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Japan's Road Map for Fuel Ammonia
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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.

The Ammonia Wrap: EU ambitions, new tankers, and GW scale green ammonia in Denmark, Norway, and Chile
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Welcome to the Ammonia Wrap: a summary of all the latest announcements, news items and publications about ammonia energy. In this week's wrap: HyDeal Ambition, new marine tankers, fuel forecasts & SOFC developments, a new technical briefing on power generation, UNSW leads research in P2X, GWs of green ammonia in Denmark, Norway and Chile, green ammonia in the Orkneys, new government focus on ammonia in South Africa, and India to make green ammonia production mandatory?

Yara’s green ammonia project YURI gets further boosts
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There were two new funding announcements last week concerning Yara’s YURI renewable ammonia project, to be built next to their Pilbara fertiliser plant in Western Australia. The Pilbara ammonia plant is an ideal demonstration site for green hydrogen and green ammonia at an industrial scale. This export-oriented plant has an annual capacity of 850,000 tons per year of ammonia, representing about 5% of the world’s merchant ammonia supply, and while the current site uses natural gas as fuel and feedstock it is situated adjacent to rich solar and wind energy resources. These announcements show that interest in YURI is strong from Australian local, state, and federal governments, with more funding opportunities in the pipeline.

Ammonia infrastructure: panel wrap-up from the 2020 Ammonia Energy Conference
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Infrastructure is key to realising the full potential of ammonia energy, enabling new markets and expanding the existing ones. By 2050 the hydrogen (and by extension, ammonia) market could be 20 times larger than it is today. What future possibilities are there to expand global ammonia production (currently 180 million tonnes per year) or trade volumes across the world’s oceans (currently 18 million tonnes per year)? On November 18, 2020, the Ammonia Energy Association (AEA) hosted a panel discussion moderated by Daniel Morris from KBR, as well as panel members Anthony Teo from DNV GL, Oliver Hatfield from Argus Media, and Michael Goff from Black & Veatch as part of the recent Ammonia Energy Conference. The panel’s insights from a number of different perspectives - market analytics, ship building and operating, as well as pipeline engineering - demonstrated ammonia's potential to become a low- or zero-carbon fuel of choice for the future. Current infrastructure can be adapted, new infrastructure can be built and operated cheaply, and lessons from previous fuel transitions can be taken on board to make the uptake of ammonia energy as smooth as possible.

United Nations Sparks Green Hydrogen Initiative
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Last month UN Climate Change announced an initiative whose goal is to scale up green hydrogen production significantly over the next six years. “The new ‘Green Hydrogen Catapult’ initiative will see green hydrogen industry leaders, including ACWA Power, CWP Renewables, Envision, Iberdrola, Ørsted, Snam, and Yara, target the deployment of 25 gigawatts through 2026 of renewables-based hydrogen production, with a view to halve the current cost of hydrogen to below US$2 per kilogram.”

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

Green Ammonia at Oil and Gas Scale: Ammonia Energy Conference 2020 Keynote
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What does green ammonia look like at oil and gas scale? To open the Ammonia Energy Conference 2020 - and give us some insights into this question - we were thrilled to welcome Alex Tancock, Managing Director of InterContinental Energy (ICE). Since 2014 ICE has been in the business of identifying the new generation of “Green Supergiants”: green hydrogen and green ammonia fusion projects based on large-scale renewable energy. Alex was excited to pass on the key lessons learnt from the development of ICE’s first publicized project - the Asian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) in north-western Australia.

Panel discussion on next-generation ammonia synthesis
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This year’s Ammonia Energy Conference included a panel discussion on next-generation ammonia synthesis, moderated by Sarb Giddey (CSIRO, Australia), and featuring panelists Doug MacFarlane (Monash University, Australia), Karthish Manthiram (MIT, United States), and Michael Stoukides (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece). The panel discussed the direct fixation of nitrogen in the form of ammonia from water and air in a single electrochemical device, which is considered the “holy grail” of ammonia synthesis. During the panel, the participants gave their perspectives on the state of the art, and the obstacles and opportunities for progress.