2026 is still a very ambitious startup date for this. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has only just approved interim guidelines for the addition of ammonia to the IGF Code (use of gaseous fuels). There's a lot to it, but this is a good high level overview: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/imo-interim-guidelines-safety...
A lot of commentators believe that since ammonia is less inherently safe it will inevitably be less safe in practice. I am not convinced by that argument, and in general if there's a strong enough business driver then anything can be made safe. But what really swung me against the idea of ammonia as a shipping fuel is that the expected cost is barely any better than methanol (which is much more inherently safe) and is more expensive than biodiesel.
The shipping companies have a real conundrum on their hands - do they go ammonia, methanol, stick with diesel, or try to get near-shore and inland shipping onto electric? Ammonia-fuelled ships have to be THOROUGHLY designed from the ground up specifically for ammonia use; you have to be 100% committed to go down that path. Whereas biodiesel can simply be dropped in (you can of course choose to fill up with a biodiesel blend today, but nobody does because you can put emissions into the atmosphere for free).
Unlike solar cells or battery cells, I don't really see much chance for 'learning rates' and technology improvement to drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia. Falling electrolyser costs are nice, but they're only a portion of the process plant CAPEX, and the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway. You could get electrolysers for free and still be unable to make cheap green ammonia. So for green ammonia to get adopted, a strong 'carbon price' needs to be in place, and I think that same strong carbon price would make biodiesel competitive.
I'm pretty sure the costs of producing a fuel based solely on making it with electricity is by far, of all the options you named, best done with Ammonia.
The reason the cost of ammonia is barely better, or even worse, than things like methanol, is because the electricity process is still expensive.
But that can (and soon would!) become waaaay cheaper. Electricity __NOT__ on demand is dirt cheap and can be halved and quartered some more: Solar panels are _idiotically cheap_ these days and that state of affairs is not temporary.
We need more not-on-demand needs. As in, 'hey, uh, if theres some power left over cuz it's windy and sunny.. no prob! Let me run these ammonia producing machines at full power for a bit. No need for ammonia right now? No problem - compared to electricity, ammonia is vastly simpler to store'.
Ammonia is a great not-on-demand consumer of electricty. That's why this is necessary.
As you said:
> the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway.
That's exactly the factor that can become ridiculously cheap. It isn't today because there's not much point investing in solar/wind because they do not cover on-demand needs (when it's not particularly sunny/windy, then electricity prices are sky high and you want to build electricity production that can deliver then. And solar/windy by definition can't), and the primary issue is transport.
if the demand for ammonia skyrockets, you can solve it all. Ammonia does not need to be produced on-demand, and you don't need all that much transport (build the ammonia producing plant close to your solar/wind parks).
> Let me run these ammonia producing machines at full power for a bit.
The problem with this is the capex and running costs of that kind of machinery make it expensive to keep idle. It can be uneconomic even with free electricity.
Where are the costs. Many factories are only used 8 hours a day despite the high costs - it isn't worth the additional cost to have employees work overnight. Some really energy hungry factories traditionally run only overnight when energy is cheap, and they shutdown for yearly maintenance in December (thus freeing up their normal energy use when everyone is running Christmas lights) Now that wind and solar are coming online those are changing how they work.
Different factories have difference costs. When energy is significant they consider that. When energy is not significant they just run when it works out.
> Many factories are only used 8 hours a day despite the high costs
I don't have a lot of direct experience but my dad worked in factories most of my childhood. Every single one ran nearly 24/7. Was that a chance occurrence of the types of factories we had near where I grew up?
The only confirmed example I know of is Harley-Davidson, roughly during the boom of cruiser motorcycles (1995-2010?): They only ran one shift, but the PR of waiting lists and extremely high instant resale prices made the choice appealing in the face of the capital costs.
Are you asking if all factories are like the ones that you grew up near?
My understanding is that manufacturing tends to be the way you describe. I'd be surprised if that held true for all sorts of factories, especially in chemical production. Just a guess but I think paying chemical engineers for overnight shifts might cut into profits somewhat
EDIT: another comment sparked a memory, I'm thinking specifically of batch operators.
Stopping and restarting chemical plants is usually horribly expensive. Most of them run 24/7, non-stop, even if the companies have negative profit on some of the products.
Usually there will be only a single engineer or maybe two on staff for the night shift. But paying regular operating staff an additional 50% night shift bonus to keep the factory running is very often worth the price.
The night shift extra is usually much closer to 50 cents than 50 percent. A lot of places even give the night shift the same pay, especially when the labor market is favorable to employers.
Which chemical? Some yes, some no. Some processes work better in continue runs, some you are doing batches. Some batches take a few weeks, some are hours...
Normal operation of ammonia plants and methanol plants has been 24/7 for decades. Most other commodity chemicals too.
Loading & unloading ships & barges as well.
Some places only load railcars & trailers during days.
Also it's common for engineers to only work straight days and often their office is not on site, they actually only make visits. They do it as needed and can be very dedicated and effective, but of course they can't touch anything because that requires a unionized operator.
Any industrially-produced chemical where continuous production is possible. I haven’t heard of such systems being competitive if left idle so someone can sleep.
Continuous production implies at least a few people 24x7. Not all chemicals are continuous production. Often there is a choice of processes when you build a factory.
> Continuous production implies at least a few people 24x7. Not all chemicals are continuous production
Yes. I'm asking if there is a chemical-production process that can be run 24/7 but which isn't due to labour shortages somewhere that doesn't result in such production being shut down (or protected)?
Chemicals are globally-traded commodities. Some are perishable and/or difficult or even illegal to ship. So there is regional price variance. But ceteris paribus, if it can be run continuously, production will shift to where it is.
I've worked in two factories in my life. Dairy, and Printing. Dairy was 24/7/365. Printing was (averaging) 20/7/365 (product/layout change, maintenance, cleaning, etc.)
My father was a fireman. Knowing what I know from him, I would never go to work for a factory that they got THOSE massive energy demanding machines that run non-stop and the fuel is ammonia. It is a near-certain death sentence, especially in 'some countries' where safety is 'a bit more relaxed'.
> Ammonia is a great not-on-demand consumer of electricty.
This does not follow. The cost efficiency of ammonia production is highly dependent on the process being continuous and steady state. Every analysis that says ammonia is cost effective as a fuel is based on an efficient continuous process as a cost assumption.
If you are constantly starting and stopping based on electricity availability then your ammonia just became much more expensive. In which case, it is probably no longer cost effective as a fuel. Mixing "best possible price" and "worst possible process" and pretending these represent the same instance of reality is misleading to say the least.
> The cost efficiency of ammonia production is highly dependent on the process being continuous and steady state.
Hydrogen is the overwhelming energy input to ammonia production. Hydrogen is readily storable -- this is done even today, when the hydrogen comes from natural gas, to smooth things out to keep the ammonia plant running -- so intermittency of renewables will be almost entirely countered by doing the same thing and storing the green hydrogen.
What matters is cost of electrolysers, but they have been getting very cheap in China.
Ammonia synthesis is a high-pressure high-temperature process. One of the reasons to use a continuous steady-state process is that cycling it up and down causes thermal and pressure fatigue in the reactor. The safe operating life of a reactor can be surprisingly short if it is not operated at a steady state. If you want this to scale, it needs to be low maintenance and have a long operating life.
You could in principle centralize ammonia production with sufficient reactant reserves to ensure continuous production from variable low-density energy sources like solar or wind. However, this would require hydrogen pipelines that largely don't exist and would take a long time to build. We can't repurpose existing natural gas infrastructure and similar because they weren't built with alloys resistant to hydrogen embrittlement. One of the big economic advantages of using methane for ammonia is that it takes advantage of the millions of kilometers of natural gas distribution pipeline that already exists.
I'm not averse to the idea but the enthusiastic proponents are pretending like the practical realities of industrial chemistry don't apply to them. We aren't going to get to a green future with rainbows and unicorns, we need to brutally realistic about the true requirements.
I wasn't talking about the cost of inputs, I was talking about their putative intermittency.
The argument that was being made seemed to be "renewables are intermittent, therefore ammonia synthesis based on renewable energy must be intermittent, or else use expensive storage". The counterargument is that hydrogen is the overwhelmingly most important input, and it is highly storable, so the intermittency of the inputs can be largely avoided at modest cost, allowing the ammonia plant to run 24/7.
You may not be aware, but we already have hydrogen pipelines coupled to ammonia plants. The US has ~1000 miles of hydrogen pipelines for this purpose. It's also not obvious to me why pipelines would necessarily be needed. After all, the ammonia plant could be built where the hydrogen is stored.
Can factories install local battery banks to cover a day’s utilization? Charge up the batteries on the cheap electricity during noon and run the plant off of those reserves. I assume other industries are already running these cost optimization analyses as the renewable electricity market continues to develop. There is a balancing point between the capex and opex, but unless it is insanely energy hungry (like aluminum), that seems possible.
> but unless it is insanely energy hungry (like aluminum)
Producing a ton of hydrogen by electrolysis requires ~3x the energy to produce a ton of aluminum. It is, in fact, "insanely energy hungry". This isn't necessarily a problem but it does create logistical challenges.
What comes back to the fact that you only need batteries for the ammonia production. Hydrogen production is a low-pressure process, and optionally even low-temperature.
It takes 11 MW of electricity to make 1 ton of ammonia, ammonia plants can make 1000 to 3000 tons a day. Providing battery storage for that production rate for 24 hours would probably cost more than the plant itself.
> You could in principle centralize ammonia production with sufficient reactant reserves to ensure continuous production from variable low-density energy sources like solar or wind.
I'm probably missing something here but why would you need to pipe hydrogen to the plant, rather than just generating it on site from power drawn from the grid?
Energy density mostly and being able to deliver that power where you need it. Aluminum plants are co-located with large-scale power plants, famously hydroelectric, for the same reason. Above certain power requirements, you essentially need the power generation to be onsite.
Hydrogen requires 3x the energy of aluminum per ton, so it is an even bigger problem for hydrogen. Unlike aluminum, it is feasible to have large numbers of small hydrogen production plants but then you need to transport all that hydrogen at an acceptable scale.
> Above certain power requirements, you essentially need the power generation to be onsite.
Is this due to transmission losses or just because you couldn't feasibly build enough capacity cables to transmit large amounts of power over long distances?
A single ton of hydrogen requires ~50 MWh of electricity. Small special-purpose ammonia plants, which are common for some industrial applications, typically require on the order of 50 tons of hydrogen per day. This would require ~2.5 GWh of electricity per day via electrolysis. To put that in context, that is in the same ballpark as the average output of the largest solar farms ever built in the US.
The largest ammonia plant in the US requires around 2,000 tons of hydrogen per day. That would require 100 GWh per day to produce by electrolysis, which would require the entire output of a large hydroelectric or nuclear power plant, much like large aluminum refineries. Otherwise, you need to move a lot of electricity or a lot of hydrogen to have good efficiency, and there is infrastructure for neither.
Converting natural gas into hydrogen is also energy intensive. One of the big advantages of natural gas is that your hydrogen source is also your energy source and there is vast infrastructure for moving natural gas around.
Building green hydrogen pipelines likely makes more sense than trying to backhaul electricity from diffuse sources. A single hydrogen pipeline can reify a lot of electricity production without the concomitant transmission and management infrastructure.
A ton of hydrogen seems to occupy a cube with a 23 meter side. Wonder if a bunch of those could be built to hold the excess gas for night time operation.
100GWh is not small, but it's not impossible. The largest solar farm in operation is 5GW, and that could get you theoretically halfway there operating 10 hours a day.
It feels like the challenges are a lot easier to solve than with fusion or nuclear.
It is doable in theory but would require the construction of large-scale supporting infrastructure that currently doesn't exist. I am not optimistic about our ability to undertake infrastructure projects of this magnitude without it taking several decades and incurring obscene cost overruns that make even the most pessimistic economic models look optimistic.
This will definitely be harder than nuclear. The expansive land use requirements means the legal battles pertaining to that would almost certainly span many decades. At least with nuclear there is a limited number of people that need to sign-off to have a viable project -- reforming that process probably would be simpler.
The issue doesn't appear to be storage, but transmission. Hydrogen can leak through metal and lead to it becoming brittle, so you can't use conventional natural gas pipelines to transport it.
That was my thinking, but I think what he is saying is that power plants won't generate enough electricity to make building an in-situ ammonia plant economical. You need to network power plants together to operate a centralized ammonia plant 24/7, and the network to move this energy (whether in the form of hydrogen or electricity) doesn't currently exist.
The land area of an all-in-one plant is maybe the biggest unknown for me with respect to just getting ownership and permits and such. But it's fun to imagine just picking a giant plot somewhere in the desert and plopping down 20 GW of solar panels, enough hydrogen storage to keep the less energy intensive steps operating throughout the night, and presumably batteries for whatever still requires electric power while panels are offline. Water and air in, sweet sweet ammonia out. :-)
Cloudy weather would be an interesting problem I guess.
One thing you can do there is have an onsite energy storage mechanism (battery, gravity, etc) and run the process 24/7, keeping the energy storage topped up whenever the cost of electricity falls below whatever threshold.
Worst comes to worse you run on grid for a few hours.
This has nothing to do with hydrogen as an input to the ammonia production process. This hydrogen is not liquefied, even if it is temporarily stored (as a compressed gas, for example underground in solution mined salt caverns.)
Do you have concrete capex and opex numbers for ammonia-from-electricity plants? I understand we should expect those to go down over time because of the learning curve, but I don't even know their order of magnitude right now. It would also be nice to have an idea of how much efficiency the electrolyzers lose when operated intermittently instead of continuously (so, for example, you can't keep them at their optimal temperature). But, since we're presupposing that intermittent electrical energy will be very cheap, efficiency is less important than capex per output and non-energy opex.
Supporting your point about solar panels continuing to be cheap, "mainstream" panels went up to 0.11€ per peak watt last month: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... which was a new historic low price in September and down 21% from 0.14€/Wp in February of last year, itself a historic record low price at the beginning of last year.
The last time something like this happened to the energy supply, it was James Watt's steam-engine.
What are the relative costs of producing methanol or ammonia from a kilowatt hour of electricity? I've always assumed methanol would be cheaper over all because it's less deadly.
If ammonia cannot be shipped safely than the whole thing is moot. We're talking about "shipping" ammonia halfway around the world in the fuel tanks of these ammonia fueled ships. If storing it long term in fuel tanks can be done safely, than so can shipping it to port.
Shipping ammonia is commonly done already. For example, the first few search results for "ammonia tanker" has a story of Maersk ordering up to ten new tankers with 93000 cubic metre capacity each.
This also means ammonia may end up getting produced at the globally best places, the places where the solar resource is extremely good, like Chile, Namibia, parts of the middle East, then shipping elsewhere.
This is illogical - we ship a live nuclear reactor around the world in a nuclear carrier or icebreaker. But you cannot take it out and put it on a truck
You “ship” electricity near a port via the electric grid, and then make ammonia near or in the port. Economies of scale might favor having a few ammonia factories and then shipping it around by boat.
Ammonia makes zero sense as a general use fuel, but ships need MW of power over several days and aren’t in populated areas.
Assuming, it’s actually viable which isn’t guaranteed.
It depends on whether you prefer to transfer electricity or ammonia. You get to pick whatever is easier, which caps the difficulty at not high. The suggestion of shipping ammonia was for the sake of convenience, not a burden. It's optional.
"build the ammonia producing plant close to your solar/wind parks"
You can't pick that and then decide not to transfer the ammonia and decide not to transfer the electricity. Unless your solar plan is at the loading dock or something.
