Zero-carbon fuel PN (Calum?)

Whether you consider it absurd or not, that's what's coming my way where I live.
edit: Recent history shows the grid needs upgrading in some regions because the grid can't even handle today's energy demands. Be it in summer for cooling, or in winter for heating.
 
Last edited:
Whether you consider it absurd or not, that's what's coming my way where I live.
edit: Recent history shows the grid needs upgrading in some regions because the grid can't even handle today's energy demands. Be it in summer for cooling, or in winter for heating.
California is the prime example for the US. And they just banned the sale of ALL new small engine powered equipment(mowers, trimmers, blowers, saws, FIRE pumps etc) after 2025. It's ludicrous.
 
Here in Germany it doesn't work, we donate electricity for free to our neighbors when the wind is blowing and selling it back if not. Quite anoying for the whole Europeen grid and not an option for any island nation...

Please compare the wind energy (the upper greenish colour) of Germany within these to weeks:



There is no way to handle such a variing input of energy with a variing demand!
 
Which is the reason energy prices are at an all time high. Previously to 2021, having gas storage in multiple countries within Europe it was possible to coordinate the buying such that relatively few customers bought gas at the same time, with a constant production/delivery, this kept the market price relatively low. With an increasing dependence on wind the amount of gas storage has been also scaled back…….until we had a good few months when the wind didn’t blow across all of Western Europe, so the stored gas supply was depleted and all the countries turned up to buy gas all at once!
 
Last edited:
It depends on where you live.
Not really. Let's assume you live in a small community of a hundred or so homes. You all go to work and come home in a roughly 2 hour time period. Plug your cars in to charge, now your hundred homes are pulling down megawatts of power. Now multiply that by thousands of other communities. The grid is built on an assumption of a relatively stable load.
There’s no need for all of the vehicles which may only have done a couple of dozen miles to all charge at once even if just plugged in. A smart grid and distribution system would prioritise the cars which were most depleted or who’s owners had flagged that they have a long journey imminent and charge the others later or overnight. You might even draw down charge from some cars and feed into the grid to cover spikes in demand when kettles and cookers get switched on.

Cars only move a tiny fraction of their lives - if you think of them as an active part of a future energy network then electric cars are also distributed energy storage and a huge opportunity

As for the “Electric does not have the range” comments. Who really does 300+ miles a day? Wouldn’t it make more sense in future to have an electric for day to day use and then car/van pool membership for the odd times you need longer legs and more space?
 
It depends on where you live.
Not really. Let's assume you live in a small community of a hundred or so homes. You all go to work and come home in a roughly 2 hour time period. Plug your cars in to charge, now your hundred homes are pulling down megawatts of power. Now multiply that by thousands of other communities. The grid is built on an assumption of a relatively stable load.
There’s no need for all of the vehicles which may only have done a couple of dozen miles to all charge at once even if just plugged in. A smart grid and distribution system would prioritise the cars which were most depleted or who’s owners had flagged that they have a long journey imminent and charge the others later or overnight. You might even draw down charge from some cars and feed into the grid to cover spikes in demand when kettles and cookers get switched on.

Cars only move a tiny fraction of their lives - if you think of them as an active part of a future energy network then electric cars are also distributed energy storage and a huge opportunity

As for the “Electric does not have the range” comments. Who really does 300+ miles a day? Wouldn’t it make more sense in future to have an electric for day to day use and then car/van pool membership for the odd times you need longer legs and more space?
On what planet does a smart grid actually exist? As for who does 300 miles a day? Me, tomorrow. I have to make a short notice run 180 miles one way and will be returning same day. There are people that commute 100 miles. I used to do that 3 days a week for school. I would put 220 miles in on a school night between work and school. For anyone that drives for a living, electric absolutely won't work.
 
Do you consider that a typical car usage?

There are indeed a few people who have long commutes but the average road user in the UK drives less than 8thousand miles a year and even in the US it is only a little over 10thousand. Why write off electric vehicles entirely which would work for the great majority of road users?

