Site items in: Ammonia-Coal Dual Fuel

Green Ammonia Consortium Comes to the Fore in Japan
Article

On December 8, the Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun ran a story about the future of coal-fired electricity generation in Japan.  The story touched on topics ranging from the plumbing in a Chugoku Electric generating station to the Trump administration’s idiosyncratic approach to environmental diplomacy.  And it contained this sentence: “Ammonia can become a ‘savior’ of coal-fired power.” Clearly an explanation is in order.

Presentation

Coal-fired power generation is supplying about 30% of the world’s primary energy. Almost all of coal-fired power plants in Japan employ the pulverized coal combustion method. In the pulverized coal combustion, coal is pulverized into a powder of several tens of microns. This method enables to burn coal effectively because of the large surface to volume ratio. Pulverized coal particles are supplied to the actual boilers with primary air whose Air/Coal ratio (mass flow rate of primary air/mass flow rate of pulverized coal) is set to 2.0. Co-combustion of coal with ammonia has been studied with the aim of reducing…

SIP
Article

To demonstrate the progress of the SIP "Energy Carriers" program, the Japan Science and Technology Agency last week released a video, embedded below, that shows three of its ammonia fuel research and development projects in operation. R&D is often an abstract idea: this video shows what it looks like to generate power from ammonia. As it turns out, fuel cells aren't hugely photogenic. Nonetheless, if a picture is worth a thousand words, this will be a long article.

Industrial demonstrations of ammonia fuel in Japan
Article

Most of the ammonia energy projects I write about are in the research and development phase but, as I've said before, technology transfer from the academic lab to commercial deployment is moving swiftly - especially in Japan. Last week, Nikkei Asian Review published two articles outlining plans by major engineering and power firms to build utility-scale demonstrations using ammonia as a fuel for electricity generation. Both projects aim to reduce the carbon intensity of the Japanese electrical grid, incrementally but significantly, by displacing a portion of the fossil fuels with ammonia. The first project will generate power using an ammonia-coal mix, while the second will combine ammonia with natural gas.