Australia does not have huge deposits of hydrogen they're just sitting around trying to find uses for. So the input for this technology is imaginary.
Making ammonia out of hydrogen, which is so useful that half your food comes from it, is called the Haber-Bosch process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process), and has been around for about a century.
Ammonia is a pretty crappy way to move things around too. Not as bad as hydrogen, but if you have ammonia, reacting it with some CO2 to make urea is how the professionals do it. Ammonia is still a dangerous gas or liquid. Urea is inoffensive little white pellets. You can already buy urea at American truck stops as "DEF" or diesel exhaust fluid.
Finally, unless they've miniaturized their technology to where you can pump ammonia into your car to run it on hydrogen instead of filling it directly with hydrogen, you're still limited by hydrogen's crappy storage density where it's needed most- in the car.
So let's take two flows and compare them to this technology's flows:
NG -> pipeline -> CNG -> CNG Engine (simple, if not all that widespread)
e- -> grid -> EV charger -> battery -> EV motor (same)
vs.
Aussie coal -> CO2 + H2 -> NH3 -> H2 -> H2 tank -> Fuel Cell -> EV motor
or
Aussie PV -> H2 -> NH3 -> H2 -> H2 tank -> Fuel Cell -> EV motor
I wish I could educate newspeople on how to distinguish real breakthroughs from university-sponsored snake oil like this.
I checked out the Toyota Mirai - it does indeed use hydrogen gas cylinders from what I can tell. So this research is targeting simply the ability to transport hydrogen.
Ironically, the ships that carry all that ammonia to Asia almost certainly used fossil fuels and who knows what the carbon footprint around building the membranes for the hydrogen transfer is like
Here's a fun little exercise with the Toyota Mirai.
Read the spec sheet, and read the wikipedia article. They claim the thing can hold 5 kg of H2, at 10,000 psi.
Look into how big the tanks are.
The math will show that at that pressure, taking up that much space, you can fit no more than about 3.7 kg of H2 in there.
The difference between the diesel emissions and mileage scandal and the Mirai is that they actually made the math work with the former, as well as large enough scale for people to care.
And shipping is the most egregiously polluting transportation in existence. Something like 10 to 30% of emissions come from 6000 ships in service. Folks claim its ok because it settles into the ocean quickly - ok for everybody but the ocean.
They proposed one use, which would be to use it as storage for solar/wind power. Perhaps their plan is that when there's excess output from renewables, they'll use electrolysis to generate hydrogen gas from water?
That is exactly the plan. With renewables you have to deploy far more than you need due to capacity factor, so to average 100kW on solar you need to deploy between 300kW and 400kW of capacity. So during the course of the day you will be generating significantly more or significantly less power than required.
Batteries and hydro will help for short term storage of excess power (ie: overnight, during cloud passage) but for long term storage (eg for transport by sea) you need something with higher energy density. For export especially you need high energy density since shipping charged batteries across the planet is going to be extremely inefficient.
The breakthrough this membrane represents is an increase in the “well to wheels” efficiency of the hydrogen economy (which is lower overall than the “pure electric” economy involving BEVs). Having said that, the “well to wheels” efficiency of H2 using Ammonia as a transport medium is under 20%, so it’s really only useful when there is plentiful cheap energy which nobody else has a better use for.
Other uses for plentiful cheap electricity could be (for example) chilling or heating large volumes of water or other thermal mass for air conditioning and industrial processes. If you have large tanks of water you can spend energy chilling (or heating) them when electricity is cheap, then use the chilled water to cool whatever it is you have that is getting too hot (and vice versa for hot water storage).
But if people are willing to pay enough for hydrogen at point of use, there will be an economic case for producing ammonia in Australia to be converted to hydrogen in Japan resulting in 1kWh in Japan costing about the same as 4kWh in Australia.
”Australia does not have huge deposits of hydrogen”
Australia has plenty of sunlight, though, much more than they need. In the long term, if/when we live of renewables, they hope to export the energy in it.
The traditional solution is a cable, but Australia is fairly distant from the possible export markets.
That, I think, is where this comes in.
Australia has access to oceans that have the hydrogen, and air contains the necessary nitrogen.
