Slashdot Mirror
New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel
overThruster (58843) writes A phys.org article says UK researchers have made a breakthrough that could make ammonia a practical source of hydrogen for fueling cars. From the article: "Many catalysts can effectively crack ammonia to release the hydrogen, but the best ones are very expensive precious metals. This new method is different and involves two simultaneous chemical processes rather than using a catalyst, and can achieve the same result at a fraction of the cost. ... Professor Bill David, who led the STFC research team at the ISIS Neutron Source, said 'Our approach is as effective as the best current catalysts but the active material, sodium amide, costs pennies to produce. We can produce hydrogen from ammonia "on demand" effectively and affordably.'"
The full paper. The researchers claim that a two-liter reaction chamber could produce enough hydrogen to power a typical sedan.
This fragmented "let's try everything" car fuel crap is getting really old. 100% of all research funds should go to electrical storage for electric cars. That's the farthest along and the most accepted. It puts pressure on utilities to use wind and solar and hydroelectric and battery increases help smartphones and laptops and everything else we use. It's a no brainer. The last thing we need 30 years from now are 10 different types of car fuels cruising around.
Though you'll have to wait about 20 min
I'm not sure if I understand the point. Why crack the ammonia to get the hydrogen out-- anhydrous ammonia is flammable; why not just burn the ammonia?
--stinky and poisonous, of course, but I suppose no worse than gasoline.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Pardon me while I pull out my pump...
So I guess there's one less "killer app" for asteroid mining... Technology keeps improving, so we don't need the high-energy/precious metals shenanigans of the 1960s Space Age anymore. We never did!
Finally I will be able to pee into the fuel tank...
They called me crazy for keeping all those jars of pee, but now I have free fuel!
"For a fraction of the cost". There is no money to be made by selling the world something it needs for just pennies. Ammonia is available everywhere for pennies, and I suspect sodium amide is available for pennies as well. This doesn't equal good business when you can still sell gasoline for some orders of magnitude more, and as such you can be damned sure no one will ever allow this to be a legit fuel for cars.
OK, I'm officially confused.
According to wiki:
So, we're going to generate hydrogen, so we can make ammonia, and then we're going to ... use the ammonia to make hydrogen?
Either I'm completely not understanding my own link, or there's a magic step in there which eludes me.
If you're already efficiently making hydrogen to make ammonia,and you wanted hydrogen for fuel, why not skip the step of making ammonia?
I guess the obvious conclusion is that it's easier and safer to deal with ammonia, but my dad used to manage refrigeration plants, and ammonia isn't something you fool around with either.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Catalyst: "a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change."
Yes, metals like palladium and rhodium cost a good chunk of change, but you don't need a lot of them, and you only need them once (per car). You add them in trace amounts to a porous honeycomb-like structure to maximize surface area, and bam, that whole gram of palladium adds $30 to the total cost of your car. Make no mistake, the more ways we have to accomplish a particular reaction, the better, and I consider TFA very cool news... But the cost of the catalyst wouldn't break the bank vs the cost of a new car.
Call me paranoid, but I can tell you a much more realistic reason we don't already have cars running on ammonia - The DEA. I can't buy a goddamned bulk pack of (real, not reformulated) Sudafed without showing two forms of ID, and $Deity help me if I actually need to get more in the same month! On the other side of the meth equation, a convenient source of anhydrous ammonia would make it much easier and safer to manufacture, so no ammonia for you!
I will piss in my gas tank at each rest stop, providing ample ammonia for my journey.
You car may already have a palladium catalytic converter. A replacement catalytic converter may retail from $200 to $1000 USD (and may not be legal in CA) before installation. honeycomb shaped?! they are not, they are in a square grid. They burn up when your car malfunctions.
Fun fact, they retain a value of $10-$50 after they are scraped and are sometimes even stolen right off your car.
Not having RTFAd yet, the summary only commented on the size of the device to release hydrogen, not the size/mass of the ammonia required to drive 300 miles. 2 litres of chamber is fine, but how many gallons of ammonia do we need to carry and what special kind of tank and fueling coupler will we need?
There've been several methods invented to "carry" the hydrogen for H2-powered vehicles. In particular, the AFAIK defunct PowerBall (not the lottery!) concept seemed superior to pumping noxious liquids, though it involved collecting the leftover slush for recycling. I don't think ammonia is much better than the best of other liquid or solid means already suggested.
