
Ammonia Is the Everest Base Camp for Clean Energy - martythemaniak
http://thebreakthrough.org/issues/decarbonization/ammonia-is-everest-base-camp-for-clean-energy
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entee
The article makes a good point that ammonia is an integral part of our modern
world, and it's pretty much impossible to get around it.

However, there are also other places in which ammonia will cost energy. That
fertilizer we use ends up in our food which ends up in our sewage. In turn,
that excess fertilizer causes algae blooms and environmental damage.
Therefore, we need to find ways to remove that waste (Europe already does in
many places). Sadly, this costs additional energy.

I worked (very briefly) on a technology that helps reduce that impact, there's
a lot of interesting work in this area. Some even uses the ammonia itself as a
source of energy.

One process using the ammonia as fuel in a way:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anammox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anammox)

Process I helped get some attention at one point:

[http://web.stanford.edu/~cantwell/Recent_publications/Schers...](http://web.stanford.edu/~cantwell/Recent_publications/Scherson_et_al_Energy_Env_Sci_6_231_2013.pdf)

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pilom
Just to nitpick for a second, the vast majority of ammonia that moves from
fertilizer to algae blooms comes just from farm runoff. Many farms still use
flood irrigation and many others end up timing fertilizer right before big
rainstorms in the spring. The water runoff is how the ammonia makes it into
the water supply, not from the food and then sewage.

~~~
entee
Absolutely true, that's why there is a dead zone at the bottom of the
mississippi.

However there are literally tons of ammonia flowing out of places with high
density and where that high ammonia still ends up in water ways after passing
through a sewage system. In particular this has been true in Western Europe,
and there are issues in various areas around the country here (Great Lakes,
Chesapeake Bay, SF bay is weird so for now we seem to be not as affected on
this particular front). In the US human sewage is thought to contribute 11% of
the problem and in Europe 25%. Not everything, but surely it'd be nice to
solve the problem. Also some of these technologies could be applied to other
sources such as manure if treatment standards were imposed on agriculture.
Runoff is harder for sure, but there we can maybe look at more targeted
application of fertilizers. It helps nobody to pay for fertilizer that ends up
in a river and not growing more food.

Useful Source:

[http://www.wri.org/our-work/project/eutrophication-and-
hypox...](http://www.wri.org/our-work/project/eutrophication-and-
hypoxia/sources-eutrophication)

~~~
robbiep
Is cutting out fertiliser going to change the level of ammonia in our
sewerage? Don't we need to take the humans out of the equation?

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dredmorbius
Ammonia-as-fuel introduces numerous problems of toxicity and handling
difficulties while being based on much the same process, particularly energy-
intensive electrolysis, as other alternatives. Both Fischer-Tropsch and
Sabatier process synthesis using seawater for CO2 feedstock result in direct
analogues of present hydrocarbon fuels: petrol, kerosene, or diesel for F-T,
methane for Sabtier. They have higher energy requirements than present fossil
fuels, but are zero-net-carbon and infinitely miscible and compatible with
existing fuel sourcing, transport, processing, storage, and utilisation
systems.

Hydrocarbons are near-zero emissions -- the primary combustion products are
CO2 and H2O. The problem to date has been that this CO2 is from fossil
sources, and we've been reintroducing millions of years of sequestered carbon
to the biosphere each current year. Sourced from the biosphere, that
particular problem disappears.

You still need an energy source. Probably solar. Fuel synthesis would be a
good application for soaking up excess supplies.

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rdtsc
Also ammonia can be substitute a refrigeration liquid in some cases replacing
freon derivaties. Ammonia itself (not the process used to produce) I think is
pretty safe for the environment, compared to say HFCs.

~~~
ams6110
It has the slight inconvenience of being rather lethal to people however,
which is why it's not used in air conditioning anymore, or if it is, it has to
be separated by an extra heat exchanger.

Still not uncommon to find it used in industrial chillers, older ice rinks,
etc.

~~~
rdtsc
It is dangerous, but I wouldn't call it immediately lethal. My dad is a
engineer specializing in large refrigeration systems and in 10-15 some years,
they had 1 ammonia fatality in a company of 40 people or so -- worker opened
valve of refrigeration system while it still had ammonia in it, large
concentration of it got blown pretty much straight into their face (and
obviusly lungs) he died at the hospital.

But they had other accidents (welder welding a fuel canister with fumes still
in it and other such crazy or stupid things) -- this was post-Soviet
environment with almost no safety controls.

The nicer property about it, is it is easy to detect leaks due to specific
smells.

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timthelion
For me, even a highly inefficient process that was small enough would be
interesting. Living in a corrupt country (the Czech republic) there is no way
to hook a solar panel up to the grid. But if I could plug a solar panel into
an amonia generator, and sell the amonia, that could let me and many other
people who are unable to use solar for political reasons get into solar. I
certainly spend enough emotional energy worying about the environment, that a
few hundered or even thousand bucks for solar panels wouldn't really be a
hurdle for me.

~~~
Retric
Grid power is a convince and money saver when it comes to solar, but it's not
needed. You can just hook up solar to a battery system and then use battery
power without hooking up to the grid. You can enegy just unplug and appliance
from your solar system and use grid power when nessisarily. However your much
better off setting things as that quickly becomes incredibly annoying.

~~~
sliverstorm
It sounds like for him, being able to sell some of the power is important-
which does not work well with batteries.

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jloughry
Watch out for toxicity, though; ammonia refrigerant leaks have killed lots of
people---bad enough that Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd together invented a
new refrigeration technology that didn't rely on rotating seals that might
leak.

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hodwik
His argument for cleaner energy is that we use Methane?

Isn't methane 30x more potent as a green-house gas?

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gliese1337
No, his argument for cleaner energy is that we _stop_ using methane in the
ways that we are already using it, and that if we must keep using it we do it
a way that eliminates the CO2 emissions- cracking off the hydrogen and leaving
behind solid carbon. Methane is quite a potent greenhouse gas, but nothing in
that article suggests releasing methane into the atmosphere.

~~~
hodwik2
There are currently huge methane leaks in multiple places in the US as we
speak, that we've spent months trying to plug.

Why wouldn't increased methane use lead to increased methane mining and
therefore more leaks? Are we honestly planning to trust the regulatory bodies
to handle this when they've never shown any serious oversight ability in the
past?

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gliese1337
Nothing in the article suggests using _more_ methane. In fact, there is quite
a list of potential _alternatives_ to methane. It merely _also_ mentions that,
if we must continue to use methane in ammonia production, which is convenient
because the infrastructure is already there, then we should do it in a manner
that _does not_ release greenhouse gasses- specifically, via methane cracking.