As for there not being a smart grid, we could build one. We managed to build internet services and connectivity for much of the world in the last 30 years - is upgrading our power network beyond human ingenuity? The cost of insuring against climate change damage is already estimated at 2-4% of world GDP so investing to reduce that and avert catastrophic collapse seems fairly sensible to me



 
Do you consider that a typical car usage?

There are indeed a few people who have long commutes but the average road user in the UK drives less than 8thousand miles a year and even in the US it is only a little over 10thousand. Why write off electric vehicles entirely which would work for the great majority of road users?

As for there not being a smart grid, we could build one. We managed to build internet services and connectivity for much of the world in the last 30 years - is upgrading our power network beyond human ingenuity? The cost of insuring against climate change damage is already estimated at 2-4% of world GDP so investing to reduce that and avert catastrophic collapse seems fairly sensible to me



The UK is about as big as a mid size US state, so there's not a lot of comparison between that small very dense country and the US which is very large and fairly sparsely populated. Comparing internet to cars is a bad analogy, governments weren't trying to force people to need broadband in the era of 28.8k modems. Having a power grid collapse is a matter of life or death in a lot of cases.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
That’s why I included and referred to US data as well

If you want a better analogy - both the US and Europe had roads before cars & the internal combustion engine. We upgraded road networks with tarmac, asphalt to suit the new technology rather than clinging to the horse and unsurfaced roads and trails

We managed to adapt infrastructure again and again cope with the advent and growth of a new technology - why not do it again?

* https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
 
Last edited by a moderator:
All routes MUST be explored and that includes clean liquid fuels for ICE use. A one trick pony will delay us considerably and there is no doubt about how little time we have left. Problem is big business including the packaging numpties.
 
Green Aviation : Reduction of Environmental Impact Through Aircraft Technology and Alternative fuels.
 

Attachments

  • Green Aviation- Reduction of Environmental Impact Through Aircraft Technology and Alternative...pdf
    356.2 KB · Views: 10
Phys.org talked about a way for ships cleaning up plastic to use that for fuel...a Titan probe might use that...or for its reverse as a von Neuman probe.
 
Another breakthrough! "Chemists discover new way to harness energy from ammonia" from the Univ. Of Wisc.
 
I don’t see anything like a breakthrough in that process, you need some energy to crack ammonia (b.t.w. nitrogens is good for nothing, the need hydrogen for the fuel cells) and this has to come from somewhere. If you don’t want to use heat (which is the more effective way, especially when using waste heat of a combustion engine) you need electricity, which lowers the overall efficiency. But Ammonia will not disintegrate into nitrogen and hydrogens by room temperature with any catalyst without adding energy!
 
This topic principally is a technically theme, and so absolutely ok. But, though it certainly is gruelingly
tempting, please refrain from starting public debates about climate change, vaccination refuseniks, or similar
themes here !
There will be no results, nobody will be proselytised and it will stray into politics with the speed of light, so being
against the rules very quickly.
There are fora for such discussions elsewhere, or you discuss it via PM, but not here !
 
I don’t get it, whats wrong?

Rutherium is a well known catalyst for cracking Ammonia, but this is no free lunch. For decomposing Ammonia you need:

2NH3 => 2N + 2 H2 (-46 KJ/mol)

No catalyst in the world can change the amount of energy which is required for a chemical reaction. As said, rutherium is a well known catalyst for decomposing ammonia (Iron does it as well, but is prone to oxidation), so I don’t see any revolutionary news in the article (which is almost certain the fault of the journalist and not of the scientist).
 
BACK TO TOPIC

That what about zero-carbon petroly
There were several Attempts for that:

One is use of Hydrogen that produce watervapor
But since hydrogen need allot energy to produce it and is bulky to storage...
It never was consider as propellant by commercial Airlines

Another was Silane a Silicon-hydrogen (SiH4) consider in 1970s as replacement for Petrol
but it has similar problem like Hydrogen, plus it undergoes spontaneous combustion with air
Next to that produce the combustion SiO2 aka Sand, what you not want in Jet engine !