I agree that hydrogen fuel is just not going to be popular anytime soon. Even if the storage problem is solved, it lacks an existing means of mass production (on the scale needed, anyhow) and it lacks a means of distribution, both of which are already in place for electric. I see the invisible hands of oil companies behind a lot of the hydrogen-mania. Natural gas will still be required, but oil is generally not for electric cars. But they're betting that oil will be the most economical way to mass-produce hydrogen. Sorry, guys, I expect to go with biofuels, battery or capacitor electric, or CNG/LNG in the somewhat near future. It'll be veggie oil, butanol, or methane powering the ICE in my hybrid. Where's your economically-sound fuel cell? Huh? Well?
who led the STFC research team at the ISIS
Clearly this information wasn't intended to be exported from Iraq and fall into Imperialist hands. Someone's going to lose their head over this one.
As I'm not material scientist or chemist I'm just guessing, but based on many of the scientific articles out there describing hydrogen based fuel cells the biggest problem with hydrogen energy is safe storage. While ammonia isn't completely stable, it doesn't explode as readily as hydrogen gas does nor does it require expensive materials to store like liquid hydrogen. Like I said, ammonia can't be called inert, but compared to other forms of storing hydrogen is might as well be and could therefore be a reasonable method for storing hydrogen fuel.
And those who came at first to scoff
remained behind to pray
Uhm, we're pretty close to that already. About 700 miles give or take. Tesla can do 250 easy, some are pushing 300. So a 1 hr full charge stop (you do have to eat, right?) plus another 30 minute stop (pee break) to 50% charge would get you there. Next year, in the lighter Model X a single 1hr stop might do it.
You'll need a new excuse soon. I suggest Miami to Seattle. People are *constantly* driving that route, so if an electric can't do it, it will never be a success.
What are the byproducts?
This article was published Jun 24, 2014, a day later an article states Japan Moves to Fast-Track Cars Powered by Hydrogen Fuel Cells. Coincidence? I think NOT!
Well, bureaucratic idiocy ignored, there is another small wart on this process.
Catalysts are very sensitive to "poisons" - chemicals that stop their catalytic activity. Sodium amide used as a catalyst has a vulnerability to a potent catalytic poison - that being water. A little moisture in the fuel tank, a little moisture in the fuel lines, and presto. No catalyst.
I'm not saying it's not possible, I just don't know how one would keep that pestilential dihydrogen monoxide carefully excluded from the process. It's cumulative, every tiny scrap of moisture kills off some of the catalyst.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
That ammonia's not insanely explosive.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Even a gas mask is not protection. But of course, real cars never crash. That's only in the movies.
Producing ammonia today consumes more than 1% of all man-made power, and natural gas is used as a source of hydrogen. Like hydrogen, it is an energy carrier and not a energy source. That considered, ammonia produced with nuclear heat would be an excellent carbon neutral liquid fuel, and is expected to cost significantly less than gasoline.
1) Find a practical way to use ammonia as a car fuel
2) Find a practical way to turn said fuel into a bomb while driving
3) ???
4) Profit, er, I mean blow myself and everything around me into itty bitty pieces.
Captcha: smolders
They'll sell ammonia for only slightly less than the equivalent amount of gasoline and increase their profits. The oil industry has been known in the past to fix prices through cabals.
Actually, we do. Electric will win in every category that it isn't winning now, with the simple, predictable, and already-in-the-lab advances. Mostly, it's already winning anyway:
Simpler mechanically; significantly better torque curves; ultimate performance, considerably more horsepower for less weight and complexity (four 250 hp motors per wheel gives you a 1000hp 4wd vehicle with more torque than you can put on the ground -- you're gonna need a padded headrest and a massive tire budget); higher efficiency than any other technology, most especially including IC engines; lighter; direct drive or geared drive capable; greener both by virtue of efficiency and because as power sources become greener (for instance, a coal plant is replaced by a solar array), the car becomes that much greener as well; easier replacement; ease of recovery of energy at braking; no need for a new national energy distribution system as with hydrogen or ammonia; ability to move charge acquisition to off-peak hours; quick recharge by pack swap; fully amenable to ultracap power, presuming someone ever gets a decent, affordable high voltage ultracap to market; Agnostic to fuel cells, generators, line power, staged storage systems, solar, etc.; excellent for keeping center of gravity low; easy to produce; no inherent waste emissions (meaning that if the power source is clean, so is the vehicle); scalable to almost any imaginable vehicle from a bicycle to heavy equipment; allows much more practical utilization of petroleum in other sectors such as lubricants, plastics; fibers, synthetic rubber, etc.; and believe it or not, I could still go on. :)
There's only one serious remaining obstacle, and that is power supply, which puts the onus squarely on new storage tech. From my POV, betting that such tech will not come to market seems like a foolish thing to do. One moderately careful look at current battery and/or ultracap research will turn up significant discoveries and prototypes utilizing various technologies that show gains in everything from charge rates to size to discharge rates to longevity and thermal manageability.
