In the last 12 months ... Ammonia Energy has published posts covering pertinent activity in 32 different countries. In most of them, ammonia’s potential as versatile energy vector has reached the point of avowed interest from relevant institutions. In a small handful, it has become a part of national policy. But, as demonstrated in repeated instances throughout the year, nowhere is ammonia energy more robustly embraced than Australia. The central argument behind this assertion is captured in the phrase, “the complete package,” as in “package of resources, policies, players, partners, and investments.”
In the last 12 months ... If a “meme”, in the definition of British psychology professor Susan Blackmore, “is information copied from person to person, including words, stories, technologies, fashions, and customs,” then clearly there is a meme spectrum that has “esoteric knowledge” at one end and “the common wisdom” at the other. Where does ammonia energy fall on this spectrum? “Esoteric knowledge” it may once have been, but this is no longer the case with the concept’s first incursions into mainstream reporting this year.
September 10–14 gave us five remarkable events both evidencing and advancing the rise of hydrogen in transportation and energy. Any one of them would have made it a significant week; together they make a sea change.
Ammonia energy received prominent mention in a review article published in the June 29, 2018 edition of Science magazine. Science is the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The paper, whose main body is almost 7,000 words long, is entitled “Net zero emissions energy systems.” While the paper's overall mission is to examine “the special challenges associated with an energy system that does not add any CO2 to the atmosphere,” the specific concerns that set it in motion relate to the idea that “energy services essential to modern civilization entail emissions that are likely to be more difficult to fully eliminate.” The paper is a detailed investigation of technological solutions that can be applied in these areas. Ammonia is highlighted as an “energy-dense liquid fuel” that could meet the needs of long-distance transportation services including aviation, long-distance trucking, and shipping.
On August 8th Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) gave a public demonstration of its newly developed ammonia-to-hydrogen fueling technology. In an interview this week with Ammonia Energy, Principal Research Scientist Michael Dolan reported that the demonstration drew more media attention than any event in CSIRO’s history – “by a comfortable margin.” The reporting sounded a set of celebratory themes, summed up by this headline from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Hydrogen fuel breakthrough in Queensland could fire up massive new export market. The stories, in other words, focused on what the demonstration could mean for fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) and the Australian economy. They did not penetrate to the heart of the matter which involved a practical development whose importance can be uniquely appreciated by the ammonia energy community.
New data from a number of ammonia energy safety studies will be published later this year. In the meantime, two excellent reports already exist that provide comparative, quantitative risk analyses. Each compares the risks of using ammonia as a fuel in passenger vehicles against the risks of other fuels, including gasoline, LPG, CNG, methanol, and hydrogen. Both conclude that the risks associated with using ammonia as a fuel are "similar, if not lower than for the other fuels."