In 1950s USAF experiment with ZIP-Fuel aka HEF made out hydro-boron compounds
Next extrem cost to produce, that stuff does terribly things with Jet engines and exhaust was extrem toxic !
try to maintain a such Jet engine in hazmat suit...

in 2010s was also this proposal Water and Boron as Fuel for Aircrafts
by Tareq Abu-Hamed from University of Minnesota, so called "on demand hydrogen production"
Water react with Boron form Boronoxide and Hydrogene
The Hydrogene is used for Jet engine or fuelcell -> electro motor
while the Boronoxide is stored and recycled in a Plant at Airport

I think the FAA will never approve all those proposal...
 
I second Michel's demand and would like to remind to my last post !
Filled up with reports, I saw no other way, than to simply delete quite a
number of posts, to stop the debate.
 
Intresting examples of C free fuel, but unike these examples ammonia is the second must produced chemical in the world. It can be mass produced with little additional cost to the pure energy cost, even with todays tecnology (Fischer Tropsch) and hopefully with future technologies (galvanic, allready beeing testet) with even higher efficiency (about 85 %).
 
On Ammonia as Hydrogen source

Main problem is combustion produce next H2O also NO2+H2O = Acid Rain.
Is there a catalyst for Ammonia to Hydrogen ?
 
Michel
The NOX issue is largely solved by new technology combustors.

NOX is a greenhouse gas about thirty times worse than CO2. NOX will be produced only if Ammonia is burnt in an unsuitable combustor, typically of the type used for other fuel types such as methane.

Now consider that “AddBlue”, the additive used to suppress NOX in diesels, uses Ammonia from decomposed Urea as it’s active ingredient. The urea is introduced into the catalyst where the temperature decomposes it into ammonia which in turn reacts with the NOX to convert it into water and nitrogen.

So to burn Ammonia with an ultra low NOX emission it requires a two stage combustion system, a so called “rich to lean” cycle . This has been demonstrated in a few places now with NOX levels below those of conventional Carbon fuels.

Note -this is taken from the Hydrogen Aeroplane thread which also has good contributions from NickNick and research paper references.
 
When not running super lean, hydrogene produces more NOx than ammonia. For global warming, only N2O2 is relavant, which is usually not produced by combustion with conventional fuel, but might be a problem in ammonia engines. SCR catalyst (those who reduce NOx by ammonia) can produce N2O2 in some conditions, but only a very small ammount is tolerated by exhaust regulations.

Someone else posted a link in this thread to a Swiss doctoral thesis from 1945, I discovered that thesis about 10 Years ago and was stuck how much valuable information was in there (even concerning NOx production, which was found to not higher than with conventional fuels).

There are ways to keep the NOx production low, for turbines and piston engines running on ammonia. Producing some ammount of hydrogene from it, can help to promote the combustion.

Using ammonia in fuel cells is another option, but not that simple. Low temperature PEM fuel cells would be poisend by ammonia and you need to convert it to very clean hydrogene before feeding the cell. It would be desirable to use the waste heat of the fuel cell for ammonia cracking, but the temperature level of these cells is much to low. High temperature fuel cells dont have that problem, but they are unsuited for mobile applications, since they should operate continously for durability reasons. Also a start up would take long time.
 
IIRC, Liquid ammonia, as opposed to ammonia solution in water, is funny stuff. Among other quirks, it briskly dissolves alkali and other electro-positive elements, deep-blue when dilute but, with increasing concentration, looks more and more metallic until resembles mercury. Given how it will dissolve almost anything ionic that water can manage, contamination and corrosion may prove vexing...

Down-side, like hydrogen, it is seriously fussy about conditions for stable combustion.
Upside, ammonia vapour at room temperature will rise away from spills...