The suggestion of shipping ammonia was for the sake of convenience, not a burden. It's optional.
Yes you have to transfer electricity in that case. We already know transferring electricity is easy.
Don't get hung up on "picking" one as if the downsides get locked in at the pre-design phase. If it's difficult to transfer ammonia then nevermind go back to the existing easy option of wires.
In other words, if that specific detail doesn't work out, it is not an argument against ammonia. It was just a potential bonus, not core to the idea. And it doesn't fundamentally change things. It's not the "opposite" plan.
Someone makes a statement. I point out that statement has implications. Someone then suggests an idea that is counter to the original statement. I point out that is inconsistent. Your response is "Don't get hung up on".
Your argument at this point has just devolved into some variant of "don't confuse me with the facts"
You said the plan was the opposite, but it was only a tiny optional detail that's opposite.
The phrasing in that comment rejected the original plan as a whole, and that's not right.
Also the comment you called a "good plan" was still talking about shipping ammonia as a maybe! So even in that detail it's not the opposite of the original comment.
I think your first comment was fine, but it's not your first comment that I replied to.
I wouldn’t get that hung up on the specifics when we are using terms like ‘near’ which is why I said boats for economies of scale.
I was thinking of navigable waterways which are common near major wind farms and some solar, not just major ports which rarely have a lot of space available. The UK is already facing issues with moving offshore wind around the country, an Ammonia plant could theoretically make a lot of sense.
Note that biofuels aren't especially environmentally friendly, even just considering carbon emissions. See e.g. [1], which makes the most optimistic possible assumption by ignoring land use changes and still concludes "the reductions for most feedstocks are insufficient to meet the GHG savings required by the EU Renewable Energy Directive" (second generation biofuels may do better, but that isn't clear). Also ignoring land use changes is a very bad asssumption; if your plan is to run global shipping (or other industries) on biofuels it seems highly implausible that it's not going to end up with more land overall used for growing crops. If that's land that could otherwise be sequestering carbon (e.g. drained peat bogs, which have the advantage of being highly fertile), then it's clearly going to be a significant contribution to carbon emissions (not to mention the ecological impacts of converting yet more land to agriculture).
> Unlike solar cells or battery cells, I don't really see much chance for 'learning rates' and technology improvement to drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia. Falling electrolyser costs are nice, but they're only a portion of the process plant CAPEX, and the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway. (...) So for green ammonia to get adopted, a strong 'carbon price' needs to be in place, and I think that same strong carbon price would make biodiesel competitive.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here? If learning rates and technology improvement drastically drive down the cost of solar cells, as you say they might, and the cost of electricity dominates the cost of green ammonia, as you say it does, doesn't that mean that the learning rates and technology improvement in solar cells will drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia? Wouldn't that make ammonia much cheaper than biodiesel, keeping biodiesel from being competitive?
(I'm not sure ammonia is a competitive fuel for other reasons, such as the corrosion and safety issues discussed in the article, but it seems clear to me that if it's going to be uncompetitively expensive, it would have to be because one of the premises above is wrong, for example because the cost of green ammonia is dominated by capex or because solar cells stop dropping in cost. I don't see how you can sustain those premises and deny the conclusion.)
>Unlike solar cells or battery cells, I don't really see much chance for 'learning rates' and technology improvement to drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia. Falling electrolyser costs are nice, but they're only a portion of the process plant CAPEX, and the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway. You could get electrolysers for free and still be unable to make cheap green ammonia. So for green ammonia to get adopted, a strong 'carbon price' needs to be in place, and I think that same strong carbon price would make biodiesel competitive.
There is a ton of research going into improving the efficiency of the H2 > NH3 conversion, and there are at least two startups (Tsubame in Japan and a new one I don't remember). There's no rule that says you can't beat Haber.
Compared to methanol, ammonia is currently more expensive but vastly more scalable in the long run; once you reach the biofuel "ceiling" (roughly corresponding to the availability of farming and forestry byproducts) you're stuck making it via carbon capture, which has its own efficiency problems.
Energy consumption. I am pretty sure that the hydrogen utilization in most ammonia production is very high.
In theory the energy required to produce ammonia is negative (Hf < 0) but at standard pressure its formation is thermodynamically unfavorable (Gf = Hf + TdeltaS > 0). But the bigger issue is the very high activation energy barrier for ammonia synthesis, which results in a lot of energy being used to make ammonia at very high pressure and temperature.
Right now there are two competing approaches to reducing the cost of ammonia production. Tsubame is using a new ruthenium-based catalyst that lowers the reaction temperature (and therefore, also the pressure). The other method is by electrocatalysis. I don't know for sure that this is what NitroVolt is doing but their name certainly suggests it.
Presumably if you had some way of rapidly removing the ammonia produced from the reaction, like maybe a high-temperature highly polar solvent that reacted reversibly with the ammonia, but didn't dissolve much hydrogen or nitrogen, you could get by with a lower equilibrium amount of ammonia and thus much lower pressure. Anhydrous phosphoric acid seems like a potential candidate? But that's obvious enough that people probably tried it a century ago.
Long distance .. this is just a problem. As you say it won't be solved unless there's carbon pricing and ultimately restrictions on fossil fuels in general, forcing a replacement with more expensive synthetic and bio-fuels.
I think long distance might be solvable too with a little out of the box thinking. Imagine ships could swap out batteries every few hundred miles. Think simple container batteries and some off shore wind park with facilities for charging container batteries and a stash of charged batteries. Floating off shore wind is now possible as well.
Containers might be a bit tedious for this. So, why not use autonomous tug boats and barges. The tug boats simply pull the load between charging stations. When they are empty they head for a charger and a full one takes over. This could even work with existing ships, which are commonly maneuvered around harbors using tug boats already.
Probably more than a few engineering challenges lurking here but it gets us out of the mindset that ships must be able to go for thousands of nautical miles without stopping for charging. I could see that working for a lot of coastal shipping routes.
.. but again for relatively short distances. You do not want to have relatively unskilled personnel attempting swaps at sea, or in bad weather (which is also very dangerous for ships under tow).
The China-EU distance is about 24,000km. I don't think more than one or two charging/swap stops are feasible on that route, so you're going to need something with 10,000km range at the very least.
China-EU can follow the coast. It isn't unreasonable to just stop at a port every night. You can put the crew up in a hotel thus saving needing beds for everyone, and they can enjoy whatever meals they want. This will make the trip take 3x longer though, which is a very significant disadvantage, but if electric energy is enough cheaper they will go for it. Most things going via sea are not time sensitive, but the crew still needs to be paid along with the ship mortgage. China-US could do the same, but the trip is about 10x longer (I didn't bother to look this up) - even with free electric I'm not sure if it is worth it.
There are islands like Hawaii where the above is not possible though so we still need something else.
> It isn't unreasonable to just stop at a port every night
You’re describing coaling stations [1]. They worked in the era of empires (one government controls the coaling network) and no other options. They’re uncompetitive today.
Any energy system requiring them will not be competitive against direct-sail systems. You’re paying for the crew and ship’s deterioration with every delay.
> It isn't unreasonable to just stop at a port every night
Is it? How many more deep water ports would be needed if every ship had to stop every night? What about if you're passing hostile or undeveloped countries? What about when you need to cross the Pacific or Atlantic? Cargo ships move at maybe 15mph - there's definitely huge parts of the world that don't have a well equipped deep water port every 360 miles. Even major western countries only have a handful of major ports.
I didn't say it was easy. Undeveloped countries would mostly welcome a chance for someone else to develop energy and port infrastructure. Hostile is a different issue, but you can bypass them as needed. (ships already pass by hostile countries)
> So for green ammonia to get adopted, a strong 'carbon price' needs to be in place, and I think that same strong carbon price would make biodiesel competitive.
And next to ammonia, biodiesel is almost drinkable.
But well, the silver lining is that the combustion products literally burning your lungs means that you won't unknowingly lock yourself in a room with a running engine.
Cost is indeed the core issue. It's an issue with most synthetic fuels and it's not an issue that is likely to go away. As long as that means you have to pay a steep premium to be green, it's not going to be popular. International agreement on carbon taxes is unlikely. And most ships operate in international waters under the flags of countries with favorable taxes and rules (e.g. Panama, Greece, etc.).
With shipping, shooting for perfect is really expensive. But we're starting with a status quo that is really bad that can be improved upon.
For example, most ships are made out of steel. Steel is relatively heavy. There's a ship yard in Tasmania working on a battery electric 300meter long ferry made out of aluminum. They've built dozens of aluminum ships already. Aluminum is much lighter than steel and that cuts the amount of energy needed to move it around by about half. That's nice because batteries are expensive and don't provide a lot of range. But making ferries out of aluminum is of course something that could work for any kind of ship.
Fuel is really expensive. 50% fuel savings are very attractive to ship operators. Most ships burn bunker fuel. That's properly nasty stuff. So using only half of that would be an improvement. It's toxic, causes lots of pollution and is nasty if it gets in the water. Some cruise ships run on LNG these days. Much cleaner but it takes up space. Those ships are mostly still made out of steel. If you make them out of aluminum, they'd be a lot lighter probably and use less fuel. So smaller LNG tanks, less CO2 emitted, and more space for the passengers. Win win.
There are also some interesting things happening with composites and carbon fiber. That stuff is even lighter and there are some companies focusing on marine applications as well. So, we could cut weight and fuel usage of ships by using modern/different materials.
There are some experiments happening with using sails on ships to cut fuel usage further. If you add all this up, we could be cutting fuel usage significantly (40-70%) and make the emissions problem a lot smaller. And unlike synthetic fuels, this also translates into financial savings. So that means it's more likely to happen.
And if we eventually put batteries in these ships, they'll go a bit further as well.
> Aluminum is much lighter than steel and that cuts the amount of energy needed to move it around by about half.
Hmm. I'm suspicious about this - might be true for cars, definitely true for planes, but ships sit at neutral buoyancy, most of the mass is cargo, and the main component of energy expenditure is actually drag. So there's significant benefits to low drag hull designs or "slow steaming", but the actual ship material isn't terribly high up on the priority list. And aluminium is way more expensive.
I think aluminum is mostly more expensive than steel because energy is expensive, but solar energy makes energy cheap.
If a ship's mass were mostly ship rather than mostly cargo, making it out of a heavier material would increase its water displacement, which would increase its drag. I don't know if that's a proportional effect; I think it's actually sublinear. But, since most of the mass is cargo, it won't make much of a difference.
If most of the mass weren't cargo, you could ship things more cheaply by sealing the cargo in giant plastic bags and towing it across the ocean behind a tugboat.
Both steel and aluminum production depend mostly on the cost of energy, so any improvements that would make aluminum cheaper would also make steel cheaper. Steel also has the benefit of being ferromagnetic so it’s a lot cheaper to pull scrap steel out of the garbage stream and recycle it, but that depends on having lots of scrap steel to begin with.
There’s really not a lot of room to make aluminum as cheap as steel, as all economies of scale have by now been mostly realized. The cost of energy is so dominant that it makes sense to run smelting plants idle most of the time with the crucible heated constantly just to take advantage of negative power prices (although there are other factors at play like subsidies and national security concerns).
Barring some sort of seismic scientific breakthrough in metallurgy, the current ratio of 2-3x the cost of steel is here to stay. There’s maybe a little room if we reach “peak aluminum” as the fraction of recycled scrap approaches 100%, but I don’t think that would make that much of a difference because we’re likely to hit “peak steel” before then (and again, its just easier to recycle from a logistics standpoint).
aluminum has terrible metal fatigue issues. Ships that have been perfectly fine for years will suddenly just fall into pieces. Trucks where weight matter do often use aluminum trailers, but they keep careful track so they are scrapped before they fall apart. This fall about is not something an inspection will catch (not 100% true, ultrasound and other inspection methods will catch some of this, but for discussion it is close enough to say you just scrap aluminum before it fails instead of inspecting)
That isn't to say aluminum can't be used for ships. Only that it is tricky.
There are different alloys of aluminum with different properties. Just like steel. And of course it's been used in the aviation industry for a long time as well. Car manufacturers are using aluminum castings in cars these days. And there are engine blocks made out of aluminum as well.
Anyway, this is the ship yard I mentioned. They have a few decades experience making ships out of aluminum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incat
As I understand it, the gotcha with aluminum is: there is no such thing as non-fatiguing stress — whereas, say, steels, have a range of elasticity where it can operate and not lose strength (or get cold-work hardened).
With aluminum, any flexion — no matter how little — marginally reduces the strength of the material. Ergo, even under ideal conditions it's saddled with a limited service life.
You just design it so the stress in the material gives a very long fatigue life (as in, how many zeros do you want?). It doesn't have a defined "fatigue limit", but it may as well have.
I don't understand how an aluminum structure can withstand the stresses in bulk-oriented ships without fatiguing to destruction in the first rough weather.
At this risk envelope I don’t see why nuclear / battery hybrids are not a serious contender. We can for example have them work on purely electric mode when close to ports and then enable the reactor in the open sea.
We do something similar with bunker fuel of different grades. They are forced to use the good stuff near the ports and once in the open sea they start burning the muddy Godzilla.
Someone I knew died from inhaling ammonia vapors after the system wasn’t purged properly and they opened a valve. Having a whole ship fueled by it seems like insanity when there is fuel that does to that to a person.
Interesting fact: ammonia was (and still is) used as a refrigerant, but aboard ships, carbon dioxide, also known as carbonic acid at the time, became more common due to its relative safety. This was in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
It was a large refrigeration system that killed the person I had mentioned.
It's kind of odd, ammonia was used back in the day on older systems. Then it was deemed too dangerous like you mentioned. But now, due to environmental impact it's now considered less dangerous and is "coming back".
We have yet to find a refrigerant that is not either toxic, explosive, or destructive to the ozone layer / a potent greenhouse gas. My understanding is that new consumer systems use propane because its relatively safe and not toxic or causing dangerous emmissions.
It's called R-290 [0], but yes this is the same as in "propane grill."
I'm a "consumer," but the technicians I talk to about replacing a residential HVAC have mentioned that consumer HVAC systems need new fire detection (maybe also suppresion?) systems on the A/C side just because of the new ingredient.
Again, not propane for the heating side, but for cooling. Crazy.
You could do that, but you'd need to build a heavily insulated place to have the A-coil/evap head, as it stands right now the efficiency loss would be too much. Additionally, the current HVAC model also acts as a rudimentary de-humidification system for buildings which helps reduce the "felt" temperature and maintain humidity levels beyond just cooling.
"Any leak will kill you through a horrible and painful process" is not on the same level of problems as "destructive to the ozone layer / a potent greenhouse gas".
The problem with R290 systems is they generally do not get service ports. As service ports tend to leak. So they're fully sealed systems. This is great for small scale refrigeration applications but for any indoor air cooling or commercial refrigeration it's effectively unusable.
CO2 was superseded by other refrigerants because it's less efficient (incidentally, ammonia is one of the most efficient), and the (very) heavy equipment required to utilise it due to the extremely high pressures is also costly.
CO2 is less common today, but has hardly been "superceded." I specialize in energy modeling for industrial refrigeration systems, and have studied several new industrial cold storage projects comparing CO2 to freon and ammonia. Their efficiency is on par with ammonia systems, within a few percentage points.
I'll agree that the equipment is heavy-duty, but disagree if you mean "massive." The energy density of CO2 is so high that suction lines can be 2"-4", 6"-8" is common for ammonia. Modern systems use many (a dozen+) small recip compressors instead of larger HP screw compressors. When all is said and done, CO2 systems are small enough that they are frequently contained to a single rack and placed on the roof of a building, whereas a comparable ammonia system requires its own engine room and a significantly larger footprint.