I would think they envision producing ammonia at scale, shipping it in tankers to a densely populated country or a country that has less sunlight, converting it back to electricity in a power station there, and feeding the result into the grid.
Doable? Yes. Economically viable? Who knows. That doesn’t only depend on this process, but also on the question how easily other countries can get their power cheaper.
It might help to note that in 2009, Australia imported 900,000 tonnes of urea. Gonna take a long time before they meet that demand.
Australia's an energy importer, big time. Sure, bargeloads of coal go out to places like Saudi Arabia, but tankerloads of oil and LNG come in.
If you want to export your energy cheaply, look at Aluminum (sorry Aussies, Aluminium to you) instead. It's safe, made from local ingredients, and stable. That's why gulf petrostates are putting huge aluminum smelters in- much cheaper to make the aluminum with their natural gas than compress and store the stuff.
On my memory, there were countless claims of "direct" ammonia production, and all came to be uneconomical or being outright scams. But in last few years, there were numerous works on catalytic production with some merit to them.
The comparative advantage nations have over each other in energy in a post-fossil fuel world will be much reduced. That is, Saudi Arabia has a huge advantage over Japan in terms of cheap fossil fuel energy, so Japan imports a lot from them. Though Saudi Arabia likely has an advantage over Japan in renewable resources, its not as dramatic as their fossil fuel advantage, so Japan would invest in their own energy resources and import less of them.
Because of this there will likely be much less international energy traded in general.
It's coming out of the CSIRO, which while not the greatest at commercialisation, have a pretty solid track record of not spinning bullshit. The car spinning looks like it's coming from auto industry wingnuts.
You seem to be dismissively implying that because scientists are experts that they have obviously considered this. Which isn't true at all. Scientists are typically much more motivated by the pursuit of knowledge than strict commercial value.
It looks like wikipedia was already updated with this information [1]. I personally find their summary to be more informative.
“Ammonia can be manufactured from solar energy, air and water. This is an efficient way to package hydrogen into a chemical that is much cheaper to store and transport than pure hydrogen be it as gas or as liquid. In fact, per volume ammonia holds more hydrogen than does liquid hydrogen. Ammonia may be the key to overcome not only the daily but also the seasonal fluctuations of renewable energy sources.
This approach will solve many of the problems foreseen for the proposed Hydrogen economy, that instead could be replaced by an Ammonia economy, essentially still a hydrogen economy.
In early August 2018, scientists from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) announced the success of developing a process to release hydrogen from ammonia and harvest that at ultra-high purity as a fuel for cars. This uses a special membrane. Two demonstration fuel cell vehicles have the technology, a Hyundai Nexo and Toyota Mirai”
Intramolecular bonds are quite a bit smaller than intermolecular distances, so if you pack atoms into longer molecules you get a denser result.
I'm guessing very long molecules become problematic (because they don't pack well), but ammonia is a small molecule so way below that.
Liquid ammonia has a density of ~690 kg/m3 and a molar mass of 17 g/mol so ~40k mol / m3, as NH3 that's ~120k atoms of hydrogen per cubic meter. Meanwhile liquid hydrogen has a density of 71g/L and a molar mass of 2.02 g/mol so a very similar ~35k mol/m3 but as H2 that's only ~70k atoms of hydrogen per cubic meter.
And liquid hydrogen aside from being extremely flammable, can't exist above 30K and degrades storage material (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement), ammonia is much more forgiving and liquid at ambient temperature above 1MPa (10 times atmospheric pressure), not innocuous by any means but way easier to transport and store (storage requirements are similar to propane).
Molecular hydrogen is unpolarized while ammonia molecules can establish hydrogen bonds, thus packing them more densely under the same conditions.
For really dense hydrogen we would need its metallic form but that requires pressures you might find in the core of jupiter. The electromagnetic force is more convenient than gravity.
I would expect this is due to the fact that each ammonia molecule contains three hydrogen atoms, whereas a hydrogen molecule contains only two. So liquid ammonia would be expected to contain more hydrogen per volume than liquid hydrogen.
(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.)
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.)
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 Bolivia.