No doubt early adopters will pay boutique, small-quantity prices for truly adequate vehicles, but that shouldn't last too long in terms of our current technological revolution.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Fr. Wikipedia:
Sources of hydrogen
The major source is methane from natural gas. The conversion, steam reforming, is conducted with air, which is deoxygenated by the combusting natural gas. Originally Bosch obtained hydrogen by the electrolysis of water.
-This discovery could help your car indirectly run on available hydrocarbons, like methane, w/o the multi-source CO2 production from ICEs or $electricity_source for electrolysis.
A lot of people don't really understand the energy storage problem. Even if storing an ammonia based fuel isn't as efficient as storing electricity directly, it is incredibly more efficient to transport and deliver to the vehicle in question. It doesn't make sense to transport electricity thousands of miles and invest heavily in a distribution grid for it when we already have a liquid fuel system in place. You don't lose a portion of fuel in transit, gas tanks don't hold less and less fuel with every fill-up, and you can fill them almost instantaneously.
"100% of all research funds should go to electrical storage"
And if we find that it is not viable with our current technology? One of our major problems is getting fixated on a single fuel source (fossil), we need to vary our energy sources to encourage price competition & innovation. Electric battery storage may be the future, or electric chemical, or chemical mechanical (IC engine) or ............, there are a lot of possible paths that may be more beneficial than others and we won't know until those technologies are developed and tested in the real world.
The fundamental particle humans are made of is not fermions. That particle is called moron. That is why they are able to occupy mutually contradictory policy positions simultaneously.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because in a world of capitalist systems, that's all that matters. At the moment, I buy 25 miles of transportation for about $3.45 cents.
I'm pretty sure that ammonia doesn't have anything like the energy density of gasoline, and that it costs more per unit of energy. Feel free to show me how wrong I am.
TL;DR: Another horseshit, "we're saved! There's never going to be an energy problem again!" article.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Most people are familiar with the Ammonia that you buy in a store... but it is not Anhydrous Ammonia... it is diluted in water, and even so, you don't want to take a big whiff of the stuff, it will knock you on your butt. Anhydrous Ammonia is pure Ammonia... It requires hazmat suits to transfer that substance from container to container (fuel pump to fuel tank in a car?). It's possible that you could distribute a more dilute formula to "gas" stations, but the effect would be dropping lots of water on the roads as you used the fuel. Do we have enough fresh water for this? Perhaps. Not to mention that the more dilute you make it, the more of it you will have to cart around per mile. Anyway, it is much more likely to cause accidents than gasoline. Don't believe me? Ask a farmer how much he likes using the stuff...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
"anhydrous ammonia spill"
I come from a farming family, anhydrous ammonia is used as a fertilizer for corn and is injected into the ground between the corn rows. One year my grandfather was running the rig and he turned too sharp or the hose became snagged in the equipment and it ripped the hose out of a probably 2000 gallon anhydrous ammonia tank. He realized just in time what was happening and leaped out of the cab of the tractor before it filled with the chemical, it melted most of the consoles and shattered the fuel/temperature/other gauges.
At higher temperatures and pressures you don't actually need a platinum group catalyst to crack the ammonia anyway. You can accomplish the same effect with catalysts like nickel. This discovery could be important for industry (I'm not much of a chemist although I do like to pretend that I know what I'm talking about) but for cars, I'm not so sure. This process is purportedly superior to the nickel-based process, so I'll give them that, but I'm not sure that not being able to crack the hydrogen was ever a dealbreaker to begin with.