The biggest opportunity for CO2 to outperform ammonia is in heat recovery and reuse. I had a customer who was exploring selling his (waste) heat as a utility to a neighboring food processor.
I believe, CO2 is actually more thermodynamically efficient if used in supercritical freezers? It's just much more difficult to work with, as you need all the tubing to withstand about 90 atmospheres of pressure.
I'm sorry for your loss. Ammonia is the the thing that our body happily spends its precious water in more-than-enough amounts just to make sure it's gotten rid of. The only mammal that optimized that process is camels if I'm not misremembering. I also found it a bit crazy to fill a ship with it.
If widely adopted, I fear that in time there will be sufficiently many major incidents that we'll start talking about deammonization as we currently talk about decarbonization.
The drivers would be wildly different. Carbon and GHG nowadays has this abstract, difficult to nail down effects. Ammonia leaks would have immediate and directly related negative effects.
Although the chemical responsible for rotten fish, Trimethylamine, is a derivative of ammonia, I never made the link between the two. Ammonia smells like ammonia to me, no matter the concentration level.
Petro is practically safe compared to ammonia. Petro only explodes in specific air-fuel situations. The vapors are harmful, but not deadly in small quantities like ammonia is. Calling petro "insanely dangerous" is wrong. Petro is the most dangerous substance normal people handle in quantity, but we allow normal people to handle it in quantity because it while it isn't safe it isn't all that dangerous.
Your standard household ammonia CONCENTRATE people sometimes use for cleaning is 99% water - you dilute it significantly for use. Even used correctly it is nasty stuff.
To be clear, "small quantities" are in units of parts per million. 5ppm (0.0005%) and the room smells of ammonia, 25ppm means you should be wearing a respirator, 500 ppm (0.05%) can be lethal.
Warning that 15% air-ammonia mixtures can burn is like warning that 100 kg of TNT could give you a concussion if it fell on your head. It's just not the concern at all.
Petrol (gasoline to Americans) is dangerous largely for is vapours. It's one of the lightest-possible liquid fuels with about 6 carbon atoms per molecule (C6).[1] Most ships don't burn petrol itself,[2] but rather heavier fractions of petroleum, generally either diesel (~C16) or bunker fuel (~30 or longer), which don't vapourise readily. It's possible to extinguish a lit match in diesel fuel (the vapours above petrol would ignite and/or explode), and bunker fuel generally won't even flow until it's been heated above the boiling point of water (spent steam from steamships is used to heat the incoming fuel both so that it will flow and to vapourise it before injection into boilers or diesel cylinders).
The comparatively small quantities of petrol carried in automobiles is not a grave hazard, though fuel tanks are protected against damage or ignition, and fires do happen. Larger vehicles, on land, sea, and air, often burn the comparatively safer kerosene (aviation) or diesel (heavy machinery).
________________________________
Notes:
1. "Distillate" and "NGL" (natural gas liquids) are used in some instances, and can boil well below 100°C. Butane boils at -0.5°C / 31.5°F.
2. As I'd just mentioned in an earlier comment. I thought a well-known cruise ship or ocean-liner had been converted to petrol, but can't find a reference. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344605>
Like the sibling comment mentioned it is nothing compared to ammonia. Yeah if you dump it somewhere in the ocean it might decompose with less damage to the environment but I was talking about immediate damage to humans.
You're thinking of something like regular fuel oil, like diesel or kerosene. Heavy fuel oil/bunker is very viscous, has to be heated to be pumped efficiently.
>You're thinking of something like regular fuel oil, like diesel or kerosene. Heavy fuel oil/bunker is very viscous, has to be heated to be pumped efficiently.
I assure you I am not.
I specifically compared it to lubricants to avoid a bunch of people mentally anchoring the discussion around diesel. Bunker C (the common one, also the most thick one) is basically on the automotive oil spectrum when it comes to viscosity.
Go to 0:00 for room temp and 9:00 for operating temp (which is low enough for a plastic soda bottle and a bare hand to be appropriate). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZZ591x0Ajs. Sure looks like 5w20 to me. Def thinner than gear oils and any comparison to 000 grease or roofing tar on a hot day is laughable. Bunker fuel is solidly on the oil spectrum.
You seems to be knowledgeable in that domain and has something interesting to share but I don’t understand your point. What is the scale 0.00-9.00 ? What is the preside point you don’t agree with GP? Please EMLI5.
My point is that it's misleading to people who don't have reason to deal in liquid fuels to characterize bunker oil as thick or viscous when it's only thick relative to fuels (which are generally pretty thin, they mostly pour like water) despite not being particularly viscous absolutely.
It's on the same order as most petroleum oils that people deal with and thinner than pretty much every petroleum product that is generally characterized as thick. Thinner grades of motor oil and most hydraulic oil is a bit thinner but thicker grades of motor oil, gear oils, all sorts of greases and tars are all more viscous. Bunker oil doesn't "need" to be heated to be pumped any more than motor oil does though heating it and the accompanying thinning does a lot to help with combustion which is why they do it (and then the rest of the systems that handle it get designed to take advantage of this) and invoking the fact that this is done kind of implies a comparison with the other petroleum products that get heated before being used and in most people's experience this is going to be products used to patch roofs and roads which is unhelpful because those don't even flow except at the highest extreme of naturally occurring temperatures. The only context in which bunker oil is particularly thick is if you're a fuel supplier and spend all day dealing in much less viscous stuff.
I've seen bunker fuel in a ship, and its consistency was best described as "tar-like". Mind, n=1 and uses may vary, but bunker fuel can be exceedingly thick. All the more so on high-latitude routes with fuel tanks near the outer hull and cooled by ambient water temperatures near freezing.
Decidedly thicker than automotive oil, and probably thicker than axle grease or vaseline / petroleum jelly.
The ship in which that was used (triple-expansion steam engine, late 1800s design, built and used during WWII) directed spent steam around the incoming fuel flow directly prior to boiler injection, and that steam then wrapped around the fuel line and part of the fuel tank itself to heat the oil to the point it would flow.
Side note: Venezuelan oil is very thick and viscous, and requires mixing with lighter fractions of petroleum to be pumped out of wells. Venezuela typically imports what would otherwise be waste light fractions of petroleum, generally from the US or Nigeria (heavily dependent on political winds) in order to do this. A significant fraction of US petroleum exports go to this or similar uses. (I suspect Canadian tar sands see similar treatment though I don't have a source on this.)
The differences in opinion here may be because we're comparing #6 in a cold ambient environment to #5/#6 in a warm ambient environment. Still, #6 is no grease.
There are only around 30 people on such a ship - we can put that many through extensive training to make sure they don't make mistakes.
However no ship fueled without such trained crew should get anywhere near one that is. Only special shipyards should allow such a ship to dock - even the route from the open ocean needs to be controlled - no beaches "near" those ships. I'm not sure what a right margin of safety is, but don't allow such ship into your national waters without first knowing that.
> However no ship fueled without such trained crew should get anywhere near one that is. Only special shipyards should allow such a ship to dock - even the route from the open ocean needs to be controlled - no beaches "near" those ships. I'm not sure what a right margin of safety is, but don't allow such ship into your national waters without first knowing that.
I could see that. At least, it sounds good in principle. But with ships sailing under flags of countries with lax safety requirements it may not be practical.
I thought the cargo ship that crashed into the Baltimore bridge had a known failing engine. I get the impression that a lot of shipping equipment and regulations are thread bare.
Ammonia tankers seem a good test bed for this tech as they already carry Ammonia and dock in places that handle it.
Other fuel cell based technologies seem to be working on scaling up, they can supplement electrical generation for crew before working with the existing generators with the aim to eventually replace them.
Like trains, ships get technical benefits from being hybrid. This makes it relatively easy then to be made more hybrid, plug into shore power when available, add some batteries and, solar panels etc.
There's no one easy fix but lots of little ones. The most interesting one I saw discussed is contracts that share the blame when delays happen. Previously ships would race to their destination and then wait around because if they missed a connection they would be held responsible. Now they can all go at slower, more efficient just-in-time speeds and the costs of the occasional missed deadline are amortized. With fuel savings they all come out ahead so it's a win-win.
>“Twenty or thirty years ago, the shipping industry made a major shift to natural gas, believing it was the fuel of the future. Now, we know it wasn’t the right step,” says Prousalidis.
This sentence confuses me. The shipping industry runs on natural gas? If so, why is there regret? My impression is that most systems using natural gas right now are in a good position.
Liquefied Natural Gas was expected to be a lower-emission alternative fuel compared to bunker fuel.
The proportion of LNG fuelled cargo tankers out there right now is about 2% but for new orders, about 30% of them are LNG fuelled so that small percentage will grow rapidly.
However, for United States LNG in particular, the LNG production chain actually has very high emissions of methane. The industry has been fighting to keep that as unclear and unquantified as absolutely possible, and there's a good reason for that - when you take into account the methane emissions along the whole value chain from drilling through liquefaction, LNG's climate impact (in terms of global warming) is no better than coal. I'm sure it's beneficial compared to bunker fuel, but the climate benefit is much much slimmer than first believed.
NASA has been showing methane leaks from satellites built for purpose.[0] I'll give you three guesses as to where the location of the leaks are located, but you'll only need one.
Better read the data now before it gets stricken from the record.
In the data EMIT has collected since being installed on the International Space Station in July, the science team has identified more than 50 “super-emitters” in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States. Super-emitters are facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure, typically in the fossil-fuel, waste, or agriculture sectors, that emit methane at high rates.
Except most emissions are not leaks. A leak implies an unintended or unwanted behaviour. But most emissions are from indented behaviour of the system. The equipment is. designed to vent to atmosphere as part of normal operation, and it’s not worth it for them to burn it until they have to pay for this pollution.
I see you and I have a difference of what we consider a leak. You seem to only consider it a leak in the equipment being used. I consider it when humans punch a hole in the ground and the gas is released by that human activity.
I'm not being obtuse at all. That methane would not be leaking in these locations if humans did not attempt to extract it. Regardless if the leaks from faulty plumbing or just not making the hole the right way so the methane in the air is a direct result of that human activity, it is still methane leaking into the air
No ordinary person would interpret your original comment this way. _aavaa_ was correct: "A leak implies an unintended or unwanted behaviour."
If producers are intentionally venting off the methane, it isn't leaking, it's being released.
> A leak is a way (usually an opening) for fluid to escape a container or fluid-containing system, such as a tank or a ship's hull, through which the contents of the container can escape or outside matter can enter the container. Leaks are usually unintended and therefore undesired.
No you've got the gist of it: the point is that numbers for CO2 emissions of LNG assume a leak-free supply chain.
That's not possible in practice: LNG leaks at almost every single step, and monitoring of it has been inconsistent and poorly implemented. Add in the significantly higher greenhouse effect of methane in the atmosphere, and you lose essentially all the potential benefits (not to mention the ultimate issue of continuing to add sequestered CO2 back into the atmosphere - it's still a fossil fuel).
Methane leaks. Unburnt methane has a global warming potential 28 times higher than CO2. (This is why landfills will burn methane buildup, even if they aren't using it to generate electricity or capturing it to resell.)
> LNG's climate impact (in terms of global warming) is no better than coal. I'm sure it's beneficial compared to bunker fuel,
Why are you sure of that?
Oils release an amount of CO2 that's midway between natural gas and coal. So unless bunker fuel is causing some other big release of greenhouse gasses, if natural gas is near coal then it's worse than bunker fuel.
On top of that, doesn't the sulfur pollution from bunker fuel have a cooling effect?
Hmm maybe I shouldn't be so sure of myself then. The comparison between LNG and coal that I was referencing was the comparison between coal and LNG's lifecycle emissions on the basis of like-for-like electricity generation (so it was slightly apples&oranges for me to say that).
I'd assumed that a main engine's efficiency with bunker fuel was awful and with LNG was much better, meaning LNG had emissions as a shipping fuel.
But I think taking into account the methane emissions of upstream production (which varies incredibly wildly depending on the production environment) LNG from most of the world (particularly the USA) will be a worse shipping fuel on a global warming basis than bunker fuel.
Thanks for picking that up.
The cooling effect of sulphur dioxide emissions (which make sulphates in the atmosphere) is a whole Pandora's box that I'm unqualified to open but yes, there's a significant cooling effect from the SO2 emissions of bunker fuel and the 2020 rules change on VLSFO dramatically slashed the shipping industry's SO2 emissions (noting that SO2 emissions have also been falling across the board, and shipping is only one component of that). https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/sulfur-dioxide-emis...
Almost all shipping by weight is done by burning bunker. By ship quantity, most ships probably actually just burn some variant of diesel. Some do run off natural gas.
If you read through industry journals, you can find some point in the late 80s where the industry journals were all reporting about how all ships would need to go back to burning coal soon. I'm pretty sure this was just a fantasy that shipbuilders paid the journals to push as it would mean the opportunity to sell lots of new ships.
I doubt the statement you quoted is grounded in any reality.
I'd thought that several notable ships had been refitted to burn petrol, though I can't find the references I'd had in mind.
(I'd think that petrol itself would be a less desirable fuel for some of the same reasons as ammonia: it's heavier-than air, sinks, and burns rapidly or explodes when vapours combine with air.)
The shipping industry only ever dipped slightly into natural gas. There are some CNG/LNG ferries around, but all the long haul stuff in international waters (which is basically lawless) uses bunker fuel.
Natural gas, aka methane, has a big impact on climate change. Don't listen what the gas industry is trying to get everyone to believe, natural gas is as natural as petroil.
(And it turns out things with LNG ships are much worse than previously believed. They not only emit CO2 - a bit less than traditional bunker fuel, but not much - they also emit methane, and in no small quantities. The LNG industry likes to pretend that these emissions are small and neglegible, but whenever someone goes out and actually measures them, they are substantial.)
According to a quick search, Viking Energy apparently will have a 220 cubic meter tank, which would equate to 220000 liters of ammonia. In aquaculture apparently ammonia reaches an almost universally high damage/lethal combination for fish (mammals can handle significant amounts thanks to a specific enzyme to handle build up the blood, fish have to just excrete it fast enough) and other non-mammals at around 2mg/L. Assuming all 220000 L of ammonia went 100% into the water and dissolved completely times 0.769 kg/m^3 density at STP, it'd be at the lethal level when dissolved in less than 84590000 liters of water, which equates to a cube approximately 44 meters per side or a sphere with a radius of 27 meters. Even with a 10x margin (since apparently some organisms can suffer damage even if not death from 0.2mg/L) that's nothing for an ocean going ship in general.
So at least at first glance to me that looks very favorable vs the bunker fuel ships normally use, which is also horribly toxic but also floats and is much harder for creatures to get rid of.
Yep. You just immediately killed all life in a volume larger than the ship, and since diffusion on volumes that large take time, created a plume of toxic water that will wander for many minutes before dissolving well enough.
Not a big deal on the ocean. And yeah, better than an oil spill.
It dissolves in water quickly. Then big algae bloom, lots of dead fish. Mammals handle it OK.
Ammonia can directly act as a nitrogen fertilizer, and plants love that. Mammals quickly convert it in their livers, but aquatic animals can't handle having it in their bloodstream and die quickly from it.
High concentrations can overwhelm the liver, and then its toxic even for humans. Pure, ammonia vapor is incredibly toxic and even tiny concentrations are bad for the mucosa.
pbmonster says "Pure, ammonia vapor is incredibly toxic and even tiny concentrations are bad for the mucosa."
As in "dissolves the mucosa"!