Here is a paper created by CSIRO scientists on the round-trip conversion efficiency of the process for different routes
The paper also mentions fuel cells which was a question I wondered about:
“Ammonia at the point of end use can be converted to hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles or alternatively utilized directly in solid oxide fuel cells, in an internal combustion engine or a gas turbine. “
So, does anyone have a link which describes the actual technology? The article seems to switch back and forth from talking about hydrogen to talking about ammonia as a carrier for hydrogen. Note that there's already a huge market for ammonia itself (often as a carrier for nitrogen, for agriculture)
Can anyone confirm that this is simply a way to package hydrogen into a safe transportation medium to international markets (from Australia as an example) and then converted back to hydrogen when it reaches the target country?
Put it this way, is it converted back to hydrogen before it’s pumped into the car? I kinda like the idea of ammonia being converted into hydrogen in the car but judging from the news reports we have seen here in Australia the membrane technology looks quite large... more something one would see in a refinery than a car.
So my question is: at what stage would the ammonia be converted back to hydrogen; at a refinery, the service station or in the car itself?
Since there are already hydrogen fuel cars available from reputable manufacturers who (I assume) would be hesitant to add a fairly complicated component into their production vehicles, it might be easiest to transport liquid ammonia to car fill stations at which point it would be converted to hydrogen before going into the cars.
Cars are far from the only potential consumer. Sure, you might also use some of the hydrogen to power cars with fuel cells. Or you use it to charge EVs. Or you use the ammonia directly for grid electricity and heating. Or industrial processes.
Ammonia is also key to modern agriculture; it would be fantastic news if it became economical to create it from air and water using wind or solar power.
When it is, we need to cover Australia, North Africa and the Southern United States with sun panels and start piping/shipping it to the places it can be used.
There is an entire industrial infrastructure in many agricultural nations that manufactures, distributes, and fertilizes with liquid anhydrous ammonia. All the necessary tech to get this into a vehicle without killing anyone already exists.
And it's regulated way more than the fuel industry. In many of those developing nations, opening a gas station is as simple as burying a few containers and paying off fire-safety inspectors. I'm not at all eager to see them handling ammonia that way.
I don't think we would have to do it way before. Gasoline is toxic, and flammable. Hydrogen is flammable. Cars pump out Carbon Monoxide which is toxic.
We are well past the "safe side" currently and it seems to be going ok.
Ammonia is gaseous under normal conditions, meaning that any leak would result in presence of gaseous ammonia in air. 500 mg of ammonia per m3 of air can damages eyes, a short exposure to 3g can have overall toxic effects, at 7 g and higher it damages the skin. Gasoline, hydrogen, or monoxide don't come close to this level of toxicity.
Petrol is safe enough that you can let untrained people pour it from one tank to another. Spill a little, no problem.
Ammonia is a gas at standard temperature, and will be transported and used as a liquid under pressure. If you expose liquid ammonia to the atmosphere, all of it boils off rapidly. The IDLH (immediate danger to life and health) limit for ammonia is 300 parts per million. If you release 15 grams of ammonia inside a typical garage, you have exceeded the IDLH threshold. If you spill just 1 gram, the smell is so strong the average person is running away in fear.
Spill some gas/petrol, wait a couple of minutes, and most of the toxicity is gone and no harm done to you except that you have increased your chance, very slightly, of getting cancer during your lifespan.
Ammonia being a gas, it's better compared to natural gas than liquid hydrocarbons.
You don't want common people handling it directly, you want safeguards every few inches on ducts that transport them and you will still have deaths caused by them every so often.
Readit News
Making ammonia out of hydrogen, which is so useful that half your food comes from it, is called the Haber-Bosch process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process), and has been around for about a century.
Ammonia is a pretty crappy way to move things around too. Not as bad as hydrogen, but if you have ammonia, reacting it with some CO2 to make urea is how the professionals do it. Ammonia is still a dangerous gas or liquid. Urea is inoffensive little white pellets. You can already buy urea at American truck stops as "DEF" or diesel exhaust fluid.
Finally, unless they've miniaturized their technology to where you can pump ammonia into your car to run it on hydrogen instead of filling it directly with hydrogen, you're still limited by hydrogen's crappy storage density where it's needed most- in the car.
So let's take two flows and compare them to this technology's flows:
NG -> pipeline -> CNG -> CNG Engine (simple, if not all that widespread)
e- -> grid -> EV charger -> battery -> EV motor (same)
vs.
