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Article

Future Ammonia Technologies: Plasma, Membrane, Redox

Trevor Brown December 08, 2017

I wrote recently about two pathways for ammonia production technology development: improvements on Haber-Bosch, or electrochemical synthesis. Last week, I covered some of these Haber-Bosch improvements; next week, I'll write about electrochemical processes. This week, I want to write about some innovations that don't fit this two-way categorization: they don't use electrochemistry and they don't build upon the Haber-Bosch process, and that might be the only thing that links them.

Article

Renewable Energy for Industry: IEA's vision for green ammonia as feedstock, fuel, and energy trade

Trevor Brown November 10, 2017

This morning in Beijing, China, the International Energy Agency (IEA) launched a major new report with a compelling vision for ammonia's role as a "hydrogen-rich chemical" in a low-carbon economy. Green ammonia would be used by industry "as feedstock, process agent, and fuel," and its production from electrolytic hydrogen would spur the commercial deployment of "several terawatts" of new renewable power. These terawatts would be for industrial markets, additional to all prior estimates of renewable deployment required to serve electricity markets. At this scale, renewable ammonia would, by merit of its ease of storage and transport, enable renewable energy trading across continents. The IEA's report, Renewable Energy for Industry, will be highlighted later this month at the COP23 in Bonn, Germany, and is available now from the IEA's website.

Presentation

Screening Binary Redox Pairs for Solar Thermochemical Ammonia Synthesis Using Machine Learned Predictions of Gibbs Formation Energies at Finite Temperatures

Christopher Bartel John Rumptz Aaron Holder Alan Weimer Charles Musgrave

Solar thermochemical ammonia synthesis (STAS) is a reduction/oxidation (redox) cycle which enables the production of ammonia (NH3) from air, water, and concentrated sunlight. In this process, a metal nitride (MN) is oxidized by steam to produce a metal oxide (MO) and NH3; the resulting MO is reduced at high temperature (driven by concentrated solar radiation) and subsequently used to reduce atmospheric nitrogen (N2) and reform the MN and restart the NH3 synthesis cycle. The identification of optimal redox pairs (MO/MN) for this process has been historically limited by the lack of thermochemical data (i.e., Gibbs formation energies at finite temperatures)…

Presentation

Our Iowa Renewable Hydrogen and Ammonia Generation System

Jay Schmuecker David Toyne

The presentation will summarize the development of the demonstration size renewable fuel and fertilizer system on my Iowa farm. Solar power, water, and air are used to make hydrogen and ammonia fuel used to power a modified John Deere 7810 tractor. The ammonia can also be used to fertilize corn cropland. The development of the ammonia reactor will be described and its performance discussed. There are no carbon emissions in either the generation or consumption of the hydrogen and ammonia.

Presentation

Comprehensive Evaluation of NH3 Production and Utilization Options for Clean Energy Applications

Greg Vezina Ibrahim Dincer Yusuf Bicer

The project proposes a comprehensive investigation on the analysis, assessment and optimization of ammonia synthesis processes under renewable energy portfolio, including low-cost hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, ocean, biomass, etc. Furthermore, ammonia production via hydrocarbon decomposition, which will be investigated in the study, is a promising option to utilize fossil fuels in a cleaner and environmentally benign way. Case studies for various locations and applications in communities, cities and provinces to develop and implement clean solutions are performed. The objectives of this project include energy and exergy analyses, environmental impact assessments, thermo-economic analyses and evaluations, optimization studies, experimental investigation, scalability and…

Article

The Dawn of Bio-Ammonia

Trevor Brown October 06, 2017

In the last 12 months ... Bio-engineering has set its sights on ammonia. If we could deliver ammonia-emitting microbes to the soil we might make ammonia fertilizer obsolete; on the other hand, if we could farm them, we might establish ammonia as a new, carbon-free algal biofuel.

Article

Yara's Solar Ammonia Plant is a Key Step toward Global Trade in Renewable Energy

Stephen H. Crolius October 05, 2017

In the last 12 months ... Yara's Australian unit announced plans to build a pilot plant to produce ammonia using solar power. This is a key step in Australia's efforts to develop its economy around clean energy exports, and could lead to a new system of global trade in which renewable ammonia is an energy commodity.

Article

Yara: solar ammonia pilot plant, for start-up in 2019

Trevor Brown September 22, 2017

Yara, the world's biggest producer of ammonia, has announced that it intends to build a demonstration plant to produce ammonia using solar power, near its existing world-scale plant in the Pilbara, in Western Australia. It expects to complete the feasibility study this year. Next year, in 2018, Yara hopes to finish the engineering design and begin construction so that it can complete the project and begin production of carbon-free ammonia in 2019.

Article

Next-generation ammonia tech: biohybrid nanoparticles

Trevor Brown August 02, 2017

Sustainable ammonia can be produced today: doing so would use electrolyzers to make hydrogen to feed the traditional Haber-Bosch process. In a very few years, new technologies will skip this hydrogen production phase altogether and make ammonia directly from renewable power in an electrochemical cell. Further down the pipeline, next generation technologies will mimic nature, specifically the nitrogenase enzyme, which produces ammonia naturally. One of these next generation technologies is currently producing impressive results at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Article

Power to Ammonia: alternative synthesis technologies

Trevor Brown June 01, 2017

The Institute for Sustainable Process Technology (ISPT) recently published a detailed analysis of three business cases for producing renewable ammonia from electricity: Power to Ammonia. The feasibility study concludes that, in the near term, ammonia production using clean electricity will likely rely on a combination of two old-established, proven technologies: electrolysis and Haber-Bosch (E-HB). To reach this conclusion, however, the study also assessed a range of alternative technologies, which I summarize in this article.