The 1976 ammonia truck disaster:
In 1976 a truck of ammonia gas ruptured on a freeway interchange in Houston. The scene was akin to early World War I gas warfare. The Houston Post newspaper office building was about a half mile from the spill. The ammonia cloud rolled over and past the building in minutes but quick-witted building engineers shut down the air circulation system so no one inside was hurt. The greenery around the building and area was scorched brown by the passing heavier-than-air ammonia cloud:
"How A Deadly Cloud In Houston Decades Ago Led To ‘Shelter-In-Place’ (good pic of the initial truck explosion):"
I believe in much of the ocean nitrogen is not the limiting nutrient for plant growth, because while it can be fixed from dissolved molecular nitrogen, there's no direct major source of things like phosphorus or iron.
Things would be different near coasts where sediment is washing in.
You put people on a ship across the ocean and they're going to dump their waste tanks into it. They're going to spill and leak industrial chemicals into it. There's a certain amount of loss that occurs during shipping and additional packaging that goes into securing it.
You're better off building things closer to where they are needed rather than relying on shipping for cheap consumer goods. Bunker fuel oil, LNG, ammonia, it's all putting the cart before the horse.
> partnership restarted the project with a specially made gas turbine designed to run on ammonia.
And that gas turbine can also run on many other fuels - LPG, LNG, gasoline, diesel, etc.
My guess is this ship will do 1 run on ammonia for the press release, and then will run on LPG for the rest of its life for economic reasons. The original fuel cell design is far more picky about fuel sources and therefore wouldn't have had that possibility.
Ammonia will (and does) leak into the environment where it becomes a part of the natural nitrogen cycle. The end result of the natural nitrogen cycle is N2O (aka laughing gas) which is a greenhouse gas 250-350x more powerful than CO2.
Running the world on ammonia, even if logistically possible, will likely accelerate climate change, not slow it.
Reading about ammonia as a ship fuel gives me strong Ignition! vibes.
For those not familiar, Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark goes into detail about all the different things aerospace engineers have tried,
including some incredibly dangerous combinations.
The conclusion for many of the tests is usually along this lines of "this makes a very powerful, lightweight rocket,
but the tendency towards disastrous results makes it impractical".
Interesting. This one says it's a gas turbine, but other articles I've seen say there's also two stroke engines for shipping. I was wondering how this would be petroleum free as a 2 stroke. It makes sense that the turbine could be with sealed bearings.
I never understood why shipping decided to deal with ammonia nonsense. It's dead-on-arrival, due to the complexity and danger of it.
We already have a workable solution: liquid methane. It can be synthesized from captured CO2 about as cheaply as ammonia, and we can just use the fossil methane as a bridge for now. More importantly, there are whole fleets of methane-powered ships now.
Methane has a higher global warming potential, but only if it leaks. And this can be minimized, especially once fossil fuel mining is phased out.
The idea is to make ammonia from electricity. If this scales up, it could lead to electric fertilizer, and greatly reduce agricultural carbon emissions.
Ammonia is not some obscure chemical until now neglected by science and industry, the problem of producing ammonia has already received the attention of several generations of the greatest minds humanity has. Adding yet more commercial demand for what is already very much in demand isn't going to help in any meaningful way. It's just going to drive up the price of fertilizer, and therefore the price of food.
As for doing it with electricity; that will never be more cost effective than doing it with natural gas. If you want to reduce carbon emissions, turn your attention to other industries. Fucking with the global food supply is the last thing anybody should be doing.
> the problem of producing ammonia has already received the attention of several generations of the greatest minds humanity has.
Sure but they were working with the constraints of the times. Renewable electricity generation doesn’t have the same level of maturity and it’s already surpassing fossil options with tons of room to scale.
> that will never be more cost effective than doing it with natural gas.
We have an effectively infinite supply of electricity but a finite supply of natural gas. The trends are clear. Electricity is going to continue to get cheaper essentially forever and fossil fuels will continue to become more scarce and thus expensive until it's not economical to use them.
You just have to draw the timeline long enough and electricity becomes the cheaper option for ammonium production and renewable electricity becomes the cheapest electricity source.
> Fucking with the global food supply is the last thing anybody should be doing.
Ammonia prices don’t have to go up if demand goes up. Price increases are only one possible outcome of an increase in demand. The other option is an increase in supply. With sufficiently cheap electricity everything becomes affordable. When we deplete natural gas supplies ammonia will get more expensive.
Food will also cost a lot more when farmland gets too hot to be productive.
The last thing anyone should be doing is betting the food supply on scarce fossil fuel sources.
I get that but isn't it like 100x more efficient to be storing that energy to offset intermittency/base power or selling that ammonium as fertilizer to offset hydrocarbon-based haber bosch ferts?
There are more efficient ways, but batteries are heavy and still not as compact as liquid fuels. If you want to run ships on non-carbon-based energy making a liquid fuel is one way that can work today.
They’d have to be huge and also need to get out of the way of overhead cranes. There’s some work being done in that direction but it’s never going to be a complete solution.
I read about some of the mitigation methods for an Ammonia fueled ship. If Ammonia is detected in the air, they start spraying water, like a sprinkler system. Ammonia has a high affinity to water.
Ammonia is also lighter than air. When it is first released it is typically cold, so it sticks around until it warms up. Eventually it will float up into the atmosphere.
One disadvantage is its lower energy density, you need to store twice as much of it as bunker oil.
One advantage that I can see for Ammonia is that the ingredients it is composed of are readily available from the environment. Also, the fuel may be upgraded by cracking it into hydrogen and nitrogen using waste heat from the engine. Hydrogen gives a bigger pop in the cylinder, Ammonia doesn't burn as easily.
One scenario I can think of is using nuclear power on a platform in the ocean, manufacturing the Ammonia, ships can come by and refuel there.
That’s a red herring. Getting hydrogen and nitrogen out of their naturally occurring forms (bonded to other things or to themselves) and turning it into ammonia is very energetically intensive.
> One scenario I can think of is using nuclear power on a platform in the ocean, manufacturing the Ammonia, ships can come by and refuel there.
I can think of many such scenarios if money is no object.
But as you say, they currently run on bunker fuel which is essentially garbage. You have to pay people to take that of your hands. It is being ridiculous to think that they would switch, on their own dime, to burning ammonia. And green ammonia at that which is orders of magnitude more expensive.
Who is willing to pay the resulting shipping costs?
Both hydrogen and carbon are also readily available from the environment.
Synthesizing hydrocarbon analogues of fossil fuels (petrol, kerosene, diesel, bunker fuel[1]) is possible and has been theoretically demonstrated.[2] The problem is that it's not economically feasible, in large part due to structural market failures in the price of petroleum.[3]
Physical abundance of the constituent elements has little to do with production costs of the resultant fuel.
And hydrocarbons are vastly preferable to ammonia as fuels for all kinds of reasons: energy density, noncorrosive nature,[4] non-toxicity, convenience in general handling and storage, etc., etc., etc. So long as you're synthesizing fuels, make it the good stuff, not poison.
________________________________
Notes:
1. That last is probably a non-starter. It's harder to synthesize longer-chain hydrocarbons, so far as I'm aware, and the primary driver of bunker oil for marine propulsion is that it's an otherwise low-value surplus from conventional petroleum production, even a large fraction of much extraction, e.g., Venezuela's very tarry petroleum,and Canada's tar sands. Lighter fractions would be easier to synthesize and more attractive as fuels.
2. For about 60 years, including research at Brookhaven National Labs, M.I.T., and the US Naval Research Lab, as well as with a Google moonshot project. A list of sources is here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970111>
3. A deep topic, but given the fact that we're extracting petroleum at roughly 1 million times its rate of formation, and in a highly unsustainable fashion, there's a fair argument that petroleum ought to be priced about 1 million times its current market price. The economics of nonrenewable resource extraction is grossly irrational and divorced from physical and geological realities. On rates of formation, Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) <https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5212176.pdf> (PDF). Previous discussions: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
4. Indeed hydrocarbons are routinely used as lubricants and protectives for metals and other materials.
The main concern for me is at dockside where there are lots of people nearby. Ideally I think they'd "lock down" and depressurise the ammonia system (except the storage tank) when close to port, and only bring it online when out at sea and far from population.
Also the refuelling process seems a bit risky. But these things are already quite routine; ammonia is already a large-volume industrial commodity with well-developed controls.
Risks can be mitigated. But the first step is always eliminating the hazardous material if possible.
And many options exists that are less inherently dangerous than ammonia. Like methanol. At least it’s a liquid and not nearly as bad.
But ammonia is chosen as a predatory delay strategy. They build the engines to be dual fuel (ammonia and methane) and then feign surprise when they have to run it on methane since the ammonia supply chain “isn’t ready yet” and the prices “need to come down a bit”.
If you think this is bad, then the chemicals used in rocketry - read the book ignition [1] - will have you whimpering in a corner. As with any system, risks can be identified and controlled and operationalised - Gasoline has its risks, so does Chlorine trifluoride [2]. Yet both are wildly different and are used in day to day operations.
Yes rocketry has made very dangerous chemical. And hydrazine is used in other fields too. But it’s used because there aren’t safer alternatives that are fit for purpose.
Ammonia is being pushed as a predatory delay strategy. The article hints at this when it talks about the engines being dual-fuel (ammonia and methane). Given the massive price difference between green ammonia and methane it doesn’t take a genius to know what their next message will be “our ships are ammonia ready, we will run them on methane until the ammonia supply chains are ready then we’ll transition to it”. Expect they have no intention of transitioning.
The ships are “ammonia ready” in the same way my driveway is Ferrari ready. All that’s missing is a lot of other people’s money.
I think that’s not a good comparison. I think we generally accept that leaving the planet is inherently riskier than traveling on it. You have to generate enough energy to exit the atmosphere, that’s a shitload of energy. Of course it’s dangerous. We’ve been sailing relatively safely for thousands of years, though.
Once corrosion is under control, is that danger actually higher than the risk of a natural gas fuel system leaking and killing a whole crew? Both gases are lighter than air, both form explosive mixtures with air (but ammonia-air mixture has much slower flame speed and slower pressure rise than natural gas - for which it makes up with its much higher toxicity).
In the end, gas leaks are always bad. But at least you can easily smell an ammonia leak.
No the ammonia toxicity hazard is incredibly severe, it immediately burns your lungs and you die by choking on your own blood as your lungs dissolve. Whereas with natural gas leaks you can reduce the likelihood of ignition by intrinsically safe instrumentation and electrical components. In both cases, gas detection and automated shutdown and sectionalisation helps significantly.
If you inhale natural gas it is only deadly (it can cause other problems that are treatable) when it displaces enough oxygen. In open air you are hopefully okay because there is still enough oxygen that you can breath. Ammonia is deadly when inhaled in small quantities. I wouldn't want either, but ammonia is worse if you must choose.
I'm not sure how likely fire is in case of a leak.
> But at least you can easily smell an ammonia leak.
IIRC, they add a very nasty smelling chemical to LNG so that leaks are evident before they get explosive. In the case of ammonia, the additive is not really needed, and the toxicity being much higher makes me think that, by the time you realize you are breathing ammonia, it's already too late.
I know they add a thiol (sulfur compound that smells like rotten eggs) to the city mains for cooking/heating gas.
Would be interesting to know if its commonly added to industrial LNG. Because we burn a lot of that - even if you only add a few ppm thiol to natural gas, that's a whole lot of sulfur being burnt...
It makes, when you consider, that its all just "measures" by the oil industry to stop society from steering away from it. They either invest in DoA technologies or technologies that allow for greenwashing of fossil fuels.
Beavers? Lets say you want to steer the population away form reasonable environmental goals like high speed rail or public transport (which has to cost something to keep bums out).
You then pick some mad-sob with a insane initiative like "rewild skunks in the inner city parks" and pump that up with donated millions. Result, that mad- as a hatter, propagates his "initiative", riles up the masses and his co-goals - which may include high-speed rail get discredited.
2026 is still a very ambitious startup date for this. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has only just approved interim guidelines for the addition of ammonia to the IGF Code (use of gaseous fuels). There's a lot to it, but this is a good high level overview: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/imo-interim-guidelines-safety...
A lot of commentators believe that since ammonia is less inherently safe it will inevitably be less safe in practice. I am not convinced by that argument, and in general if there's a strong enough business driver then anything can be made safe. But what really swung me against the idea of ammonia as a shipping fuel is that the expected cost is barely any better than methanol (which is much more inherently safe) and is more expensive than biodiesel.
The shipping companies have a real conundrum on their hands - do they go ammonia, methanol, stick with diesel, or try to get near-shore and inland shipping onto electric? Ammonia-fuelled ships have to be THOROUGHLY designed from the ground up specifically for ammonia use; you have to be 100% committed to go down that path. Whereas biodiesel can simply be dropped in (you can of course choose to fill up with a biodiesel blend today, but nobody does because you can put emissions into the atmosphere for free).
Unlike solar cells or battery cells, I don't really see much chance for 'learning rates' and technology improvement to drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia. Falling electrolyser costs are nice, but they're only a portion of the process plant CAPEX, and the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway. You could get electrolysers for free and still be unable to make cheap green ammonia. So for green ammonia to get adopted, a strong 'carbon price' needs to be in place, and I think that same strong carbon price would make biodiesel competitive.
I'm pretty sure the costs of producing a fuel based solely on making it with electricity is by far, of all the options you named, best done with Ammonia.
The reason the cost of ammonia is barely better, or even worse, than things like methanol, is because the electricity process is still expensive.
But that can (and soon would!) become waaaay cheaper. Electricity __NOT__ on demand is dirt cheap and can be halved and quartered some more: Solar panels are _idiotically cheap_ these days and that state of affairs is not temporary.
We need more not-on-demand needs. As in, 'hey, uh, if theres some power left over cuz it's windy and sunny.. no prob! Let me run these ammonia producing machines at full power for a bit. No need for ammonia right now? No problem - compared to electricity, ammonia is vastly simpler to store'.
Ammonia is a great not-on-demand consumer of electricty. That's why this is necessary.
As you said:
> the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway.
That's exactly the factor that can become ridiculously cheap. It isn't today because there's not much point investing in solar/wind because they do not cover on-demand needs (when it's not particularly sunny/windy, then electricity prices are sky high and you want to build electricity production that can deliver then. And solar/windy by definition can't), and the primary issue is transport.
if the demand for ammonia skyrockets, you can solve it all. Ammonia does not need to be produced on-demand, and you don't need all that much transport (build the ammonia producing plant close to your solar/wind parks).
> Let me run these ammonia producing machines at full power for a bit.
The problem with this is the capex and running costs of that kind of machinery make it expensive to keep idle. It can be uneconomic even with free electricity.
Where are the costs. Many factories are only used 8 hours a day despite the high costs - it isn't worth the additional cost to have employees work overnight. Some really energy hungry factories traditionally run only overnight when energy is cheap, and they shutdown for yearly maintenance in December (thus freeing up their normal energy use when everyone is running Christmas lights) Now that wind and solar are coming online those are changing how they work.
Different factories have difference costs. When energy is significant they consider that. When energy is not significant they just run when it works out.
> Many factories are only used 8 hours a day despite the high costs
I don't have a lot of direct experience but my dad worked in factories most of my childhood. Every single one ran nearly 24/7. Was that a chance occurrence of the types of factories we had near where I grew up?
The only confirmed example I know of is Harley-Davidson, roughly during the boom of cruiser motorcycles (1995-2010?): They only ran one shift, but the PR of waiting lists and extremely high instant resale prices made the choice appealing in the face of the capital costs.
Are you asking if all factories are like the ones that you grew up near?