Ammonia has been utilized as an automotive fuel on numerous occasions. Certain mixtures with diesel fuel yield a blended fuel that's immediately usable in a diesel engine (with some modifications mainly to protect against chemical damage originating from the ammonia in the fuel) without the need for additional catalysts, and apparently performs well. Ammonia's big problem is that its flame temperature is lower than its ignition temperature, and the flame speed's not so great. Ammonia has an excellent octane rating but as an engine fuel its cons outweigh its pros due to other factors - at least in normal everyday engines working with pure ammonia. If you add something else to it, like a fraction of diesel fuel or dimethyl ether, it burns much more nicely. A specially modified engine that uses waste heat (and possibly pressure in the cylinder itself) to facilitate the breakdown of ammonia and improve its characteristics as a fuel may be possible, but unless I'm missing something, it was always possible even before this discovery.
As for fuel cells, there are fuel cells that directly utilize ammonia. That's old news. I'm not sure whether or not they themselves require a catalyst for the ammonia, and I'm assuming this is true. That could be a step forward.
As for people asking why you would use ammonia as a fuel when most of it is currently produced from natural gas, it's possible - not yet practical, but possible - to produce ammonia either through solar heat or electricity. According to this scheme the hydrogen would be obtained from water, and there are are high temperature thermochemical processes for this purpose that offer potentially higher throughput and efficiency than direct electrolysis. (High temperature electrolysis may also offer a path forward, but a great deal of heat is required either way.) The same process heat can then be used to drive the Haber process, boosting system efficiency. Since storing pure hydrogen is problematic in the extreme, binding it up in a chemical form is much more convenient, especially if the resulting substance is industrially significant in the way that ammonia and methane are. However, synthetic hydrocarbons require a carbon source, increasing the system's complexity and inputs. The Haber process does not.
Until ammonia can be produced economically from renewable energy sources, however, this will not improve things much for the environment or for the economics of transportation. That's the bottom line. Presently most ammonia production uses natural gas as an ammonia feedstock. A better use of that natural gas as a transportation fuel would probably be CNG.
This only resolve a problem related as how transport hydrogen. Other alternatives exists.
But the ultimate problem is that hydrogen vector is too mucho inneficient.
Because hydrogen, or ammonia, is not a source of energy but a energy vector, we must considerate which is the ratio from raw captured energy from a energy source (solar, wind, nuclear...) and the energy that is really used in the aplication. With ammonia, compress nitrogen, generate hydrogen from water, generate ammonia, release hydrogen from ammonia, use hydrogen into a fuel cell and use electricity to move a electric motor.
This chain is a lot more inefficient that use batteries like normal cars.
Could be usefull at niches, like normal hydrogen, because hydrogen/ammonia/synthetic fuels are a lot more energy dense that batteries, but for normal cars that difference is not enough to compensate the use.
Anhydrous ammonia is used by meth cooks. The DEA will simply not allow it to become a readily available vehicle fuel.
It is also used in the manufacture of explosives, thus the BATF will never allow it either.
Just the very notion of selling anhydrous ammonia outside of tightly controlled industrial and agricultural marketplaces is a no-starter.
Kinda puts the DEA behind the 8-ball when they have spent years and pissed away millions of tax dollars tightening regulations on anhydrous ammonia (used as a fertilizer), and now this comes along and promises to make the stuff available at every local gas station!
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Water soluble catalyst. Which means anhydrous ammonia. Which means that your local fuel station is going to be dispensing anhydrous ammoinia in bulk to everyone with such a vehicle.
What else is anhydrous ammonia used for? I don't know... Nothing detrimental, anyway...
Science and Technology Facilities Union...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Ammonia as a fuel checklist:
For those of you not familiar with ammonia synthesis, we make it by reacting nitrogen with hydrogen under high pressure and temperature. The predominant sources of hydrogen these days are natural gas and oil. So, why do we need to go trough all this trouble if we can burn the natural gas in the existing car engines? Have we really run out of stupid fuel sources so we have to consider ammonia?
I think the utility of this idea lies in the cost and method of production of the ammonia. How much energy does it take to make it and what are the byproducts of production.
The sustainability issue with transportation is not related to fuel. If you put automobiles on rails and let a computer drive them,you can go 10x faster on 10x less fuel with no accidents. The biggest benefit is that you no longer need to wait in line at a bus stop or train station. There are soooo many other things that you could be doing instead of driving, like talking on your cell phone. The energy savings are enormous with this system and would pay back construction costs in less than 5 years.
Think of it as tarballing or zipping up hydrogen.
From gas compressed in liquid form using Nitrogen.
Then, unpacking it on the fly, back to gas... you dump the nitrogen into the exhaust, and the hydrogen into the combustion chamber.
The breakthrough these guys are claiming is that they've found a way to unpack on the fly, fast enough to supply enough hydrogen to drive a mid sized sedan, without it costing a fortune in precious metals.
Also, as a bonus, if your get in an accident, your hydrogen pours out instead of exploding.
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
The safety aspects of handling and storage of ammonia are pretty bad.
http://theenergycollective.com/geoffrey-styles/46324/ammonia-alternative-fuel
Gas tanks filled with ammonia + Accident = nasty Hazmat scene.
There was an article or two in the likes of Mechanix Illustrated or related magazine about the US Army experimenting with ammonia fueled engines. Reports indiacted that engines would function, but had not been developed to the point of practicality. Shudder to think what kind of NOx levels are present in the exhaust.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Depending on where the hydrogen in the ammonia comes from, this is a complete waste of time.
Much hydrogen is consumed to make ammonia. Why waste the energy to reclaim it?
Another source of ammonia involves reacting steam with coke to form ammonia and....get this...carbon dioxide.
Until ammonia from other sources is readily available, making hydrogen this way is not wise or helpful for the environment.
When removing hydrogen from ammonia (NH4), we create nitric oxide, which will absorb water to form nitric acid.
What are they going to do with it?
No, seriously. It's much easier to use methane to produce hydrogen. Nitrogen fixation is amongst the most energy-consuming processes, because conditions required for it are hellish. And then you want to use hard-won ammonia just to get hydrogen???
And I don't even want to think about ammonia leaks. It won't simply stink a lot, but it'll easily kill a lot of people.
What could possibly go wrong?
Natural gas, like all fossil hydrocarbons is a finite resource, so people are looking at alternatives. Here's one to consider:
Sunlight + Solar Cells = Electricity
Water + Electricity = Hydrogen
Hydrogen + Nitrogen + Electricity = Ammonia
Ammonia + Catalyst = Hydrogen
Hydrogen + Ammonia + Engine = Transport
Personally I don't think it's as neat as
Sunlight + Plants = Biomass
Biomass + Fermentation = Ethanol
Ethanol + Engine = Transport
First you produce hydrogen gas from a hydrocarbon, which requires a lot of energy, and then you add nitrogen to get ammonia.
It could really be great if pee from livestock and people could become the precursor to people's fuel needs.
Your argument sounds good, but any NH3 that is not converted to N2 and H2 gets converted to NOx (aka the brown stuff in smog) when it is combusted, just google fuel bound nitrogen (FBN)
Don't believe it! This is really part of The Sontaran Strategem!
And will they call it Atmos?
Did the mysterious catalyst breakthrough came from a kid scientist named Luke Rattigan with a mansion outside of London full of Mensa kids?
Sontar Ha! Sontar Ha!, Sontar Ha! Sontar Ha!, Sontar Ha! Sontar Ha!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Your argument sounds good, but any NH3 that is not converted to N2 and H2 gets converted to NOx (aka the brown stuff in smog) when it is combusted, just google fuel bound nitrogen (FBN)
The catalytic converter that came from the factory on the exhaust of the vehicle is already designed specifically to deal with NOx emissions.
I should have mentioned that though. Didn't think of it!
I just saw this other post this morning, about some industrious teenagers in Africa making a generator that runs on urine. Related tech? A URINE POWERED GENERATOR http://makerfaireafrica.com/20...
Haber Process. Strip H2 from CH4.
Energy consumed.
Compress with NH2 in Rayne Nickel Bed at 15 atm..
Energy consumed
Cool to liquid at -80F
Energy Consumed
Crack with reaction
Energy Consumed
Burn in ICE
Energy wasted.
Anyone done the power / transmission / conversion losses for electrics?
Like as in roadbed broadcast power?
Solves the problem with maximum efficiency.
Offtopic:
I don't know where I heard this. I heard that division by zero equals an infinity on a complex plane.
Is above nonsense? I certainly can't find it googling and slashdot audience is the best community for such a question.
Ruptured tank=toxic cloud hugs ground=lethal to persons near by. One reason why ammonia not used in residential refrigerators. Look it up.