of its kind, took place on November 1 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the U.S. The focus of the Conference was on steps – current and future – that will lead to implementation of ammonia energy in the global economy. At the highest level, the Conference results validated the relevance and timeliness of the theme. In the words of closing speaker Grigorii Soloveichik, Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E REFUEL Program, the Conference strengthened his confidence that “ammonia is a great energy carrier ... with billions of dollars of potential in prospective markets.”
"Ammonia for Power" is an open-access literature review that includes over 300 citations for recent and ongoing research in the use of ammonia in engines, fuel cells, and turbines, as well as providing references to decades of historical case studies and publications. The review, written by a consortium of ammonia energy experts from the University of Cardiff, University of Oxford, the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, and Tsinghua University in China, can be found in the November 2018 edition of Progress in Energy and Combustion Science.
The second annual European Conference on Sustainable Ammonia Solutions has announced its full program, spread over two days, May 17 and 18, 2018, at Rotterdam Zoo in the Netherlands. The international cadre of speakers, representing a dozen countries from across Europe as well as the US, Canada, Israel, and Japan, will describe global developments in ammonia energy from the perspectives of industry, academia, and government agencies.
As part of the sustainable agenda of the UK, the government, research institutions and various enterprises have looked for options to reduce the carbon footprint of the country while ensuring energy independence for several years. As a response, one of the alternatives has been to introduce the use of marine energy via the implementation of a barrage in the Severn Estuary or the development and implementation of Tidal Lagoons located around the Welsh coast. From these alternatives, the tidal lagoon concept seems to be most feasible. Hybrid tidal and wind energy systems will produce vast amounts of energy during off-peak hours that will require the use of energy storage technologies - the size of each proposed tidal lagoon ranges close to ~1.5 GW. Currently, companies involved in the development of these complexes are thinking of batteries, pumped hydro, and ammonia as the potential candidates to provide storage for these vast amounts of energy.
In August of 2017 a symposium on the Ammonia Economy was held in Washington DC as part of the Energy and Fuels Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) conference. The symposium was devised to explore the latest results from ammonia related research, including but not limited to; advances in the generation of ammonia, advances in the catalytic cracking of ammonia to nitrogen and hydrogen, ammonia storage and utilisation, detectors and sensors for ammonia, ammonia fuel cells and hydrogen from ammonia, ammonia combustion and ammonia safety.
In the last 12 months ... Groups in Australia, Japan, Denmark, the U.K., and the U.S. all made progress with technologies that can be used to convert ammonia to hydrogen at fueling stations. This means that hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles can be handled as ammonia from the point of production to the point of dispensing.
The NH3 Fuel Association (NH3FA) has released the names of the organization’s charter group of sponsors. The common thread that unites the six companies? A conviction that ammonia energy represents a significant opportunity for their businesses. The sponsors are Yara, Nel Hydrogen, Airgas, Haldor Topsoe, Casale, and Terrestrial Energy.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) has published the program for its 2017 National Meeting, which takes place next month in Washington DC and includes a session dedicated to the "Ammonia Economy." The first day of the week-long meeting, Sunday August 20th, will feature a full morning of technical papers from the US, UK, and Japan, covering ammonia energy topics across three general areas: producing hydrogen from ammonia, developing new catalysts for ammonia synthesis and oxidation, and storing ammonia in solid chemical form.
Developers around the world are looking at using ammonia as a form of energy storage, essentially turning an ammonia storage tank into a very large chemical battery. In the UK, Siemens is building an "all electric ammonia synthesis and energy storage system." In the Netherlands, Nuon is studying the feasibility of using Power-to-Ammonia "to convert high amounts of excess renewable power into ammonia, store it and burn it when renewable power supply is insufficient." While results from Siemens could be available in 2018, it might be 2021 before we see results from Nuon, whose "demonstration facility is planned to be completed in five years." But, while we wait for these real-world industrial data, the academic literature has just been updated with a significant new study on the design and performance of a grid-scale ammonia energy storage system.
In April 2016, Siemens AG announced that it will construct a plant at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford to demonstrate the production of ammonia in an electrochemical reactor. The technology is seen as a facilitator of the use of ammonia synthesis as a method for storing renewably generated electricity. It involves lower pressures and temperatures than conventional synthesis with the Haber Bosch process. The project will test two different electrolyte chemistries using its 30 kilowatt electrochemical reactor.