My understanding is that manufacturing tends to be the way you describe. I'd be surprised if that held true for all sorts of factories, especially in chemical production. Just a guess but I think paying chemical engineers for overnight shifts might cut into profits somewhat
EDIT: another comment sparked a memory, I'm thinking specifically of batch operators.
Stopping and restarting chemical plants is usually horribly expensive. Most of them run 24/7, non-stop, even if the companies have negative profit on some of the products.
Usually there will be only a single engineer or maybe two on staff for the night shift. But paying regular operating staff an additional 50% night shift bonus to keep the factory running is very often worth the price.
The night shift extra is usually much closer to 50 cents than 50 percent. A lot of places even give the night shift the same pay, especially when the labor market is favorable to employers.
> Many factories are only used 8 hours a day despite the high cost
Is this true in chemicals?
Which chemical? Some yes, some no. Some processes work better in continue runs, some you are doing batches. Some batches take a few weeks, some are hours...
Normal operation of ammonia plants and methanol plants has been 24/7 for decades. Most other commodity chemicals too.
Loading & unloading ships & barges as well.
Some places only load railcars & trailers during days.
Also it's common for engineers to only work straight days and often their office is not on site, they actually only make visits. They do it as needed and can be very dedicated and effective, but of course they can't touch anything because that requires a unionized operator.
> Which chemical?
Any industrially-produced chemical where continuous production is possible. I haven’t heard of such systems being competitive if left idle so someone can sleep.
Continuous production implies at least a few people 24x7. Not all chemicals are continuous production. Often there is a choice of processes when you build a factory.
> Continuous production implies at least a few people 24x7. Not all chemicals are continuous production
Yes. I'm asking if there is a chemical-production process that can be run 24/7 but which isn't due to labour shortages somewhere that doesn't result in such production being shut down (or protected)?
Chemicals are globally-traded commodities. Some are perishable and/or difficult or even illegal to ship. So there is regional price variance. But ceteris paribus, if it can be run continuously, production will shift to where it is.
I've worked in two factories in my life. Dairy, and Printing. Dairy was 24/7/365. Printing was (averaging) 20/7/365 (product/layout change, maintenance, cleaning, etc.)
My father was a fireman. Knowing what I know from him, I would never go to work for a factory that they got THOSE massive energy demanding machines that run non-stop and the fuel is ammonia. It is a near-certain death sentence, especially in 'some countries' where safety is 'a bit more relaxed'.
> Ammonia is a great not-on-demand consumer of electricty.
This does not follow. The cost efficiency of ammonia production is highly dependent on the process being continuous and steady state. Every analysis that says ammonia is cost effective as a fuel is based on an efficient continuous process as a cost assumption.
If you are constantly starting and stopping based on electricity availability then your ammonia just became much more expensive. In which case, it is probably no longer cost effective as a fuel. Mixing "best possible price" and "worst possible process" and pretending these represent the same instance of reality is misleading to say the least.
> The cost efficiency of ammonia production is highly dependent on the process being continuous and steady state.
Hydrogen is the overwhelming energy input to ammonia production. Hydrogen is readily storable -- this is done even today, when the hydrogen comes from natural gas, to smooth things out to keep the ammonia plant running -- so intermittency of renewables will be almost entirely countered by doing the same thing and storing the green hydrogen.
What matters is cost of electrolysers, but they have been getting very cheap in China.
It is not just the cost of inputs.
Ammonia synthesis is a high-pressure high-temperature process. One of the reasons to use a continuous steady-state process is that cycling it up and down causes thermal and pressure fatigue in the reactor. The safe operating life of a reactor can be surprisingly short if it is not operated at a steady state. If you want this to scale, it needs to be low maintenance and have a long operating life.
You could in principle centralize ammonia production with sufficient reactant reserves to ensure continuous production from variable low-density energy sources like solar or wind. However, this would require hydrogen pipelines that largely don't exist and would take a long time to build. We can't repurpose existing natural gas infrastructure and similar because they weren't built with alloys resistant to hydrogen embrittlement. One of the big economic advantages of using methane for ammonia is that it takes advantage of the millions of kilometers of natural gas distribution pipeline that already exists.
I'm not averse to the idea but the enthusiastic proponents are pretending like the practical realities of industrial chemistry don't apply to them. We aren't going to get to a green future with rainbows and unicorns, we need to brutally realistic about the true requirements.
I wasn't talking about the cost of inputs, I was talking about their putative intermittency.
The argument that was being made seemed to be "renewables are intermittent, therefore ammonia synthesis based on renewable energy must be intermittent, or else use expensive storage". The counterargument is that hydrogen is the overwhelmingly most important input, and it is highly storable, so the intermittency of the inputs can be largely avoided at modest cost, allowing the ammonia plant to run 24/7.
You may not be aware, but we already have hydrogen pipelines coupled to ammonia plants. The US has ~1000 miles of hydrogen pipelines for this purpose. It's also not obvious to me why pipelines would necessarily be needed. After all, the ammonia plant could be built where the hydrogen is stored.
Can factories install local battery banks to cover a day’s utilization? Charge up the batteries on the cheap electricity during noon and run the plant off of those reserves. I assume other industries are already running these cost optimization analyses as the renewable electricity market continues to develop. There is a balancing point between the capex and opex, but unless it is insanely energy hungry (like aluminum), that seems possible.
> but unless it is insanely energy hungry (like aluminum)
Producing a ton of hydrogen by electrolysis requires ~3x the energy to produce a ton of aluminum. It is, in fact, "insanely energy hungry". This isn't necessarily a problem but it does create logistical challenges.
What comes back to the fact that you only need batteries for the ammonia production. Hydrogen production is a low-pressure process, and optionally even low-temperature.
It takes 11 MW of electricity to make 1 ton of ammonia, ammonia plants can make 1000 to 3000 tons a day. Providing battery storage for that production rate for 24 hours would probably cost more than the plant itself.
> It takes 11 MW of electricity to make 1 ton of ammonia
Do you mean MWh? Because the units given don't make sense.
But 11 MWh would be too low.
> You could in principle centralize ammonia production with sufficient reactant reserves to ensure continuous production from variable low-density energy sources like solar or wind.
I'm probably missing something here but why would you need to pipe hydrogen to the plant, rather than just generating it on site from power drawn from the grid?
Energy density mostly and being able to deliver that power where you need it. Aluminum plants are co-located with large-scale power plants, famously hydroelectric, for the same reason. Above certain power requirements, you essentially need the power generation to be onsite.
Hydrogen requires 3x the energy of aluminum per ton, so it is an even bigger problem for hydrogen. Unlike aluminum, it is feasible to have large numbers of small hydrogen production plants but then you need to transport all that hydrogen at an acceptable scale.
> Above certain power requirements, you essentially need the power generation to be onsite.
Is this due to transmission losses or just because you couldn't feasibly build enough capacity cables to transmit large amounts of power over long distances?
A single ton of hydrogen requires ~50 MWh of electricity. Small special-purpose ammonia plants, which are common for some industrial applications, typically require on the order of 50 tons of hydrogen per day. This would require ~2.5 GWh of electricity per day via electrolysis. To put that in context, that is in the same ballpark as the average output of the largest solar farms ever built in the US.
The largest ammonia plant in the US requires around 2,000 tons of hydrogen per day. That would require 100 GWh per day to produce by electrolysis, which would require the entire output of a large hydroelectric or nuclear power plant, much like large aluminum refineries. Otherwise, you need to move a lot of electricity or a lot of hydrogen to have good efficiency, and there is infrastructure for neither.
Converting natural gas into hydrogen is also energy intensive. One of the big advantages of natural gas is that your hydrogen source is also your energy source and there is vast infrastructure for moving natural gas around.
Building green hydrogen pipelines likely makes more sense than trying to backhaul electricity from diffuse sources. A single hydrogen pipeline can reify a lot of electricity production without the concomitant transmission and management infrastructure.
A ton of hydrogen seems to occupy a cube with a 23 meter side. Wonder if a bunch of those could be built to hold the excess gas for night time operation.
100GWh is not small, but it's not impossible. The largest solar farm in operation is 5GW, and that could get you theoretically halfway there operating 10 hours a day.
It feels like the challenges are a lot easier to solve than with fusion or nuclear.
It is doable in theory but would require the construction of large-scale supporting infrastructure that currently doesn't exist. I am not optimistic about our ability to undertake infrastructure projects of this magnitude without it taking several decades and incurring obscene cost overruns that make even the most pessimistic economic models look optimistic.
This will definitely be harder than nuclear. The expansive land use requirements means the legal battles pertaining to that would almost certainly span many decades. At least with nuclear there is a limited number of people that need to sign-off to have a viable project -- reforming that process probably would be simpler.
The issue doesn't appear to be storage, but transmission. Hydrogen can leak through metal and lead to it becoming brittle, so you can't use conventional natural gas pipelines to transport it.
Exactly, these tanks can be giant balloons right next to the solar panels all feeding the in-situ ammonia plant.
That was my thinking, but I think what he is saying is that power plants won't generate enough electricity to make building an in-situ ammonia plant economical. You need to network power plants together to operate a centralized ammonia plant 24/7, and the network to move this energy (whether in the form of hydrogen or electricity) doesn't currently exist.
The land area of an all-in-one plant is maybe the biggest unknown for me with respect to just getting ownership and permits and such. But it's fun to imagine just picking a giant plot somewhere in the desert and plopping down 20 GW of solar panels, enough hydrogen storage to keep the less energy intensive steps operating throughout the night, and presumably batteries for whatever still requires electric power while panels are offline. Water and air in, sweet sweet ammonia out. :-)
Cloudy weather would be an interesting problem I guess.
I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be stored either as liquid or at least pressurized.
Steam has something like 200x the volume of the water it’s boiled from.
One thing you can do there is have an onsite energy storage mechanism (battery, gravity, etc) and run the process 24/7, keeping the energy storage topped up whenever the cost of electricity falls below whatever threshold.
Worst comes to worse you run on grid for a few hours.
Liquid ammonia takes less energy and volume than liquifying hydrogen.
This has nothing to do with hydrogen as an input to the ammonia production process. This hydrogen is not liquefied, even if it is temporarily stored (as a compressed gas, for example underground in solution mined salt caverns.)
Do you have concrete capex and opex numbers for ammonia-from-electricity plants? I understand we should expect those to go down over time because of the learning curve, but I don't even know their order of magnitude right now. It would also be nice to have an idea of how much efficiency the electrolyzers lose when operated intermittently instead of continuously (so, for example, you can't keep them at their optimal temperature). But, since we're presupposing that intermittent electrical energy will be very cheap, efficiency is less important than capex per output and non-energy opex.
Supporting your point about solar panels continuing to be cheap, "mainstream" panels went up to 0.11€ per peak watt last month: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... which was a new historic low price in September and down 21% from 0.14€/Wp in February of last year, itself a historic record low price at the beginning of last year.
The last time something like this happened to the energy supply, it was James Watt's steam-engine.
What are the relative costs of producing methanol or ammonia from a kilowatt hour of electricity? I've always assumed methanol would be cheaper over all because it's less deadly.
Wouldn't this imply that the ammonia consumption would have to be near the solar plant?
No? For similar reasons that fossil fuel consumers don't need to be near an oil well.
You'd have to ship the ammonia to the point of use, which is going to be significantly more hazardous
If ammonia cannot be shipped safely than the whole thing is moot. We're talking about "shipping" ammonia halfway around the world in the fuel tanks of these ammonia fueled ships. If storing it long term in fuel tanks can be done safely, than so can shipping it to port.
Shipping ammonia is commonly done already. For example, the first few search results for "ammonia tanker" has a story of Maersk ordering up to ten new tankers with 93000 cubic metre capacity each.
This also means ammonia may end up getting produced at the globally best places, the places where the solar resource is extremely good, like Chile, Namibia, parts of the middle East, then shipping elsewhere.
Sunny places with good ports and cheap land.
This is illogical - we ship a live nuclear reactor around the world in a nuclear carrier or icebreaker. But you cannot take it out and put it on a truck
That has more to do with the design of the vessel than anything.
You “ship” electricity near a port via the electric grid, and then make ammonia near or in the port. Economies of scale might favor having a few ammonia factories and then shipping it around by boat.
Ammonia makes zero sense as a general use fuel, but ships need MW of power over several days and aren’t in populated areas.
Assuming, it’s actually viable which isn’t guaranteed.
OK, that sounds like a good plan. But that's the opposite of what was proposed further up this thread.
It depends on whether you prefer to transfer electricity or ammonia. You get to pick whatever is easier, which caps the difficulty at not high. The suggestion of shipping ammonia was for the sake of convenience, not a burden. It's optional.
the actual post I replied to originally said
"build the ammonia producing plant close to your solar/wind parks"
You can't pick that and then decide not to transfer the ammonia and decide not to transfer the electricity. Unless your solar plan is at the loading dock or something.
The suggestion of shipping ammonia was for the sake of convenience, not a burden. It's optional.
Yes you have to transfer electricity in that case. We already know transferring electricity is easy.
Don't get hung up on "picking" one as if the downsides get locked in at the pre-design phase. If it's difficult to transfer ammonia then nevermind go back to the existing easy option of wires.
In other words, if that specific detail doesn't work out, it is not an argument against ammonia. It was just a potential bonus, not core to the idea. And it doesn't fundamentally change things. It's not the "opposite" plan.
Someone makes a statement. I point out that statement has implications. Someone then suggests an idea that is counter to the original statement. I point out that is inconsistent. Your response is "Don't get hung up on".
Your argument at this point has just devolved into some variant of "don't confuse me with the facts"
You said the plan was the opposite, but it was only a tiny optional detail that's opposite.
The phrasing in that comment rejected the original plan as a whole, and that's not right.
Also the comment you called a "good plan" was still talking about shipping ammonia as a maybe! So even in that detail it's not the opposite of the original comment.
I think your first comment was fine, but it's not your first comment that I replied to.
I wouldn’t get that hung up on the specifics when we are using terms like ‘near’ which is why I said boats for economies of scale.
I was thinking of navigable waterways which are common near major wind farms and some solar, not just major ports which rarely have a lot of space available. The UK is already facing issues with moving offshore wind around the country, an Ammonia plant could theoretically make a lot of sense.
It only needs to be easier to ship than hydrogen.
We're already doing this with methanol in Sweeen though. So what's the point?
Note that biofuels aren't especially environmentally friendly, even just considering carbon emissions. See e.g. [1], which makes the most optimistic possible assumption by ignoring land use changes and still concludes "the reductions for most feedstocks are insufficient to meet the GHG savings required by the EU Renewable Energy Directive" (second generation biofuels may do better, but that isn't clear). Also ignoring land use changes is a very bad asssumption; if your plan is to run global shipping (or other industries) on biofuels it seems highly implausible that it's not going to end up with more land overall used for growing crops. If that's land that could otherwise be sequestering carbon (e.g. drained peat bogs, which have the advantage of being highly fertile), then it's clearly going to be a significant contribution to carbon emissions (not to mention the ecological impacts of converting yet more land to agriculture).
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.035...
> Unlike solar cells or battery cells, I don't really see much chance for 'learning rates' and technology improvement to drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia. Falling electrolyser costs are nice, but they're only a portion of the process plant CAPEX, and the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway. (...) So for green ammonia to get adopted, a strong 'carbon price' needs to be in place, and I think that same strong carbon price would make biodiesel competitive.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here? If learning rates and technology improvement drastically drive down the cost of solar cells, as you say they might, and the cost of electricity dominates the cost of green ammonia, as you say it does, doesn't that mean that the learning rates and technology improvement in solar cells will drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia? Wouldn't that make ammonia much cheaper than biodiesel, keeping biodiesel from being competitive?