Butanol, as you say, is not water-miscible. Potentially problematic for spillage disposal, though I'm sure multiple common strains of 'wild' bacteria would thrive on it. n-Propanol has less p/w zing, but is water miscible. (*)

Not strictly relevant, but mention of those 'exotic' fuels reminded me of this tale... (**)
A Tall Tail by Charles Stross

*) Disclosure #1: I devised a now-obsolete method for simple analysis of whisper of 'active' antiseptic in chunky lozenges that were almost entirely sucrose plus pink dye. Put a tablet's weight or a snapped tablet in 10ml of dilute acetic acid in 25ml flask. Warm to dissolve, allow to cool. Fill flask to mark with n-propanol and mix. Sugar precipitates like Pernod cloud. Stand in dark overnight, sugar cloud becomes 'crystal garden', trapping most of the dye. Clear supernatant may be poured into scan-cell...

**) Disclosure #2: IMHO, Stross' 'Laundry' tales are wicked fun...
 
Just some remarks:
NH3 (ammonia) is very toxic so I doubt that it will ever be used in commercial transport.
It is not produced by Fischer-Tropsch process but by Haber-Bosch process.
Some people above are too optimistic about managing NOx emissions when burning NH3.

To produce green NH3 one needs green H2 (hydrogen) and N2 (nitrogen).
Green hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of water, which consumes a lot of electricity.
Nitrogen is produced by cryogenic distillation of air, which also consumes energy.
Then H2 and N2 are reacted into NH3 which again consumes energy.
The NH3 could be burnt as a fuel, of used as a hydrogen source.

If that NH3 is to be a hydrogen source then it is to be split into N2 and H2 which again consumes energy.
And that H2 can then be converted into electricity (and water) in a fuel cell with a fairly low efficiency.
If one starts with 100 kWh electricity one might finally get some 20 kWh electricity out of the fuel cell.

Obviously the use of NH3 is not going to save us as it would only throw away a lot of energy that we can't spare in a carbon free future.

NH3 and H2 are merely lousy energy carriers.
They are not energy sources and therefor are not a solution to anything.
The same applies to methanol or kerosene or diesel produced from reacting H2 with CO2 captured from the atmosphere. It's all technically possible, already almost hundred years, but it makes no economic sense and would not do anything against global warming as all energy carriers only waste energy.

I stopped reading Phys.org articles already many years ago because I got sick of all the overly optimistic BS that one finds there. Everybody should take those articles, and those of many other websites, with a lot of salt when it comes to hydrogen economy and green fuels.
 
You right, it is Haber Bosch, not Fischer Tropsch (thats for Methanol).

Ammonia is the second most produced chemical in the world, there are allready pipelins, ships, trucks, railroads transporting this stuff all over the world, without an serior ammount of accidents. Also handeling an storing ammonia is unproblemat, b.t.w. the first refigerators used ammonia as working fluid, so piping and proper sealing could be done 100 years ago.

The efficincy of producing ammonia out of electricity (from water and air) is 66 % (please see my posting before, with a qotation from DLR), which isnt bad at all, when you concider the easy liquifidation and storage (liquid at about 10 bar and 20°).

As said, he energy density is half that of kerosene, this not good compared to kerosene, but much higher than anything which can practically be archieved with any other carbon free energy carrier (including hydrogene).

Splitting ammonia (its not neccessary for every application) is a chance to improve efficiency of combustion engines, because you invest otherwise lost waste heat and you gain more energy in the fuel. The overall efficiency ishigher than the engine efficiency alone!
 
NH3 (ammonia) is very toxic so I doubt that it will ever be used in commercial transport.