Aussie coal -> CO2 + H2 -> NH3 -> H2 -> H2 tank -> Fuel Cell -> EV motor
or
Aussie PV -> H2 -> NH3 -> H2 -> H2 tank -> Fuel Cell -> EV motor
I wish I could educate newspeople on how to distinguish real breakthroughs from university-sponsored snake oil like this.
Ironically, the ships that carry all that ammonia to Asia almost certainly used fossil fuels and who knows what the carbon footprint around building the membranes for the hydrogen transfer is like
Read the spec sheet, and read the wikipedia article. They claim the thing can hold 5 kg of H2, at 10,000 psi.
Look into how big the tanks are.
The math will show that at that pressure, taking up that much space, you can fit no more than about 3.7 kg of H2 in there.
The difference between the diesel emissions and mileage scandal and the Mirai is that they actually made the math work with the former, as well as large enough scale for people to care.
They proposed one use, which would be to use it as storage for solar/wind power. Perhaps their plan is that when there's excess output from renewables, they'll use electrolysis to generate hydrogen gas from water?
Batteries and hydro will help for short term storage of excess power (ie: overnight, during cloud passage) but for long term storage (eg for transport by sea) you need something with higher energy density. For export especially you need high energy density since shipping charged batteries across the planet is going to be extremely inefficient.
The breakthrough this membrane represents is an increase in the “well to wheels” efficiency of the hydrogen economy (which is lower overall than the “pure electric” economy involving BEVs). Having said that, the “well to wheels” efficiency of H2 using Ammonia as a transport medium is under 20%, so it’s really only useful when there is plentiful cheap energy which nobody else has a better use for.
Other uses for plentiful cheap electricity could be (for example) chilling or heating large volumes of water or other thermal mass for air conditioning and industrial processes. If you have large tanks of water you can spend energy chilling (or heating) them when electricity is cheap, then use the chilled water to cool whatever it is you have that is getting too hot (and vice versa for hot water storage).
But if people are willing to pay enough for hydrogen at point of use, there will be an economic case for producing ammonia in Australia to be converted to hydrogen in Japan resulting in 1kWh in Japan costing about the same as 4kWh in Australia.
Australia has plenty of sunlight, though, much more than they need. In the long term, if/when we live of renewables, they hope to export the energy in it.
The traditional solution is a cable, but Australia is fairly distant from the possible export markets.
That, I think, is where this comes in. Australia has access to oceans that have the hydrogen, and air contains the necessary nitrogen.
I would think they envision producing ammonia at scale, shipping it in tankers to a densely populated country or a country that has less sunlight, converting it back to electricity in a power station there, and feeding the result into the grid.
Doable? Yes. Economically viable? Who knows. That doesn’t only depend on this process, but also on the question how easily other countries can get their power cheaper.
Australia's an energy importer, big time. Sure, bargeloads of coal go out to places like Saudi Arabia, but tankerloads of oil and LNG come in.
If you want to export your energy cheaply, look at Aluminum (sorry Aussies, Aluminium to you) instead. It's safe, made from local ingredients, and stable. That's why gulf petrostates are putting huge aluminum smelters in- much cheaper to make the aluminum with their natural gas than compress and store the stuff.
>NG -> pipeline -> CNG -> CNG Engine (simple, if not all that widespread)
>e- -> grid -> EV charger -> battery -> EV motor (same)
>vs.
>Aussie coal -> CO2 + H2 -> NH3 -> H2 -> H2 tank -> Fuel Cell -> EV motor
>or
>Aussie PV -> H2 -> NH3 -> H2 -> H2 tank -> Fuel Cell -> EV motor
There is still one dark horse in the competition:
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-ammonia-on-demand-alternative-...
On my memory, there were countless claims of "direct" ammonia production, and all came to be uneconomical or being outright scams. But in last few years, there were numerous works on catalytic production with some merit to them.
The comparative advantage nations have over each other in energy in a post-fossil fuel world will be much reduced. That is, Saudi Arabia has a huge advantage over Japan in terms of cheap fossil fuel energy, so Japan imports a lot from them. Though Saudi Arabia likely has an advantage over Japan in renewable resources, its not as dramatic as their fossil fuel advantage, so Japan would invest in their own energy resources and import less of them.