(I'm not sure ammonia is a competitive fuel for other reasons, such as the corrosion and safety issues discussed in the article, but it seems clear to me that if it's going to be uncompetitively expensive, it would have to be because one of the premises above is wrong, for example because the cost of green ammonia is dominated by capex or because solar cells stop dropping in cost. I don't see how you can sustain those premises and deny the conclusion.)
>Unlike solar cells or battery cells, I don't really see much chance for 'learning rates' and technology improvement to drastically drive down the cost of green ammonia. Falling electrolyser costs are nice, but they're only a portion of the process plant CAPEX, and the cost of the green electricity dominates the economics over the process plant CAPEX anyway. You could get electrolysers for free and still be unable to make cheap green ammonia. So for green ammonia to get adopted, a strong 'carbon price' needs to be in place, and I think that same strong carbon price would make biodiesel competitive.
There is a ton of research going into improving the efficiency of the H2 > NH3 conversion, and there are at least two startups (Tsubame in Japan and a new one I don't remember). There's no rule that says you can't beat Haber.
Compared to methanol, ammonia is currently more expensive but vastly more scalable in the long run; once you reach the biofuel "ceiling" (roughly corresponding to the availability of farming and forestry byproducts) you're stuck making it via carbon capture, which has its own efficiency problems.
By "efficiency" do you mean energy consumption or hydrogen consumption?
Energy consumption. I am pretty sure that the hydrogen utilization in most ammonia production is very high.
In theory the energy required to produce ammonia is negative (Hf < 0) but at standard pressure its formation is thermodynamically unfavorable (Gf = Hf + TdeltaS > 0). But the bigger issue is the very high activation energy barrier for ammonia synthesis, which results in a lot of energy being used to make ammonia at very high pressure and temperature.
Right now there are two competing approaches to reducing the cost of ammonia production. Tsubame is using a new ruthenium-based catalyst that lowers the reaction temperature (and therefore, also the pressure). The other method is by electrocatalysis. I don't know for sure that this is what NitroVolt is doing but their name certainly suggests it.
Thank you!
Presumably if you had some way of rapidly removing the ammonia produced from the reaction, like maybe a high-temperature highly polar solvent that reacted reversibly with the ammonia, but didn't dissolve much hydrogen or nitrogen, you could get by with a lower equilibrium amount of ammonia and thus much lower pressure. Anhydrous phosphoric acid seems like a potential candidate? But that's obvious enough that people probably tried it a century ago.
Short distance electric shipping seems the most feasible. Scotland is making steps in this direction. https://www.offshore-energy.biz/scotland-to-buy-seven-electr...
Long distance .. this is just a problem. As you say it won't be solved unless there's carbon pricing and ultimately restrictions on fossil fuels in general, forcing a replacement with more expensive synthetic and bio-fuels.
I think long distance might be solvable too with a little out of the box thinking. Imagine ships could swap out batteries every few hundred miles. Think simple container batteries and some off shore wind park with facilities for charging container batteries and a stash of charged batteries. Floating off shore wind is now possible as well.
Containers might be a bit tedious for this. So, why not use autonomous tug boats and barges. The tug boats simply pull the load between charging stations. When they are empty they head for a charger and a full one takes over. This could even work with existing ships, which are commonly maneuvered around harbors using tug boats already.
Probably more than a few engineering challenges lurking here but it gets us out of the mindset that ships must be able to go for thousands of nautical miles without stopping for charging. I could see that working for a lot of coastal shipping routes.
Container batteries already seem to be a thing: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/worlds-first-700-teu-pure-ba...
.. but again for relatively short distances. You do not want to have relatively unskilled personnel attempting swaps at sea, or in bad weather (which is also very dangerous for ships under tow).
The China-EU distance is about 24,000km. I don't think more than one or two charging/swap stops are feasible on that route, so you're going to need something with 10,000km range at the very least.
China-EU can follow the coast. It isn't unreasonable to just stop at a port every night. You can put the crew up in a hotel thus saving needing beds for everyone, and they can enjoy whatever meals they want. This will make the trip take 3x longer though, which is a very significant disadvantage, but if electric energy is enough cheaper they will go for it. Most things going via sea are not time sensitive, but the crew still needs to be paid along with the ship mortgage. China-US could do the same, but the trip is about 10x longer (I didn't bother to look this up) - even with free electric I'm not sure if it is worth it.
There are islands like Hawaii where the above is not possible though so we still need something else.
> It isn't unreasonable to just stop at a port every night
You’re describing coaling stations [1]. They worked in the era of empires (one government controls the coaling network) and no other options. They’re uncompetitive today.
Any energy system requiring them will not be competitive against direct-sail systems. You’re paying for the crew and ship’s deterioration with every delay.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/coaling-station
> It isn't unreasonable to just stop at a port every night
Is it? How many more deep water ports would be needed if every ship had to stop every night? What about if you're passing hostile or undeveloped countries? What about when you need to cross the Pacific or Atlantic? Cargo ships move at maybe 15mph - there's definitely huge parts of the world that don't have a well equipped deep water port every 360 miles. Even major western countries only have a handful of major ports.
I didn't say it was easy. Undeveloped countries would mostly welcome a chance for someone else to develop energy and port infrastructure. Hostile is a different issue, but you can bypass them as needed. (ships already pass by hostile countries)
> So for green ammonia to get adopted, a strong 'carbon price' needs to be in place, and I think that same strong carbon price would make biodiesel competitive.
And next to ammonia, biodiesel is almost drinkable.
And there's the entire CO versus NO or NO2.
But well, the silver lining is that the combustion products literally burning your lungs means that you won't unknowingly lock yourself in a room with a running engine.
Also a very unlikely form of suicide - people generally opt for less painful ways to die.
Cost is indeed the core issue. It's an issue with most synthetic fuels and it's not an issue that is likely to go away. As long as that means you have to pay a steep premium to be green, it's not going to be popular. International agreement on carbon taxes is unlikely. And most ships operate in international waters under the flags of countries with favorable taxes and rules (e.g. Panama, Greece, etc.).
With shipping, shooting for perfect is really expensive. But we're starting with a status quo that is really bad that can be improved upon.
For example, most ships are made out of steel. Steel is relatively heavy. There's a ship yard in Tasmania working on a battery electric 300meter long ferry made out of aluminum. They've built dozens of aluminum ships already. Aluminum is much lighter than steel and that cuts the amount of energy needed to move it around by about half. That's nice because batteries are expensive and don't provide a lot of range. But making ferries out of aluminum is of course something that could work for any kind of ship.
Fuel is really expensive. 50% fuel savings are very attractive to ship operators. Most ships burn bunker fuel. That's properly nasty stuff. So using only half of that would be an improvement. It's toxic, causes lots of pollution and is nasty if it gets in the water. Some cruise ships run on LNG these days. Much cleaner but it takes up space. Those ships are mostly still made out of steel. If you make them out of aluminum, they'd be a lot lighter probably and use less fuel. So smaller LNG tanks, less CO2 emitted, and more space for the passengers. Win win.
There are also some interesting things happening with composites and carbon fiber. That stuff is even lighter and there are some companies focusing on marine applications as well. So, we could cut weight and fuel usage of ships by using modern/different materials.
There are some experiments happening with using sails on ships to cut fuel usage further. If you add all this up, we could be cutting fuel usage significantly (40-70%) and make the emissions problem a lot smaller. And unlike synthetic fuels, this also translates into financial savings. So that means it's more likely to happen.
And if we eventually put batteries in these ships, they'll go a bit further as well.
It's not perfect. But probably a lot better.
> Aluminum is much lighter than steel and that cuts the amount of energy needed to move it around by about half.
Hmm. I'm suspicious about this - might be true for cars, definitely true for planes, but ships sit at neutral buoyancy, most of the mass is cargo, and the main component of energy expenditure is actually drag. So there's significant benefits to low drag hull designs or "slow steaming", but the actual ship material isn't terribly high up on the priority list. And aluminium is way more expensive.
I think aluminum is mostly more expensive than steel because energy is expensive, but solar energy makes energy cheap.
If a ship's mass were mostly ship rather than mostly cargo, making it out of a heavier material would increase its water displacement, which would increase its drag. I don't know if that's a proportional effect; I think it's actually sublinear. But, since most of the mass is cargo, it won't make much of a difference.
If most of the mass weren't cargo, you could ship things more cheaply by sealing the cargo in giant plastic bags and towing it across the ocean behind a tugboat.
Both steel and aluminum production depend mostly on the cost of energy, so any improvements that would make aluminum cheaper would also make steel cheaper. Steel also has the benefit of being ferromagnetic so it’s a lot cheaper to pull scrap steel out of the garbage stream and recycle it, but that depends on having lots of scrap steel to begin with.
There’s really not a lot of room to make aluminum as cheap as steel, as all economies of scale have by now been mostly realized. The cost of energy is so dominant that it makes sense to run smelting plants idle most of the time with the crucible heated constantly just to take advantage of negative power prices (although there are other factors at play like subsidies and national security concerns).
Barring some sort of seismic scientific breakthrough in metallurgy, the current ratio of 2-3x the cost of steel is here to stay. There’s maybe a little room if we reach “peak aluminum” as the fraction of recycled scrap approaches 100%, but I don’t think that would make that much of a difference because we’re likely to hit “peak steel” before then (and again, its just easier to recycle from a logistics standpoint).
Hmm, really? I didn't realize that. Thank you!
aluminum has terrible metal fatigue issues. Ships that have been perfectly fine for years will suddenly just fall into pieces. Trucks where weight matter do often use aluminum trailers, but they keep careful track so they are scrapped before they fall apart. This fall about is not something an inspection will catch (not 100% true, ultrasound and other inspection methods will catch some of this, but for discussion it is close enough to say you just scrap aluminum before it fails instead of inspecting)
That isn't to say aluminum can't be used for ships. Only that it is tricky.
There are different alloys of aluminum with different properties. Just like steel. And of course it's been used in the aviation industry for a long time as well. Car manufacturers are using aluminum castings in cars these days. And there are engine blocks made out of aluminum as well.
Anyway, this is the ship yard I mentioned. They have a few decades experience making ships out of aluminum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incat
As I understand it, the gotcha with aluminum is: there is no such thing as non-fatiguing stress — whereas, say, steels, have a range of elasticity where it can operate and not lose strength (or get cold-work hardened).
With aluminum, any flexion — no matter how little — marginally reduces the strength of the material. Ergo, even under ideal conditions it's saddled with a limited service life.
You just design it so the stress in the material gives a very long fatigue life (as in, how many zeros do you want?). It doesn't have a defined "fatigue limit", but it may as well have.
I don't understand how an aluminum structure can withstand the stresses in bulk-oriented ships without fatiguing to destruction in the first rough weather.
You make it thick enough so the material isn't stressed. This does require rigorous engineering processes, but it's pretty common.
At this risk envelope I don’t see why nuclear / battery hybrids are not a serious contender. We can for example have them work on purely electric mode when close to ports and then enable the reactor in the open sea.
We do something similar with bunker fuel of different grades. They are forced to use the good stuff near the ports and once in the open sea they start burning the muddy Godzilla.
That linkedin post seems AI generated, got a better source?
> Ammonia is toxic, explosive, and corrosive
Someone I knew died from inhaling ammonia vapors after the system wasn’t purged properly and they opened a valve. Having a whole ship fueled by it seems like insanity when there is fuel that does to that to a person.
Interesting fact: ammonia was (and still is) used as a refrigerant, but aboard ships, carbon dioxide, also known as carbonic acid at the time, became more common due to its relative safety. This was in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
It was a large refrigeration system that killed the person I had mentioned.
It's kind of odd, ammonia was used back in the day on older systems. Then it was deemed too dangerous like you mentioned. But now, due to environmental impact it's now considered less dangerous and is "coming back".
The nonsense will last until the first large accident in some experimental vehicle. Then it will go away again.
Hopefully, it won't happen on the middle of a populated area.
We have yet to find a refrigerant that is not either toxic, explosive, or destructive to the ozone layer / a potent greenhouse gas. My understanding is that new consumer systems use propane because its relatively safe and not toxic or causing dangerous emmissions.
> use propane
It's called R-290 [0], but yes this is the same as in "propane grill."
I'm a "consumer," but the technicians I talk to about replacing a residential HVAC have mentioned that consumer HVAC systems need new fire detection (maybe also suppresion?) systems on the A/C side just because of the new ingredient.
Again, not propane for the heating side, but for cooling. Crazy.
[0] https://www.superradiatorcoils.com/blog/r-290-pros-cons-comp...
I wonder why they don't just put the whole chilling unit outside and use a chilled water loop into the interior air handler.
You could do that, but you'd need to build a heavily insulated place to have the A-coil/evap head, as it stands right now the efficiency loss would be too much. Additionally, the current HVAC model also acts as a rudimentary de-humidification system for buildings which helps reduce the "felt" temperature and maintain humidity levels beyond just cooling.
"Any leak will kill you through a horrible and painful process" is not on the same level of problems as "destructive to the ozone layer / a potent greenhouse gas".
The problem with R290 systems is they generally do not get service ports. As service ports tend to leak. So they're fully sealed systems. This is great for small scale refrigeration applications but for any indoor air cooling or commercial refrigeration it's effectively unusable.
Supercritical CO2 is a great refrigerant. It's neither toxic, nor destructive to ozone, nor is it a particularly dangerous for GW.
CO2 was superseded by other refrigerants because it's less efficient (incidentally, ammonia is one of the most efficient), and the (very) heavy equipment required to utilise it due to the extremely high pressures is also costly.
CO2 is less common today, but has hardly been "superceded." I specialize in energy modeling for industrial refrigeration systems, and have studied several new industrial cold storage projects comparing CO2 to freon and ammonia. Their efficiency is on par with ammonia systems, within a few percentage points.
I'll agree that the equipment is heavy-duty, but disagree if you mean "massive." The energy density of CO2 is so high that suction lines can be 2"-4", 6"-8" is common for ammonia. Modern systems use many (a dozen+) small recip compressors instead of larger HP screw compressors. When all is said and done, CO2 systems are small enough that they are frequently contained to a single rack and placed on the roof of a building, whereas a comparable ammonia system requires its own engine room and a significantly larger footprint.
The biggest opportunity for CO2 to outperform ammonia is in heat recovery and reuse. I had a customer who was exploring selling his (waste) heat as a utility to a neighboring food processor.
I believe, CO2 is actually more thermodynamically efficient if used in supercritical freezers? It's just much more difficult to work with, as you need all the tubing to withstand about 90 atmospheres of pressure.
I'm sorry for your loss. Ammonia is the the thing that our body happily spends its precious water in more-than-enough amounts just to make sure it's gotten rid of. The only mammal that optimized that process is camels if I'm not misremembering. I also found it a bit crazy to fill a ship with it.
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If widely adopted, I fear that in time there will be sufficiently many major incidents that we'll start talking about deammonization as we currently talk about decarbonization.
The drivers would be wildly different. Carbon and GHG nowadays has this abstract, difficult to nail down effects. Ammonia leaks would have immediate and directly related negative effects.
> Ammonia is toxic, explosive, and corrosive
It also smells like rotten fish.
Although the chemical responsible for rotten fish, Trimethylamine, is a derivative of ammonia, I never made the link between the two. Ammonia smells like ammonia to me, no matter the concentration level.
I thought it smells like piss. Rotten eggs - hydrogen sulphide.
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Petrol is also insanely dangerous, yet we seem to manage.
Petro is practically safe compared to ammonia. Petro only explodes in specific air-fuel situations. The vapors are harmful, but not deadly in small quantities like ammonia is. Calling petro "insanely dangerous" is wrong. Petro is the most dangerous substance normal people handle in quantity, but we allow normal people to handle it in quantity because it while it isn't safe it isn't all that dangerous.