Yes it is but nowhere near as bad as implied. About 200 million tons a year produced, with about 170 million tons being directly injected into the soil as a fertiliser. This means unskilled/semi skilled farm labourers are daily decanting quantities in the 10’s of tons into trailer tanks such that it can be hauled out to the field and injected into the soil with a special modified plough. The historic safety of this is worse than members of the public handling diesel but not by much. No I don’t see your average soccer mom filling an SUV, but trained handlers at say airports/industrial processes should be able to match today’s safety for kerosene and that’s good enough. (Ref FACTs chemical accident database;- check out how bad H2 is while you’re there, it’s horrible)



Green hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of water, which consumes a lot of electricity.
Nitrogen is produced by cryogenic distillation of air, which also consumes energy.
Yes it needs green energy to power the production process;- Note “Generation 3” NH3 converts sunlight/water/air into NH3 without the electrical step (lab demonstrated) . Cryo distillation WAS the process used but most of the new schemes are looking at highly energy efficiency swing pressure absorption and molecular seizes.

If ammonia, or a partially cracked ammonia/hydrogen mixture (maybe 5%H2) can be directly used, it makes no sense to fully crack the ammonia into hydrogen/nitrogen

The energy consumption thing is not about how much NH3 does or does not, it’s about how it compares to other zero CO2 energy carriers. The developing green hydrogen business is beginning to standardise on NH3 as the shipping medium, with some 20-30 equatorial production schemes verses only one LH2 scheme, (even this scheme intends to produce energy from brown coal). Combined these green NH3 schemes amount to levels of global energy on par with major petroleum companies (Ref Fortescue group ambitions to supply 1000Mw/hr per year by 2030)

The winner in this race will be the most energy efficient process that doesn’t pollute.
 
Last edited:
Ammonia is also present in nature, whenever organic material decays, some ammount of amonia is beeing produced, its not something we are not used to (in little doses).
 
Ammonia is too toxic to be used as a fuel in passenger planes of cars. That's never gonna happen.
Maybe for cargo ships, but not for cruise ships.
And I don't mean the danger of filling up the tanks, but that of leaks and accidents.

@Nicknick: I don't see how you get that 66 %.
And Fischer-Tropsch is for producing hydrocarbons, not methanol.

@Zoo Tycoon: that's basically a solar panel with a build-in electrolyzer. Nothing new, with a lot of concealing language. And it produces hydrogen, not ammonia.

@publiusr: That research by Wallen & Berry is about converting ammonia into nitrogen:
We figured out that, not only are we making nitrogen, we are making it under conditions that are completely unprecedented,” says Berry, who is the Lester McNall Professor of Chemistry and focuses his research efforts on transition metal chemistry. “To be able to complete the ammonia-to-nitrogen reaction under ambient conditions — and get energy — is a pretty big deal.”

There is no mention of generating hydrogen gas.
".......this process can be harnessed to produce electricity, with protons and nitrogen gas as byproducts. In addition, the metal complex can be recycled through exposure to oxygen and used repeatedly."
So apparently only nitrogen gas is generated but the hydrogen atoms (from the ammonia) are converted into protons (H+) which are attached/adsorbed to the catalyst (metal complex) and reacted with oxygen to remove them as water (H2O).


Every time I read this kind of articles I come to the same conclusion: a lot of blah blah but nothing really new except the type of catalyst. Note also that those articles researchers always claim that their technology is more efficient than existing ones but they never prove that with numbers. It's often no more than old wine in new green painted bags. Thanks to the subsidies because of global warming.

We are dealing here with very simple chemistry and very simple thermodynamics, known already a century ago. Yes, we nowadays have better catalysts but catalysts can't change thermodynamic laws, they only affect reaction kinetics (meaning that reaction goes faster at same temperature, or will run at lower temperature at same speed).
 
You might have noticed, that I corrected myself about Fischer Tropsch (see above:" you right, it is Haber Bosch, not Fischer Tropsch (that’s for Methanol).")