Because of this there will likely be much less international energy traded in general.
It's coming out of the CSIRO, which while not the greatest at commercialisation, have a pretty solid track record of not spinning bullshit. The car spinning looks like it's coming from auto industry wingnuts.
Except it became one of the most controlled substances around out of a sudden.
“Ammonia can be manufactured from solar energy, air and water. This is an efficient way to package hydrogen into a chemical that is much cheaper to store and transport than pure hydrogen be it as gas or as liquid. In fact, per volume ammonia holds more hydrogen than does liquid hydrogen. Ammonia may be the key to overcome not only the daily but also the seasonal fluctuations of renewable energy sources.
This approach will solve many of the problems foreseen for the proposed Hydrogen economy, that instead could be replaced by an Ammonia economy, essentially still a hydrogen economy.
In early August 2018, scientists from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) announced the success of developing a process to release hydrogen from ammonia and harvest that at ultra-high purity as a fuel for cars. This uses a special membrane. Two demonstration fuel cell vehicles have the technology, a Hyundai Nexo and Toyota Mirai”
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#Energy_carrier
How is this possible? Suspect the answer would be way over my head!
I'm guessing very long molecules become problematic (because they don't pack well), but ammonia is a small molecule so way below that.
Liquid ammonia has a density of ~690 kg/m3 and a molar mass of 17 g/mol so ~40k mol / m3, as NH3 that's ~120k atoms of hydrogen per cubic meter. Meanwhile liquid hydrogen has a density of 71g/L and a molar mass of 2.02 g/mol so a very similar ~35k mol/m3 but as H2 that's only ~70k atoms of hydrogen per cubic meter.
And liquid hydrogen aside from being extremely flammable, can't exist above 30K and degrades storage material (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement), ammonia is much more forgiving and liquid at ambient temperature above 1MPa (10 times atmospheric pressure), not innocuous by any means but way easier to transport and store (storage requirements are similar to propane).
Molecular hydrogen is unpolarized while ammonia molecules can establish hydrogen bonds, thus packing them more densely under the same conditions.
For really dense hydrogen we would need its metallic form but that requires pressures you might find in the core of jupiter. The electromagnetic force is more convenient than gravity.
Also what does the chemical reaction look like when harvesting hydrogen from ammonia?
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...
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 Bolivia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-31/the-canad...
Reverse Haber process maybe?
2NH3 -> N2 + 3H2
The paper also mentions fuel cells which was a question I wondered about:
“Ammonia at the point of end use can be converted to hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles or alternatively utilized directly in solid oxide fuel cells, in an internal combustion engine or a gas turbine. “
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b02219
http://www.siemens.co.uk/en/insights/potential-of-green-ammo...
Edit: this seems to be more detailed http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fue...
Put it this way, is it converted back to hydrogen before it’s pumped into the car? I kinda like the idea of ammonia being converted into hydrogen in the car but judging from the news reports we have seen here in Australia the membrane technology looks quite large... more something one would see in a refinery than a car.
So my question is: at what stage would the ammonia be converted back to hydrogen; at a refinery, the service station or in the car itself?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
When it is, we need to cover Australia, North Africa and the Southern United States with sun panels and start piping/shipping it to the places it can be used.
We are well past the "safe side" currently and it seems to be going ok.
Ammonia is a gas at standard temperature, and will be transported and used as a liquid under pressure. If you expose liquid ammonia to the atmosphere, all of it boils off rapidly. The IDLH (immediate danger to life and health) limit for ammonia is 300 parts per million. If you release 15 grams of ammonia inside a typical garage, you have exceeded the IDLH threshold. If you spill just 1 gram, the smell is so strong the average person is running away in fear.
Spill ammonia?
https://www.vyperlook.com/extreme-things/policeman-killed-in...
You don't want common people handling it directly, you want safeguards every few inches on ducts that transport them and you will still have deaths caused by them every so often.
I have this inkling that developing this for cars isn't the best use, as battery EV looks set to best Hydrogen fuel-cells in that market.
Instead, I think pursuing it for shipping, aviation and utility-scale energy storage is a much better idea.