Your standard household ammonia CONCENTRATE people sometimes use for cleaning is 99% water - you dilute it significantly for use. Even used correctly it is nasty stuff.
Petro (sic) only explodes in specific air-fuel situations
That seems to be true for ammonia as well, at least according to the Wikipedia page's [1] section on Combustion:
Ammonia does not burn readily or sustain combustion, except under narrow fuel-to-air mixtures of 15–28% ammonia by volume in air.
That doesn't sound too horrible, it feels like gasoline/petrol is easier to combust (although I know it's the fumes that are actually flammable).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#Combustion
Maybe I wasn't clear. Ammonia is burning is not the worry. Ammonia in small quantities will kill you directly. no fire needed, it will kill you.
To be clear, "small quantities" are in units of parts per million. 5ppm (0.0005%) and the room smells of ammonia, 25ppm means you should be wearing a respirator, 500 ppm (0.05%) can be lethal.
Warning that 15% air-ammonia mixtures can burn is like warning that 100 kg of TNT could give you a concussion if it fell on your head. It's just not the concern at all.
This risk factor sounds less like a normal chemical substance and more on the level of uranium
It’s comparable to carbon monoxide, except you can’t smell that one.
Petrol (gasoline to Americans) is dangerous largely for is vapours. It's one of the lightest-possible liquid fuels with about 6 carbon atoms per molecule (C6).[1] Most ships don't burn petrol itself,[2] but rather heavier fractions of petroleum, generally either diesel (~C16) or bunker fuel (~30 or longer), which don't vapourise readily. It's possible to extinguish a lit match in diesel fuel (the vapours above petrol would ignite and/or explode), and bunker fuel generally won't even flow until it's been heated above the boiling point of water (spent steam from steamships is used to heat the incoming fuel both so that it will flow and to vapourise it before injection into boilers or diesel cylinders).
The comparatively small quantities of petrol carried in automobiles is not a grave hazard, though fuel tanks are protected against damage or ignition, and fires do happen. Larger vehicles, on land, sea, and air, often burn the comparatively safer kerosene (aviation) or diesel (heavy machinery).
________________________________
Notes:
1. "Distillate" and "NGL" (natural gas liquids) are used in some instances, and can boil well below 100°C. Butane boils at -0.5°C / 31.5°F.
2. As I'd just mentioned in an earlier comment. I thought a well-known cruise ship or ocean-liner had been converted to petrol, but can't find a reference. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344605>
Like the sibling comment mentioned it is nothing compared to ammonia. Yeah if you dump it somewhere in the ocean it might decompose with less damage to the environment but I was talking about immediate damage to humans.
Ships don't run on petrol, they run on various grades of bunker oil which is basically just really thin lubricating oil.
You're thinking of something like regular fuel oil, like diesel or kerosene. Heavy fuel oil/bunker is very viscous, has to be heated to be pumped efficiently.
>You're thinking of something like regular fuel oil, like diesel or kerosene. Heavy fuel oil/bunker is very viscous, has to be heated to be pumped efficiently.
I assure you I am not.
I specifically compared it to lubricants to avoid a bunch of people mentally anchoring the discussion around diesel. Bunker C (the common one, also the most thick one) is basically on the automotive oil spectrum when it comes to viscosity.
Go to 0:00 for room temp and 9:00 for operating temp (which is low enough for a plastic soda bottle and a bare hand to be appropriate). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZZ591x0Ajs. Sure looks like 5w20 to me. Def thinner than gear oils and any comparison to 000 grease or roofing tar on a hot day is laughable. Bunker fuel is solidly on the oil spectrum.
> very viscous > I assure you I’m not
> bunker fuel is solidity
You seems to be knowledgeable in that domain and has something interesting to share but I don’t understand your point. What is the scale 0.00-9.00 ? What is the preside point you don’t agree with GP? Please EMLI5.
My point is that it's misleading to people who don't have reason to deal in liquid fuels to characterize bunker oil as thick or viscous when it's only thick relative to fuels (which are generally pretty thin, they mostly pour like water) despite not being particularly viscous absolutely.
It's on the same order as most petroleum oils that people deal with and thinner than pretty much every petroleum product that is generally characterized as thick. Thinner grades of motor oil and most hydraulic oil is a bit thinner but thicker grades of motor oil, gear oils, all sorts of greases and tars are all more viscous. Bunker oil doesn't "need" to be heated to be pumped any more than motor oil does though heating it and the accompanying thinning does a lot to help with combustion which is why they do it (and then the rest of the systems that handle it get designed to take advantage of this) and invoking the fact that this is done kind of implies a comparison with the other petroleum products that get heated before being used and in most people's experience this is going to be products used to patch roofs and roads which is unhelpful because those don't even flow except at the highest extreme of naturally occurring temperatures. The only context in which bunker oil is particularly thick is if you're a fuel supplier and spend all day dealing in much less viscous stuff.
I guess it's just pedantry at the end of the day.
And yes, the numbers were timestamp references.
I've seen bunker fuel in a ship, and its consistency was best described as "tar-like". Mind, n=1 and uses may vary, but bunker fuel can be exceedingly thick. All the more so on high-latitude routes with fuel tanks near the outer hull and cooled by ambient water temperatures near freezing.
Decidedly thicker than automotive oil, and probably thicker than axle grease or vaseline / petroleum jelly.
The ship in which that was used (triple-expansion steam engine, late 1800s design, built and used during WWII) directed spent steam around the incoming fuel flow directly prior to boiler injection, and that steam then wrapped around the fuel line and part of the fuel tank itself to heat the oil to the point it would flow.
Side note: Venezuelan oil is very thick and viscous, and requires mixing with lighter fractions of petroleum to be pumped out of wells. Venezuela typically imports what would otherwise be waste light fractions of petroleum, generally from the US or Nigeria (heavily dependent on political winds) in order to do this. A significant fraction of US petroleum exports go to this or similar uses. (I suspect Canadian tar sands see similar treatment though I don't have a source on this.)
The differences in opinion here may be because we're comparing #6 in a cold ambient environment to #5/#6 in a warm ambient environment. Still, #6 is no grease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Maritime_fuel_classif...
> What is the scale 0.00-9.00 ?
Referring to the timestamps in the linked video (i.e. from the start of the video to 9 minutes).
My god you are thick.
The point was that risks can be managed.
There are only around 30 people on such a ship - we can put that many through extensive training to make sure they don't make mistakes.
However no ship fueled without such trained crew should get anywhere near one that is. Only special shipyards should allow such a ship to dock - even the route from the open ocean needs to be controlled - no beaches "near" those ships. I'm not sure what a right margin of safety is, but don't allow such ship into your national waters without first knowing that.
> However no ship fueled without such trained crew should get anywhere near one that is. Only special shipyards should allow such a ship to dock - even the route from the open ocean needs to be controlled - no beaches "near" those ships. I'm not sure what a right margin of safety is, but don't allow such ship into your national waters without first knowing that.
I could see that. At least, it sounds good in principle. But with ships sailing under flags of countries with lax safety requirements it may not be practical.
I thought the cargo ship that crashed into the Baltimore bridge had a known failing engine. I get the impression that a lot of shipping equipment and regulations are thread bare.
> we can put that many through extensive training to make sure they don't make mistakes.
I hope you are being sarcastic.
You get skill issued, you get auschwitzed
Ammonia tankers seem a good test bed for this tech as they already carry Ammonia and dock in places that handle it.
Other fuel cell based technologies seem to be working on scaling up, they can supplement electrical generation for crew before working with the existing generators with the aim to eventually replace them.
Like trains, ships get technical benefits from being hybrid. This makes it relatively easy then to be made more hybrid, plug into shore power when available, add some batteries and, solar panels etc.
There's no one easy fix but lots of little ones. The most interesting one I saw discussed is contracts that share the blame when delays happen. Previously ships would race to their destination and then wait around because if they missed a connection they would be held responsible. Now they can all go at slower, more efficient just-in-time speeds and the costs of the occasional missed deadline are amortized. With fuel savings they all come out ahead so it's a win-win.
>“Twenty or thirty years ago, the shipping industry made a major shift to natural gas, believing it was the fuel of the future. Now, we know it wasn’t the right step,” says Prousalidis.
This sentence confuses me. The shipping industry runs on natural gas? If so, why is there regret? My impression is that most systems using natural gas right now are in a good position.
What am I missing here?
Liquefied Natural Gas was expected to be a lower-emission alternative fuel compared to bunker fuel.
The proportion of LNG fuelled cargo tankers out there right now is about 2% but for new orders, about 30% of them are LNG fuelled so that small percentage will grow rapidly.
However, for United States LNG in particular, the LNG production chain actually has very high emissions of methane. The industry has been fighting to keep that as unclear and unquantified as absolutely possible, and there's a good reason for that - when you take into account the methane emissions along the whole value chain from drilling through liquefaction, LNG's climate impact (in terms of global warming) is no better than coal. I'm sure it's beneficial compared to bunker fuel, but the climate benefit is much much slimmer than first believed.
NASA has been showing methane leaks from satellites built for purpose.[0] I'll give you three guesses as to where the location of the leaks are located, but you'll only need one.
Better read the data now before it gets stricken from the record.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/jpl/methane-supe...
> I'll give you three guesses as to where the location of the leaks are located, but you'll only need one.
Were we supposed to guess New Mexico, Turkmenistan, and Iran, or am I missing something?
Firstly, drilling / wellhead operations.
2nd 'graph of the linked article:
In the data EMIT has collected since being installed on the International Space Station in July, the science team has identified more than 50 “super-emitters” in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States. Super-emitters are facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure, typically in the fossil-fuel, waste, or agriculture sectors, that emit methane at high rates.
<https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/jpl/methane-supe...>
Except most emissions are not leaks. A leak implies an unintended or unwanted behaviour. But most emissions are from indented behaviour of the system. The equipment is. designed to vent to atmosphere as part of normal operation, and it’s not worth it for them to burn it until they have to pay for this pollution.
I see you and I have a difference of what we consider a leak. You seem to only consider it a leak in the equipment being used. I consider it when humans punch a hole in the ground and the gas is released by that human activity.
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I'm not being obtuse at all. That methane would not be leaking in these locations if humans did not attempt to extract it. Regardless if the leaks from faulty plumbing or just not making the hole the right way so the methane in the air is a direct result of that human activity, it is still methane leaking into the air
No ordinary person would interpret your original comment this way. _aavaa_ was correct: "A leak implies an unintended or unwanted behaviour."
If producers are intentionally venting off the methane, it isn't leaking, it's being released.
> A leak is a way (usually an opening) for fluid to escape a container or fluid-containing system, such as a tank or a ship's hull, through which the contents of the container can escape or outside matter can enter the container. Leaks are usually unintended and therefore undesired.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leak
> However, for United States LNG in particular, the LNG production chain actually has very high emissions of methane.
I thought LNG was methane. What am I missing here?
No you've got the gist of it: the point is that numbers for CO2 emissions of LNG assume a leak-free supply chain.
That's not possible in practice: LNG leaks at almost every single step, and monitoring of it has been inconsistent and poorly implemented. Add in the significantly higher greenhouse effect of methane in the atmosphere, and you lose essentially all the potential benefits (not to mention the ultimate issue of continuing to add sequestered CO2 back into the atmosphere - it's still a fossil fuel).
Methane leaks. Unburnt methane has a global warming potential 28 times higher than CO2. (This is why landfills will burn methane buildup, even if they aren't using it to generate electricity or capturing it to resell.)
I’d assume they’re talking about methane leaks throughout the supply chain
> LNG's climate impact (in terms of global warming) is no better than coal. I'm sure it's beneficial compared to bunker fuel,
Why are you sure of that?
Oils release an amount of CO2 that's midway between natural gas and coal. So unless bunker fuel is causing some other big release of greenhouse gasses, if natural gas is near coal then it's worse than bunker fuel.
On top of that, doesn't the sulfur pollution from bunker fuel have a cooling effect?
Hmm maybe I shouldn't be so sure of myself then. The comparison between LNG and coal that I was referencing was the comparison between coal and LNG's lifecycle emissions on the basis of like-for-like electricity generation (so it was slightly apples&oranges for me to say that).
I'd assumed that a main engine's efficiency with bunker fuel was awful and with LNG was much better, meaning LNG had emissions as a shipping fuel.
But I think taking into account the methane emissions of upstream production (which varies incredibly wildly depending on the production environment) LNG from most of the world (particularly the USA) will be a worse shipping fuel on a global warming basis than bunker fuel.
Thanks for picking that up.
The cooling effect of sulphur dioxide emissions (which make sulphates in the atmosphere) is a whole Pandora's box that I'm unqualified to open but yes, there's a significant cooling effect from the SO2 emissions of bunker fuel and the 2020 rules change on VLSFO dramatically slashed the shipping industry's SO2 emissions (noting that SO2 emissions have also been falling across the board, and shipping is only one component of that). https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/sulfur-dioxide-emis...
Almost all shipping by weight is done by burning bunker. By ship quantity, most ships probably actually just burn some variant of diesel. Some do run off natural gas.
If you read through industry journals, you can find some point in the late 80s where the industry journals were all reporting about how all ships would need to go back to burning coal soon. I'm pretty sure this was just a fantasy that shipbuilders paid the journals to push as it would mean the opportunity to sell lots of new ships.
I doubt the statement you quoted is grounded in any reality.
I'd thought that several notable ships had been refitted to burn petrol, though I can't find the references I'd had in mind.
(I'd think that petrol itself would be a less desirable fuel for some of the same reasons as ammonia: it's heavier-than air, sinks, and burns rapidly or explodes when vapours combine with air.)
The shipping industry only ever dipped slightly into natural gas. There are some CNG/LNG ferries around, but all the long haul stuff in international waters (which is basically lawless) uses bunker fuel.
Natural gas, aka methane, has a big impact on climate change. Don't listen what the gas industry is trying to get everyone to believe, natural gas is as natural as petroil.
Batteries are most likely the most feasible option for many applications soon.
> What am I missing here?
Climate change. Maybe you've heard of it?
(And it turns out things with LNG ships are much worse than previously believed. They not only emit CO2 - a bit less than traditional bunker fuel, but not much - they also emit methane, and in no small quantities. The LNG industry likes to pretend that these emissions are small and neglegible, but whenever someone goes out and actually measures them, they are substantial.)
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What is the environmental impact of this ship sinking, leaking, or even dumping the ammonia payload?
According to a quick search, Viking Energy apparently will have a 220 cubic meter tank, which would equate to 220000 liters of ammonia. In aquaculture apparently ammonia reaches an almost universally high damage/lethal combination for fish (mammals can handle significant amounts thanks to a specific enzyme to handle build up the blood, fish have to just excrete it fast enough) and other non-mammals at around 2mg/L. Assuming all 220000 L of ammonia went 100% into the water and dissolved completely times 0.769 kg/m^3 density at STP, it'd be at the lethal level when dissolved in less than 84590000 liters of water, which equates to a cube approximately 44 meters per side or a sphere with a radius of 27 meters. Even with a 10x margin (since apparently some organisms can suffer damage even if not death from 0.2mg/L) that's nothing for an ocean going ship in general.
So at least at first glance to me that looks very favorable vs the bunker fuel ships normally use, which is also horribly toxic but also floats and is much harder for creatures to get rid of.
> times 0.769 kg/m^3 density at STP
The ship's tank is not at STP. The ammonia inside it is pressurized into a liquid.
