First ammonia-fueled ship hits a snag

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Ammonia is toxic, explosive, and corrosive

It also smells like rotten fish.

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Petrol is also insanely dangerous, yet we seem to manage.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.