Ammonia as a renewable liquid fuel has increased global interest for long term energy storage and as a principal chemical candidate in overcoming the challenging practical issues such as storage and transport associated with hydrogen. It is known the Haber-Bosch method of producing ammonia is based on fossil fuels and has a high energy consumption as a result of operating temperatures and pressures of special concern. A techno-economic study is presented for the electrochemical synthesis of ammonia with proton conducting membrane at near ambient pressure. Different coupling pathways were investigated for production of hydrogen and generation of nitrogen to assess…
Article
Future Ammonia Technologies: Electrochemical (part 3)
This series of articles on the future of ammonia synthesis began with a report on the NH3 Energy+ conference presentation by Grigorii Soloveichik, Program Director at the US Department of Energy's ARPA-E, who categorized the technologies as being either improvements on Haber-Bosch or electrochemical (with exceptions). ARPA-E invests in "transformational, high-risk, early-stage research," and recently began funding ammonia synthesis technologies, not to make renewable fertilizer but to produce "energy-dense zero-carbon liquid fuel." This article will introduce the six electrochemical technologies currently in development with funding from ARPA-E.
Presentation
Electro-Synthesis of Ammonia for Grid Scale Energy Storage
Ceramatec Inc., in partnership with its partners, will develop a lower temperature and higher efficiency membrane process to synthesize ammonia for energy storage. Ammonia (NH3) is carbon-free, has a high energy density (>4 kW/l), which enables many hours of energy storage from large renewable power projects in small areas, and can be back converted to electricity using turbines or fuel cells at high efficiency. Ammonia synthesis is currently carried out in very large Haber-Bosch plants, mostly fueled from natural gas. The current large-scale Haber-Bosch (H-B) technology needs to run at constant inputs of energy and reactants. Moreover, ammonia is an…