Indeed it's more like 600 kg/m3, so, about 1000 times more ammonia. So, the cube would be about 10 times bigger (side of 400m).
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/ammonia-liquid-thermal-pr...
Yep. You just immediately killed all life in a volume larger than the ship, and since diffusion on volumes that large take time, created a plume of toxic water that will wander for many minutes before dissolving well enough.
Not a big deal on the ocean. And yeah, better than an oil spill.
It dissolves in water quickly. Then big algae bloom, lots of dead fish. Mammals handle it OK.
Ammonia can directly act as a nitrogen fertilizer, and plants love that. Mammals quickly convert it in their livers, but aquatic animals can't handle having it in their bloodstream and die quickly from it.
High concentrations can overwhelm the liver, and then its toxic even for humans. Pure, ammonia vapor is incredibly toxic and even tiny concentrations are bad for the mucosa.
What could possibly go wrong?
pbmonster says "Pure, ammonia vapor is incredibly toxic and even tiny concentrations are bad for the mucosa."
As in "dissolves the mucosa"!
The 1976 ammonia truck disaster:
In 1976 a truck of ammonia gas ruptured on a freeway interchange in Houston. The scene was akin to early World War I gas warfare. The Houston Post newspaper office building was about a half mile from the spill. The ammonia cloud rolled over and past the building in minutes but quick-witted building engineers shut down the air circulation system so no one inside was hurt. The greenery around the building and area was scorched brown by the passing heavier-than-air ammonia cloud:
"How A Deadly Cloud In Houston Decades Ago Led To ‘Shelter-In-Place’ (good pic of the initial truck explosion):"
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2016/04/25/...
Film footage of the scene and victims - moderately gory:
"The worst accident in Houston history: The 1976 ammonia truck disaster":
https://abc13.com/ammonia-truck-disaster-houston/1332062/
I believe in much of the ocean nitrogen is not the limiting nutrient for plant growth, because while it can be fixed from dissolved molecular nitrogen, there's no direct major source of things like phosphorus or iron.
Things would be different near coasts where sediment is washing in.
You put people on a ship across the ocean and they're going to dump their waste tanks into it. They're going to spill and leak industrial chemicals into it. There's a certain amount of loss that occurs during shipping and additional packaging that goes into securing it.
You're better off building things closer to where they are needed rather than relying on shipping for cheap consumer goods. Bunker fuel oil, LNG, ammonia, it's all putting the cart before the horse.
Anything to avoid banning bunker fuel, and forcing ship owners to spend more for diesel which is cleaner.
> partnership restarted the project with a specially made gas turbine designed to run on ammonia.
And that gas turbine can also run on many other fuels - LPG, LNG, gasoline, diesel, etc.
My guess is this ship will do 1 run on ammonia for the press release, and then will run on LPG for the rest of its life for economic reasons. The original fuel cell design is far more picky about fuel sources and therefore wouldn't have had that possibility.
Alternative fuel? yes.
Greenhouse gas solution? no.
Ammonia will (and does) leak into the environment where it becomes a part of the natural nitrogen cycle. The end result of the natural nitrogen cycle is N2O (aka laughing gas) which is a greenhouse gas 250-350x more powerful than CO2.
Running the world on ammonia, even if logistically possible, will likely accelerate climate change, not slow it.
Reading about ammonia as a ship fuel gives me strong Ignition! vibes. For those not familiar, Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark goes into detail about all the different things aerospace engineers have tried, including some incredibly dangerous combinations. The conclusion for many of the tests is usually along this lines of "this makes a very powerful, lightweight rocket, but the tendency towards disastrous results makes it impractical".
Interesting. This one says it's a gas turbine, but other articles I've seen say there's also two stroke engines for shipping. I was wondering how this would be petroleum free as a 2 stroke. It makes sense that the turbine could be with sealed bearings.
I never understood why shipping decided to deal with ammonia nonsense. It's dead-on-arrival, due to the complexity and danger of it.
We already have a workable solution: liquid methane. It can be synthesized from captured CO2 about as cheaply as ammonia, and we can just use the fossil methane as a bridge for now. More importantly, there are whole fleets of methane-powered ships now.
Methane has a higher global warming potential, but only if it leaks. And this can be minimized, especially once fossil fuel mining is phased out.
It doesn't seem like a great idea to use what is essentially fertilizer as a fuel. Surely this new demand will drive up the price of fertilizer.
The idea is to make ammonia from electricity. If this scales up, it could lead to electric fertilizer, and greatly reduce agricultural carbon emissions.
Maybe. But longer term, new uses for ammonia might well lead to more efficient and widespread production.
Ammonia is not some obscure chemical until now neglected by science and industry, the problem of producing ammonia has already received the attention of several generations of the greatest minds humanity has. Adding yet more commercial demand for what is already very much in demand isn't going to help in any meaningful way. It's just going to drive up the price of fertilizer, and therefore the price of food.
As for doing it with electricity; that will never be more cost effective than doing it with natural gas. If you want to reduce carbon emissions, turn your attention to other industries. Fucking with the global food supply is the last thing anybody should be doing.
> the problem of producing ammonia has already received the attention of several generations of the greatest minds humanity has.
Sure but they were working with the constraints of the times. Renewable electricity generation doesn’t have the same level of maturity and it’s already surpassing fossil options with tons of room to scale.
> that will never be more cost effective than doing it with natural gas.
We have an effectively infinite supply of electricity but a finite supply of natural gas. The trends are clear. Electricity is going to continue to get cheaper essentially forever and fossil fuels will continue to become more scarce and thus expensive until it's not economical to use them.
You just have to draw the timeline long enough and electricity becomes the cheaper option for ammonium production and renewable electricity becomes the cheapest electricity source.
> Fucking with the global food supply is the last thing anybody should be doing.
Ammonia prices don’t have to go up if demand goes up. Price increases are only one possible outcome of an increase in demand. The other option is an increase in supply. With sufficiently cheap electricity everything becomes affordable. When we deplete natural gas supplies ammonia will get more expensive.
Food will also cost a lot more when farmland gets too hot to be productive.
The last thing anyone should be doing is betting the food supply on scarce fossil fuel sources.
I wonder what environmentally-friendly propulsion system wins in the next decade for large ships: ammonia, hydrogen or nuclear reactors.
I suppose there's more, ethanol and methanol, synthetic natural gas.
It is a shame petroleum-based fuels are so damn convenient.
none of those three, but I expect a combination of methanol, biodiesel and (only for near-shore and inland shipping) battery electric.
Batteries up to mid range are competetive already: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10...
I propose submerged stainless steel cables pulling boats from underneath, powered by deep geothermal converters.
Synthetic hydrocarbon analogues.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344373>
Or wind
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanbird
We’ve come full circle.
Might have niche-applications, but a nuclear-powered container ship can do many more trips in the time it takes this to do 1 trip.
Isn't the energy return on investment for this extremely low and/or negative? Am I missing something here?
It's a way of storing energy. You use solar, nuclear, wind, etc. to make ammonia.
I get that but isn't it like 100x more efficient to be storing that energy to offset intermittency/base power or selling that ammonium as fertilizer to offset hydrocarbon-based haber bosch ferts?
There are more efficient ways, but batteries are heavy and still not as compact as liquid fuels. If you want to run ships on non-carbon-based energy making a liquid fuel is one way that can work today.
Why not sails? Wind. That stuff
They’d have to be huge and also need to get out of the way of overhead cranes. There’s some work being done in that direction but it’s never going to be a complete solution.
Meanwhile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Saad%C3%A9-class_conta... <- CMA-CGM LNG-powered
https://www.cma-cgm.com/news/5012/maiden-call-of-cma-cgm-iro...
Ammonia too complicated?
first ?
https://zero.fortescue.com/en/case-studies/green-pioneer
I dont think so.
Ammonia...this ship could be run on poop...
Ammonia is in peepee, not poopoo. Maybe you are thinking methane, which is present in farts.
I think it is in both but you need bacteria for the poop. but that's 2 sources of fuel instead of one!
Bad news, men. The captain says we're behind schedule so beans for supper again!
I misread, and really hoped, it was “first ammonia-fueled sheep hits a snag.” Boy that was gonna be a fascinating article!
Still read this one though probably, seems interesting.
Hopefully this ship of fools runs aground before it kills its whole crew with the first, inevitable, leak.
I read about some of the mitigation methods for an Ammonia fueled ship. If Ammonia is detected in the air, they start spraying water, like a sprinkler system. Ammonia has a high affinity to water.
Ammonia is also lighter than air. When it is first released it is typically cold, so it sticks around until it warms up. Eventually it will float up into the atmosphere.
One disadvantage is its lower energy density, you need to store twice as much of it as bunker oil.
One advantage that I can see for Ammonia is that the ingredients it is composed of are readily available from the environment. Also, the fuel may be upgraded by cracking it into hydrogen and nitrogen using waste heat from the engine. Hydrogen gives a bigger pop in the cylinder, Ammonia doesn't burn as easily.
One scenario I can think of is using nuclear power on a platform in the ocean, manufacturing the Ammonia, ships can come by and refuel there.
> readily available in the environment.
That’s a red herring. Getting hydrogen and nitrogen out of their naturally occurring forms (bonded to other things or to themselves) and turning it into ammonia is very energetically intensive.
> One scenario I can think of is using nuclear power on a platform in the ocean, manufacturing the Ammonia, ships can come by and refuel there.
I can think of many such scenarios if money is no object.
But as you say, they currently run on bunker fuel which is essentially garbage. You have to pay people to take that of your hands. It is being ridiculous to think that they would switch, on their own dime, to burning ammonia. And green ammonia at that which is orders of magnitude more expensive.
Who is willing to pay the resulting shipping costs?
Both hydrogen and carbon are also readily available from the environment.
Synthesizing hydrocarbon analogues of fossil fuels (petrol, kerosene, diesel, bunker fuel[1]) is possible and has been theoretically demonstrated.[2] The problem is that it's not economically feasible, in large part due to structural market failures in the price of petroleum.[3]
Physical abundance of the constituent elements has little to do with production costs of the resultant fuel.
And hydrocarbons are vastly preferable to ammonia as fuels for all kinds of reasons: energy density, noncorrosive nature,[4] non-toxicity, convenience in general handling and storage, etc., etc., etc. So long as you're synthesizing fuels, make it the good stuff, not poison.
________________________________
Notes:
1. That last is probably a non-starter. It's harder to synthesize longer-chain hydrocarbons, so far as I'm aware, and the primary driver of bunker oil for marine propulsion is that it's an otherwise low-value surplus from conventional petroleum production, even a large fraction of much extraction, e.g., Venezuela's very tarry petroleum,and Canada's tar sands. Lighter fractions would be easier to synthesize and more attractive as fuels.
2. For about 60 years, including research at Brookhaven National Labs, M.I.T., and the US Naval Research Lab, as well as with a Google moonshot project. A list of sources is here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970111>
3. A deep topic, but given the fact that we're extracting petroleum at roughly 1 million times its rate of formation, and in a highly unsustainable fashion, there's a fair argument that petroleum ought to be priced about 1 million times its current market price. The economics of nonrenewable resource extraction is grossly irrational and divorced from physical and geological realities. On rates of formation, Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) <https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5212176.pdf> (PDF). Previous discussions: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
4. Indeed hydrocarbons are routinely used as lubricants and protectives for metals and other materials.
Hopefully not.
Like anything else, risks can be mitigated.
The main concern for me is at dockside where there are lots of people nearby. Ideally I think they'd "lock down" and depressurise the ammonia system (except the storage tank) when close to port, and only bring it online when out at sea and far from population.
Also the refuelling process seems a bit risky. But these things are already quite routine; ammonia is already a large-volume industrial commodity with well-developed controls.
Risks can be mitigated. But the first step is always eliminating the hazardous material if possible.
And many options exists that are less inherently dangerous than ammonia. Like methanol. At least it’s a liquid and not nearly as bad.
But ammonia is chosen as a predatory delay strategy. They build the engines to be dual fuel (ammonia and methane) and then feign surprise when they have to run it on methane since the ammonia supply chain “isn’t ready yet” and the prices “need to come down a bit”.
If you think this is bad, then the chemicals used in rocketry - read the book ignition [1] - will have you whimpering in a corner. As with any system, risks can be identified and controlled and operationalised - Gasoline has its risks, so does Chlorine trifluoride [2]. Yet both are wildly different and are used in day to day operations.
1. https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride
Yes rocketry has made very dangerous chemical. And hydrazine is used in other fields too. But it’s used because there aren’t safer alternatives that are fit for purpose.
Ammonia is being pushed as a predatory delay strategy. The article hints at this when it talks about the engines being dual-fuel (ammonia and methane). Given the massive price difference between green ammonia and methane it doesn’t take a genius to know what their next message will be “our ships are ammonia ready, we will run them on methane until the ammonia supply chains are ready then we’ll transition to it”. Expect they have no intention of transitioning.
The ships are “ammonia ready” in the same way my driveway is Ferrari ready. All that’s missing is a lot of other people’s money.
I think that’s not a good comparison. I think we generally accept that leaving the planet is inherently riskier than traveling on it. You have to generate enough energy to exit the atmosphere, that’s a shitload of energy. Of course it’s dangerous. We’ve been sailing relatively safely for thousands of years, though.
Once corrosion is under control, is that danger actually higher than the risk of a natural gas fuel system leaking and killing a whole crew? Both gases are lighter than air, both form explosive mixtures with air (but ammonia-air mixture has much slower flame speed and slower pressure rise than natural gas - for which it makes up with its much higher toxicity).
In the end, gas leaks are always bad. But at least you can easily smell an ammonia leak.
No the ammonia toxicity hazard is incredibly severe, it immediately burns your lungs and you die by choking on your own blood as your lungs dissolve. Whereas with natural gas leaks you can reduce the likelihood of ignition by intrinsically safe instrumentation and electrical components. In both cases, gas detection and automated shutdown and sectionalisation helps significantly.
If you inhale natural gas it is only deadly (it can cause other problems that are treatable) when it displaces enough oxygen. In open air you are hopefully okay because there is still enough oxygen that you can breath. Ammonia is deadly when inhaled in small quantities. I wouldn't want either, but ammonia is worse if you must choose.
I'm not sure how likely fire is in case of a leak.
> But at least you can easily smell an ammonia leak.
IIRC, they add a very nasty smelling chemical to LNG so that leaks are evident before they get explosive. In the case of ammonia, the additive is not really needed, and the toxicity being much higher makes me think that, by the time you realize you are breathing ammonia, it's already too late.
I know they add a thiol (sulfur compound that smells like rotten eggs) to the city mains for cooking/heating gas.
Would be interesting to know if its commonly added to industrial LNG. Because we burn a lot of that - even if you only add a few ppm thiol to natural gas, that's a whole lot of sulfur being burnt...
> Hopefully this ship of fools runs aground
Hopefully in a deserted rock in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe try hydrogen? Or beavers? Have it driven by environmental movements, you finance selective steered into being maximum annoying?
it does seem safer see
https://blog.ballard.com/marine/worlds-first-liquid-powered-...
Seems you left out a whole bunch of words because that comment doesn’t make any sense.
It makes, when you consider, that its all just "measures" by the oil industry to stop society from steering away from it. They either invest in DoA technologies or technologies that allow for greenwashing of fossil fuels.
Beavers? Lets say you want to steer the population away form reasonable environmental goals like high speed rail or public transport (which has to cost something to keep bums out). You then pick some mad-sob with a insane initiative like "rewild skunks in the inner city parks" and pump that up with donated millions. Result, that mad- as a hatter, propagates his "initiative", riles up the masses and his co-goals - which may include high-speed rail get discredited.
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