The Ammonia Energy Association publishes news and research on using ammonia as a fuel and hydrogen carrier, including engines and production costs.
HN commenters cite it when arguing ammonia is easier to store and transport than hydrogen, and for production cost and project news.
I'd need to dig through my downloads folder a bit, but here is one (very simple) model. Note that lazard is claimed to have an anti-nuclear bias from many.
https://www.lazard.com/media/451779/lazards-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen-analysis-vf.pdf
https://model.energy allows you to play with the numbers. Note that there are existing solar projects with lower whole
sale prices than their 2030 projections in low latitude areas.
You can explore different scenarios like 'what if the hyasa 95% efficient electrolyser is commercialisable without needing platinum' or put in figures for ammonia in the h2 electrolyser column (just tweak the h2 capital and efficiency costa until price per kg of the 'hydrogen' is equivalent to a price you like for green ammonia keeping in mind H2 is about 7x the energy per mass)
Additionally keep in mind that nuclear lcoe figures tend to have very low discount rates (so compare like for like) and they also ignore build time.
Here's a press releasehttps://h2-ccs-network.com/blog/verdagy-hits-lcoh-below-3-00-kg-with-commercial-aem-electrolyzer-module/
Note they do not mention energy cost, so grain of salt. $2/kg (including storage) is roughly the magic number where you stop thinking about nuclear at all. $3-5 means you need to think about how little time you can runthe turbine and how much it costs you when it's off. H2 is more efficient and cheaper, Ammonia can be moved and stored more easily (and used in deisel engines as long as you can increase fuel…
From the abstract[0]: they have a promising catalyst that could be used for a "direct ammonia fuel cell" operating at room temperature. It involves ruthenium, which is an expensive rare earth element.
For context, it's possible to 'crack' ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen & feed that to a PEM fuel cell, but this requires extra equipment, high temperatures, and consumes some of the output energy. Solid oxide fuel cells can also run directly on ammonia, but that's b/c they operate at high temperature [650 C].[1] Solid acid fuel cells can turn ammonia into hydrogen at 250 C -- but this is still extra equipment & consumes energy.[2] Ammonia can also be burned in modified gas turbines, which IMO would be a great way to quickly displace natural gas in peaker plants, to enable higher renewables penetration w/o relying on fossil fuels to take up the slack.
Ammonia is a better hydrogen carrier than liquid or compressed hydrogen because storage is easier due to high energy density. The round-trip energy efficiency could also be higher.[3] It's less flammable, but more toxic. For more, see [4]. It sounds like the real enabling technology would be direct fuel cells and direct electrosynthesis (reverse fuel cells) to get higher efficiency.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-021-00797-w
[1] https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/ammonia-for-fuel-cells-afc-sofc-and-pem/
[2] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/11/ammonia-to-green-hydrogen/
[3]…
That is a pretty narrow view. The world does not stop only to cars. Even for Toyota.
Fuel cells do not break through in the car industry (because battery do the job there) but do everywhere else.
- We now have datacenters and hospitals that dump their old diesel generators for fuel cells for emergency power supply [^1]
- Non-nuclear submarines have run commonly on fuel cells in Germany for decades.
- Fuel cells start to be evaluated with ammonia usage for rural co-generation Heat & Power. [^2]
- Several Boat experiments use Fuel Cell [^3] [^5]
- With the current power density level of battery and for the next decade, there is no way you can make a "green" long range commercial plane without a fuel cell technically [^4]
Yes. Hydrogen storage is a pain and yes Hydrogen electrolysis is inefficient. But it does not change it is already a working solution for High Power & High Density electricity generation and will probably remain there for decades.
[^1]: https://techhq.com/2020/07/hydrogen-fuel-cells-the-future-of-clean-data-centers/
[^2]: https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/on-the-ground-in-japan-residential-fuel-cells/
[^3]: https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-world-high-temperature-ammonia-powered-fuel-cell.html
[^4 ]: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2020/10/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cross-industry-collaboration-potential-for-aviation.html
[^5]: https://new.abb.com/marine/systems-and-solutions/electric-solutions/fuel-cell
"The raw energy density of liquid ammonia is 11.5 MJ/L,[64] which is about a third that of diesel."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#As_a_fuel
(Note this is energy density by volume, which is the metric most care about. Energy density by weight of H2 gas is great, but the volume is enormous in comparison.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
Ammonia has been long recognized as a great medium for energy storage and you can generate at the site of electric generation. But the challenge has been extracting the hydrogen from the ammonia. My understanding is that hydrogen crackers exist, but have only been successful commercially at large scale. A portable cracker that you can put on a car that extracts hydrogen on demand from an ammonia storage tank is the innovation we need to see. Apparently there is work in Denmark that looks promising... (And now there is this new membrane technology from Australia.)
https://www.mvsengg.com/products/hydrogen/ammonia-cracker/
http://www.ammoniaenergy.org/ammonia-cracking-to-high-purity-hydrogen-for-pem-fuel-cells-in-denmark/
Personally, I am cheering for ammonia as a storage means. I am not a fan of batteries found in today's electric vehicles because there are too many conflict minerals in them. Maybe Tesla will succeed mining colbat in Colbat Ontario Canada... But until then, it is probably coming from the Congo or…
I don't agree with the sentiment that the experts have written off hydrogen. Actually I had a lot I'd say on that but it would come off as completely snarky.
While hydrogen and electric via battery storage will form a large part of the path ahead, especially in urban and industrial sectors, there are other paths which haven't got much light. For one, certain interests keep prodding bio fuels ... while the oil industry keeps very very quite that the fuel crackers in their refineries could utilise ordinary renewable organic based oils as a feed stock to produce the same as presently used in vehicles.
Green hydrogen certainly will be a product of huge demand in the future, based on what I've read the last couple years ... the smart money is on anhydrous ammonia, for which its production requires a lot of hydrogen. However I guess why this sector is attracting so much interest, if there's a better path than ammonia as a means to utilise hydrogen, those successful will reap the rewards.
They are already trialling using ammonia as a fuel for the same large engines found in cargo ships. [1] Fuel cells installations using ammonia already exist [2]
[1] https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/man-ammonia-engine-update/
[2] https://www.gencellenergy.com/our-products/gencell-a5/
From a quick google, steam turbines cost about 50% more than gas turbines.[1][2] Gas is $500-700/kW, steam is $670-1140/kW.
That's easily compensated by the higher capacity factor of non-storage applications (since storage turbines, calculated above, cost 100% more per kWh due to idle time). Also, storage has to add the cost of the electrolyzer and ammonia storage tanks.
On top of that, round-trip efficiency of energy storage via ammonia is only about 30%.[3] So if your solar farm costs $20/MWh, your cost of stored energy is over $60/MWh before accounting for turbine/electrolyzer costs.
This means you can easily be competitive with a steam turbine plus a heat source that costs $60/MWh, at least for baseload.
[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ges-new-gas-turbines-are-state-of-the-art-but-are-we-getting-too-cozy-with
[2] pdf: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/09/f33/CHP-Steam%20Turbine.pdf
[3] https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/round-trip-efficiency-of-ammonia-as-a-renewable-energy-transportation-media/