We totally agree about this article, nitrogen is good for nothing and to fulfill the first law of thermodynamics you have to invest the energy for the cracking no matter how you do it (e.g. by loosening the hydrogen from the catalyst). Ruthenium, by the way, is a well-known catalyst for cracking ammonia. You should keep in mind, that cracking ammonia doesnt hurt the effeciency, it even helps to incease it. The energy used for cracking is inside the fuel (NH3 + H2 + N2 has more energy content than pure NH3) and waste heat can be used for that (at least in combustion engines).

Ammonia isn’t unsafer than kerosine, it has different pros and cons. Ammonia doesn’t burn easily and once it became a gas, it is lighter than air, which is a great advantage.

There is no safe way of energy storage for aircraft crashes, hydrogen explodes, batteries start to burn (even out of nothing), kerosine spills over the ground and burns the paxes and ammonia is toxic (but escapes into the air).

The 66 % efficiency can be calculated of the total efficiency (35 % last column) divided by the effectivity of the combustion process (53 %, estimated for a high temperature fuel cell) in the second last column.

For electrolytic ammonia production even 85 % is possible, but this is a quite new approach (I have a quotation for that somewhere, but I don’t find it right now).
 
You might have noticed, that I corrected myself about Fischer Tropsch (see above:" you right, it is Haber Bosch, not Fischer Tropsch (that’s for Methanol).")

....................

The 66 % efficiency can be calculated of the total efficiency (35 % last column) divided by the effectivity of the combustion process (53 %, estimated for a high temperature fuel cell) in the second last column.

...................
You should have noticed that I mentioned that Fischer-Tropsch is for producing hydrocarbons, not for methanol, that's a completely different process.

Not clear what you mean by "35 % last column".

The fact that ammonia is lighter than air does not make it safe.
Nitrogen is lighter than oxygen but that does not mean that we breath pure oxygen at ground level and that all the nitrogen is way up in the atmosphere. Just as good because otherwise jet engines would not work at the altitude that airliners fly.
Same with natural gas, also lighter than air but that does not mean that in case of a leak it only goes vertical upwards.
Ammonia vapor is not only very toxic, but also flammable, like natural gas. One spark and the vapor will explode if concentration exceeds LEL.

I don't think that ammonia will ever be used as a fuel for passenger transport, not in planes, not in cars, not in ships. There may be niche applications like cargo ships where it might be used as a fuel.
But you are of course in title to your opinion.
The future will tell who is right.
 
Ammonia vapor is not only …., but also flammable, like natural gas. One spark and the vapor will explode if concentration exceeds LEL.

You forgot to inform the readers that ammonia in air has a minimum ignition energy that is twenty six times that of natural gas (8 mJ vs 0.3 mJ). The flammability range for Ammonia is 14-33% compared to natural gas at 5-15%. In reality ammonia/air is between one and two orders of magnitude less likely to combust let alone explode.

This just doesn’t come across in your words.
 
The density of ammonia is 0,73 kg/m³, wheras air has 1,29 kg/m³ and nitrogene 1,25 kg/m³, so unlike nitrogene, ammonia is much lighter than air, which definately makes it go up when when a big leakage occoures. Of course, like all gases, once it is completely dilluted, it will mix with air, but this tend to happen far above the ground.

The ignition of ammonia isn’t easy at all, there are special safety rockets for the ignition of ammonia in case an ammonia train has derailed and blows off. The stuff just doesn’t ignite when you shoot an ordinary rocket in to a cloud of ammonia.

If flying with ammonia is to dangerous for you, you shouldn’t be flying at all (except sailplanes) , as there is no safer alternative as propellent. The safety record of ammonia is not worse than that of most hydrocarbons and the risk of hydrogen (explosions) and batteries (fire) are worse.

Edit: about the 35%:

electricity to ammonia = 66 %
effectivity of the high temperature fuel cell: 53 %
total efficiency: eta = 0,66 * 0,53 = 35 %
 
Last edited:
Ammonia for vehicles is nothing new by the way, it has allready beeing used in the 40 th in Beligium:


As far as I konw, without any major incidents
 
Far more recently there was this in Australia;-

 

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom