[ammonia-guy]

What if any results have you or your collegues acheived since this idea was presented? Any calcs on what maximum percentages of Ammonia can be dissolved in Ethanol/Methanol? Any calcs on what the most efficient ratio would be energy wise vs price wise for said mixtures? I am left wondering if an E-85/A-15 mix would be better or an E-15/A-85 mixture. I beleive it would depend on price of materials, energy density of the fuels, storabillity of the fuel mixtures and a whole host of other variables. If you go for E-85/A-15 you might be able top store it in a standard fuel tank, which would save a lot of tank weight and complexity.

Any data at all would be welcome, even negative data indicating this idea won't work would be better than nothing.

Sorry I've been out of touch Tanada. I like a little impatience in a person.

No, we haven't actually done the mixing yet, but none of us have any reason to doubt that 15% ethanol in anhydrous ammonia cannot be achieved. I honestly don't see any reason to consider 85% ethanol. If one were going that direction, you could use straight ethanol. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we think that "spiking" the ammonia with ethanol might improve the combustion properties in an internal combustion engine. We could also spike with hydrogen, methanol, biodiesel. We recently ran across a paper from the 60s where the investigators ran a diesel engine on ammonia with a little diesel fuel sprayed into the fuel line.

I believe I mentioned that Ted Hollinger of the Hydrogen Engine Center www.hydrogenenginecenter.com is going to report on progress of running one of his engines on ammonia (with possibly some "spikants") at the ammonia meeting in Chicago next month. That paper should be available on the web by the third week of next month.

To Geronimo--

Welcome. Yes it (ammonia as a fuel or hydrogen carrier) is an exciting area to be researching. Hydrogen is not hard to produce, just to move around efficiently. Ammonia, and other potential carriers, give us the opportunity to deliver the hydrogen to the point of use. My favorite production method for the hydrogen (and/or ammonia) is electrolysis.

[Drjay]

I love the idea of additional research in ammonia.

I do remember one experience with an ammonia refrigeration system that had a seal break. It cleared out an entire block. Not fun.

There should be some ammonia transport available as almost all of the US ammonia plants (which operate using Natural gas) have been shut down due to economic losses from excessive operating costs.

[EnergySpin]

I'm glad that people are still contributing to the thread
I did embark on ammonia research for a different purpose (i..e to assess how realistic the whole deal of :" we are gonna run out fertilizers " is), and then realized that it could be used as hydrogen carrier.
Well if there is any merit in ammonia we will find soon; I guess that mixtures might be a less hazardous form than purer anhydrous NH3 but research will be needed for that. In the end it might not work for other reasons (e.g safety), and ammonia will be added to the big list of fuels for niche applications like the hydrazine space shuttle fue which was originally used in the German submarines during WWI.
ammonia_guy do you have any numbers on the energy budget of ammonia synthesis via electrolytic methods? I could only find data on outdated electric arc techniques. Maybe you have more data from Norsk Hydro and hopefully you could share them with us
ES

[ammonia-guy]

ammonia_guy do you have any numbers on the energy budget of ammonia synthesis via electrolytic methods? I could only find data on outdated electric arc techniques. Maybe you have more data from Norsk Hydro and hopefully you could share them with us
ES

I'm afraid right now, at least for modern electrolyzers, we're just making assumptions. Right or wrong, we're using 50% efficiency for the entire process of converting wind, hydro, or other electricity to ammonia. (That is...rectification efficiency X electrolysis efficiency X ammonia production (Haber-Bosch) efficiency X (1 - other %inefficiencies/%losses)). This performance is the big thing we need to demonstate and improve to make, say, wind to ammonia practical. Norsk Hydro is a participant in our ammonia conference, so I hope to have a better handle on this by this time next month.

If you just want to look at the electrolyzer part, NREL has done a good job of comparing commercial electrolyzers. If you want to contact me by PM, I can forward you some NREL docs I've collected.

I agree with most of you, of course. Ammonia as a fuel and hydrogen carrier shows a lot of promise to help provide clean energy and treat the earth with more respect. Not to mention, increasing energy independence down the road.

AG

[Tanada]

ammonia_guy do you have any numbers on the energy budget of ammonia synthesis via electrolytic methods? I could only find data on outdated electric arc techniques. Maybe you have more data from Norsk Hydro and hopefully you could share them with us
ES

I'm afraid right now, at least for modern electrolyzers, we're just making assumptions. Right or wrong, we're using 50% efficiency for the entire process of converting wind, hydro, or other electricity to ammonia. (That is...rectification efficiency X electrolysis efficiency X ammonia production (Haber-Bosch) efficiency X (1 - other %inefficiencies/%losses)). This performance is the big thing we need to demonstate and improve to make, say, wind to ammonia practical. Norsk Hydro is a participant in our ammonia conference, so I hope to have a better handle on this by this time next month.

If you just want to look at the electrolyzer part, NREL has done a good job of comparing commercial electrolyzers. If you want to contact me by PM, I can forward you some NREL docs I've collected.

I agree with most of you, of course. Ammonia as a fuel and hydrogen carrier shows a lot of promise to help provide clean energy and treat the earth with more respect. Not to mention, increasing energy independence down the road.

AG

Maybe my memory is faulty but as I recall if you feed live superheated steam and a small percentage of O2 into a vessel of red hot coke you get producer gas out the other side, CO and H2, relatively cheaply. You then seperate the two gas components, burn the CO to heat more Coke or turn a gas turbine and feed the H2 into the Haber-Bosch process to make Ammonia.

Or has my memory been playing tricks on me again?

[EnergySpin]

Maybe my memory is faulty but as I recall if you feed live superheated steam and a small percentage of O2 into a vessel of red hot coke you get producer gas out the other side, CO and H2, relatively cheaply. You then seperate the two gas components, burn the CO to heat more Coke or turn a gas turbine and feed the H2 into the Haber-Bosch process to make Ammonia.

Or has my memory been playing tricks on me again?

Lol:)
This is the description of the Haber-Bosch process that gave them the Nobel prize. Natural gas came much latter in the picture .... NG is used only as hydrogen source in modern industrial processes that synthesize ammonia.
NG is not burned, just reformed to H2. In fact, synthesis of ammonica down this pathway should not be described as an energy-intensive process. It is true that a valuable source (NG) is consumed but it is not due to its energy but due to its hydrogen content.
There are other pathways to ammonia synthesis BTW: one involves a modification of the Scandinavian electrolytic method employed by Norsk Hydro; there was a research group in Greece that have prototyped an ambient temperature method of synthesis based on Ruthenium catalysts.

Apparently there was a recent publication in Science(or Nature my memory fails me) about this particular method (by a US group).
Isn't science fun? And most of the neo-Malthusians tend to forget science (or at least use only the part that is amenable to their "mind projection fallacies" mindset)

If you search somewhere in PO.com I have posted about the multiple pathways of NH3 synthesis, a fact that Heinberg conveniently forgets to mention to the people buying his books
Of course when he shows up in FEASTA he sings a different tune: "yes but how soon can we use alternative ChemEng processes to synthesize fertilizers"

[ammonia-guy]

Maybe my memory is faulty but as I recall if you feed live superheated steam and a small percentage of O2 into a vessel of red hot coke you get producer gas out the other side, CO and H2, relatively cheaply. You then seperate the two gas components, burn the CO to heat more Coke or turn a gas turbine and feed the H2 into the Haber-Bosch process to make Ammonia.

Or has my memory been playing tricks on me again?

Tanada, if your memory is playing tricks on you, at least you're in the majority.

Roughly, you're describing is what was called the "water gas" process. Essentially, C (coke) + H20 --> CO + H2. That is, steam passed over hot coke gives water gas.

The neat part is that you can then convert the CO to CO2 and H2 using the "water shift" reaction CO + H20 --> CO2 + H2. This is done all the time. A lot of hydrogen is produced using the water shift method.

Water gas (the mixture of CO and H2) was used for heating quite widely in the first half of the 1900s, delivered through pipes much like natural gs is today.

AG

[Petrodollar]

I'm no expert on this subject, but if I were Master of the Known Universe(MOTKU) ...or perhaps just President, I would request several billion dollars to do five or six things simultaneously:

1) Convert one of the world's 3500 super tankers to a prototype 100 Megawatt floating/grazing Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) ship that tests the viability of producing baseload electricity, and liquid ammonia to be used in fuel-cells. But not just regular ammonia, but non-toxic Ammonia-Borane: H3BNH3 I'd also convert one or two mothballed US Navy supply ships to transport Ammonia-Borane as the "feeder" ship to transport the fuel stateside from the 100MW OTEC plantships that slowly graze at 1/2 knot in the warm tropical waters....

2) Make a sweet deal with Cuba that allows us to conduct joint US/Cuba experiments in the exceptionally warm waters off Cuba's coast (78F) to conduct OTEC "grazing" with this converted supertanker. As an added bonus, the OTEC ship could easily produce some potable water for Cuba at no charge, and probably need to provide some percentage of the Ammonia-borane or borazane (H3BNH3) production for domestic Cuban use in automobiles. Probably have to drop the 1959 embargo against Cuba too, but afterall, Castro will not live forever, and Mother Nature is not going to wait either regarding global Peak Oil...

3) Inform GM and Ford CEOs that if they want a gov't bail-out when they go Chapter 11, they must devote their best engineers to quickly building and testing Fuel Cell automobiles and trucks that utlize H3BNH3. Oh, as MOTKU, I would pass 35 mpg CAFE standards to buy us some time.

4) Repeal the recently passed Energy bill, along with most of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and provide tax subsidies to the petro-companies that agree and commit a huge slice of their record profits from now till 2015(?) to energy reconfiguration re fuel cells. Reallocating the billions of revenue from the unaffordable tax cuts, and moving a huge chunk of current military expenses over to Energy Reconfiguration, could facilitate projects for mass transit and energy-related infastructure improvements (with the goal of using less fossil-fuel energy, esp. liquid fuels).

5) As a form of patriotic duty, I would vigerously promote huge incentives to consumers to purchase hybrid vehicles, solar panels, geothermal units, wind turbines, etc, etc. I would stress that we need to use our current hydrocrabon energy subsidy for energy reconfiguration, even if results in lower efficiently (FWIW: OTEC is approx 3.5% efficient, but its renewable as long as the sun keeps shinning) Renewability is the new mantra...

While I'm at it, I might even try to get farmers to grow some biodiesel for localized farm production operations (of course biomass/biodiesal is not scaleable outside the John Deer tractors and related farm equipment, but it is going to get very expensive to continue transporting diesel from the coastal regions to the "heartland" of the US for farm production.)

6) Lastly, I would pray this whole hybrid/renewable system works, has a small but positive EROEI, and somehow get the world community to also spend trillions in "going Full monty" OTEC/Ammonia-Borane/Fuel Cell in an effort to mitigate the imminent crisis in liquid fuels...after which building the huge fleet to OTEC ships and associated infastructure will prove too energy intensive, and ultimately impossible.

(The warm surface water b/t the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer provides enough solar energy for a couple of thousand OTEC plantships. BTW, there are 3,500 oil tankers in the world, and if possible, these platforms should be converted as fast as humanly possible to OTEC...and I should also note that water's high specific heat means the OTEC process works 24/7 - tropical oceans remain warm all night. This broad scenario assumes items #1-#4 were to transpire...). Here's my favorite short article on OTEC:

"Solar Enery From the Tropical Oceans" by William Avery & Walter Berl
http://www.issues.org/issues/14.2/avery.htm

(Unfortunately, Dr. Avery, a professor at Johns Hopkin's APL and OTEC expert, passed away a couple of years ago...but he wrote the bible on OTEC circa early 1990's technology: Renewable Energy from the Oceans (Oxford University Press, 1994).

BTW, Saudi Arabia and the ME need potable water, and their coastal waters are warm enough for OTEC ships as well, so I'd work with Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, India and the other industrialized nations to develop an international treaty re OTEC plantship operations, along with the Uppsala Protocol. That should reduce the probability of global resource warfare, or as Heinberg states, the Last One Standing scenario...

Well, that is what I would do if I were MOTKU...


Here's a technical paper I found on this forum that discusses Ammonia-Borane. This seems to be the best choice for fuel cells, but producing hydrogen in large scales with non-fossil fuel yet with baseload electricity, IMO, can only be accomplished via the OTEC/solar process.

TECHNOECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF AREA II HYDROGEN PRODUCTION - PART II Hydrogen from Ammonia and Ammonia-Borane Complex forFuel Cell Applications http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandf ... 405b15.pdf

This paper provides the second in a series of analysis focusing on the prospects of ammonia and ammonia-borane compounds for use as hydrogen carriers for fuel cell applications. Due to extreme toxicity of ammonia, it is difficult to envision its widespread use as the future transportation fuel. This is despite the fact that ammonia is a low cost, readily available, environmentally clean and very high-density hydrogen energy storer. One approach to mitigate this problem is to complex ammonia with a suitable hydride so that the resulting material is neither toxic nor cryogenic. A class of compounds known as amine-boranes and their certain derivatives meet this requirement. The simplest known stable compound in this group is ammonia-borane, H3BNH3 (or borazane). Borazane is a white crystalline solid that upon heating reacts to release hydrogen in a sequence of reactions that occur at distinct temperature ranges. Ammonia-borane contains about 20 wt% hydrogen and is stable in water and ambient air.

[Tanada]

Maybe my memory is faulty but as I recall if you feed live superheated steam and a small percentage of O2 into a vessel of red hot coke you get producer gas out the other side, CO and H2, relatively cheaply. You then seperate the two gas components, burn the CO to heat more Coke or turn a gas turbine and feed the H2 into the Haber-Bosch process to make Ammonia.

Or has my memory been playing tricks on me again?

Tanada, if your memory is playing tricks on you, at least you're in the majority.

Roughly, you're describing is what was called the "water gas" process. Essentially, C (coke) + H20 --> CO + H2. That is, steam passed over hot coke gives water gas.

The neat part is that you can then convert the CO to CO2 and H2 using the "water shift" reaction CO + H20 --> CO2 + H2. This is done all the time. A lot of hydrogen is produced using the water shift method.

Water gas (the mixture of CO and H2) was used for heating quite widely in the first half of the 1900s, delivered through pipes much like natural gs is today.

AG

Two technologies I was reading about in this catagory were the Coal->Synthetic Methane plant in North Dakota where they convert Lignite into water gas, then reform the water gas into Methane, kind of the reverse of combustion for Methane. They claim to be able to produce as much CH4 as anyone wants for .30 per CCF of methane, which sounds way to easy when I am paying .95 per CCF for state regulated natural gas. Either it won;t scale at that price or the state is letting me be ripped off massively.

The other system skips the methanation process and converts the 'water gas' to electricity via a combined cycle combustion turbine with steam turbine powered from the exhaust heat of the combustion turbine. This is the 'clean coal technology' the politicians love to talk about so much but once again I don't know if it will scale well.

Ammonia on the other hand we know from long experience does scale well and if it is as useful in ICE's as we hope, either as a portion of alcohol based duels or as a seperate fuel material, I think one of those coal gassifiers should be able to make enough ammonia to supply an average city with vehical fuel, especially given that the number of ammonia vehicals will start off small.

[ammonia-guy]

Ammonia on the other hand we know from long experience does scale well and if it is as useful in ICE's as we hope, either as a portion of alcohol based duels or as a seperate fuel material, I think one of those coal gassifiers should be able to make enough ammonia to supply an average city with vehical fuel, especially given that the number of ammonia vehicals will start off small.

Tanada, I like your faith and positive outlook. Plan to use that energy for legislators and rule-makers.

Unfortunately, the coal gasifiers, at least as individual plants/companies, not planning to make much of a dent in USA city or vehicular fuel use. They're switching to coal for the fertilzer market, to re-capture some of the lost ammonia fertilizer market lost to imports, period. The USA interests as a whole, either public (re ammonia fuel specifically) and private, has not convinced the coal conversion plant builders that there is an ammonia transportation market. Who moves and shakes first here, public or private is very much uncertain? We're probably at the "Rome wasn't built in a day" stage of realizing an ammonia economy, with leadership TBD.

AG

[ammonia-guy]

) Convert one of the world's 3500 super tankers to a prototype 100 Megawatt floating/grazing Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) ship that tests the viability of producing baseload electricity, and liquid ammonia to be used in fuel-cells. But not just regular ammonia, but non-toxic Ammonia-Borane: H3BNH3 I'd also convert one or two mothballed US Navy supply ships to transport Ammonia-Borane as the "feeder" ship to transport the fuel stateside from the 100MW OTEC plantships that slowly graze at 1/2 knot in the warm tropical waters....

2) Make a sweet deal with Cuba that allows us to conduct joint US/Cuba experiments in the exceptionally warm waters off Cuba's coast (78F) to conduct OTEC "grazing" with this converted supertanker. As an added bonus, the OTEC ship could easily produce some potable water for Cuba at no charge, and probably need to provide some percentage of the Ammonia-borane or borazane (H3BNH3) production for domestic Cuban use in automobiles. Probably have to drop the 1959 embargo against Cuba too, but afterall, Castro will not live forever, and Mother Nature is not going to wait either regarding global Peak Oil...

3) Inform GM and Ford CEOs that if they want a gov't bail-out when they go Chapter 11, they must devote their best engineers to quickly building and testing Fuel Cell automobiles and trucks that utlize H3BNH3. Oh, as MOTKU, I would pass 35 mpg CAFE standards to buy us some time.

4) Repeal the recently passed Energy bill, along with most of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and provide tax subsidies to the petro-companies that agree and commit a huge slice of their record profits from now till 2015(?) to energy reconfiguration re fuel cells. Reallocating the billions of revenue from the unaffordable tax cuts, and moving a huge chunk of current military expenses over to Energy Reconfiguration, could facilitate projects for mass transit and energy-related infastructure improvements (with the goal of using less fossil-fuel energy, esp. liquid fuels).

5) As a form of patriotic duty, I would vigerously promote huge incentives to consumers to purchase hybrid vehicles, solar panels, geothermal units, wind turbines, etc, etc. I would stress that we need to use our current hydrocrabon energy subsidy for energy reconfiguration, even if results in lower efficiently (FWIW: OTEC is approx 3.5% efficient, but its renewable as long as the sun keeps shinning) Renewability is the new mantra...

While I'm at it, I might even try to get farmers to grow some biodiesel for localized farm production operations (of course biomass/biodiesal is not scaleable outside the John Deer tractors and related farm equipment, but it is going to get very expensive to continue transporting diesel from the coastal regions to the "heartland" of the US for farm production.)

6) Lastly, I would pray this whole hybrid/renewable system works, has a small but positive EROEI, and somehow get the world community to also spend trillions in "going Full monty" OTEC/Ammonia-Borane/Fuel Cell in an effort to mitigate the imminent crisis in liquid fuels...after which building the huge fleet to OTEC ships and associated infastructure will prove too energy intensive, and ultimately impossible.

(The warm surface water b/t the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer provides enough solar energy for a couple of thousand OTEC plantships. BTW, there are 3,500 oil tankers in the world, and if possible, these platforms should be converted as fast as humanly possible to OTEC...and I should also note that water's high specific heat means the OTEC process works 24/7 - tropical oceans remain warm all night. This broad scenario assumes items #1-#4 were to transpire...). Here's my favorite short article on OTEC:

"Solar Enery From the Tropical Oceans" by William Avery & Walter Berl
http://www.issues.org/issues/14.2/avery.htm

(Unfortunately, Dr. Avery, a professor at Johns Hopkin's APL and OTEC expert, passed away a couple of years ago...but he wrote the bible on OTEC circa early 1990's technology: Renewable Energy from the Oceans (Oxford University Press, 1994).

BTW, Saudi Arabia and the ME need potable water, and their coastal waters are warm enough for OTEC ships as well, so I'd work with Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, India and the other industrialized nations to develop an international treaty re OTEC plantship operations, along with the Uppsala Protocol. That should reduce the probability of global resource warfare, or as Heinberg states, the Last One Standing scenario...

Well, that is what I would do if I were MOTKU...


Here's a technical paper I found on this forum that discusses Ammonia-Borane. This seems to be the best choice for fuel cells, but producing hydrogen in large scales with non-fossil fuel yet with baseload electricity, IMO, can only be accomplished via the OTEC/solar process.

TECHNOECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF AREA II HYDROGEN PRODUCTION - PART II Hydrogen from Ammonia and Ammonia-Borane Complex forFuel Cell Applications http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandf ... 405b15.pdf

This paper provides the second in a series of analysis focusing on the prospects of ammonia and ammonia-borane compounds for use as hydrogen carriers for fuel cell applications. Due to extreme toxicity of ammonia, it is difficult to envision its widespread use as the future transportation fuel. This is despite the fact that ammonia is a low cost, readily available, environmentally clean and very high-density hydrogen energy storer. One approach to mitigate this problem is to complex ammonia with a suitable hydride so that the resulting material is neither toxic nor cryogenic. A class of compounds known as amine-boranes and their certain derivatives meet this requirement. The simplest known stable compound in this group is ammonia-borane, H3BNH3 (or borazane). Borazane is a white crystalline solid that upon heating reacts to release hydrogen in a sequence of reactions that occur at distinct temperature ranges. Ammonia-borane contains about 20 wt% hydrogen and is stable in water and ambient air.

Petrodollar, or MOTKU, I commend your energy and thoughts. First comment, if you were running for MOTKU, I would vote for you (provided you had a job for me as science advisor).

Just a few other comments. Hope these don't come off as negative. Sincerely.

For all the well-intentioned press/publicity that espouses ammonia boranes (AB), (and for that matter the "ammonia in a pill" MgCl2 tablets) have produced--those don't provide a near-term, workable solution, technically. And, certainly not on a capacity (DOE estimate to replace oil fuel--40 million tons of H2 per year).

You list ABs as 20% hydrogen content. That's not technically correct. The "easily removed/replaced" (and think of the previous ''easily" in additional quotes) is only about 12 percent, from a practical point of view, certainly not 20%. Taking/exchanging the last 8 percent out of the AB requires more energy than any of us have to spare. Not to mention, the energy required to load/unload the AB. On the other hand, anhydrous ammonia as 17.6 percent hydrogen. No magic required, just safety, re ammonia toxicity.

I'm interested in your OTEC comment. I would agree that OTEC is not dead, but I'm not at all sure it is competitive with modern-day alternatives. For instance , stranded or underutilized wind and hydro, not to mention nuclear in the future, are much more efficient producers of hydrogen/ammonia than OTEC. By the way, I'm a OTEC-to-ammonia fan. I just haven't seen the economics make sense.

[EnergySpin]

A couple of interesting ammonia news:
NREL will be holding a meeting this week in Argonne National Labs
www.energy.iastate.edu/news/pr/ammonia2005.html

[ammonia-guy]

The proceedings of the Ammonia conference at Argonne Natl Lab are now available at

Webpage Title

It was a very positive and informative meeting.

A-G

[ammonia-guy]

Let's try that again

http://www.energy.iastate.edu/renewable ... Mtg05.html

A-G

[EnergySpin]

Hi AG
Thanks for the link ... make sure you hold the Cinci meeting next year in any of the downtown convention centers. Hopefully I can be there to attend (if it will be open to the general public)

Edit:
-----
Any chance that Norsk Hydro will put their presentation on the web?

Question:
I have a hard time figuring out the bottom line of the presentation "The Great Plains Wind Resource" by Bill Leighty regarding the feasibility of HVDC transmission. Can it be done efficiently?

[Tanada]

Let's try that again

http://www.energy.iastate.edu/renewable ... Mtg05.html

A-G

Now that I have had a chance to reveiw most of the stuff under your link I find myself rather let down. I was expecting more facts and figures results from experiments with ICE Ammonia and ICE Ethanol/Ammonia mixtures. Did I just miss it or were the results not presented?

[ammonia-guy]

Now that I have had a chance to reveiw most of the stuff under your link I find myself rather let down. I was expecting more facts and figures results from experiments with ICE Ammonia and ICE Ethanol/Ammonia mixtures. Did I just miss it or were the results not presented?

I understand (and share to some extent) your disappointment Tanada.

First, you'll note that the conference covered a wide range of ammonia issues--production, safety, delivery, and cost, in addition to FC and ICE applications. It was a good balance and a very successful meeting, though admittedly the FC and ICE laboratory studies are just getting under way and not reporting real performance data.

Also, Ted Hollinger (head of Hydrogen Engine Center, www.hydrogenenginecenter.com, and leader of the ammonia ICE work) suffered the loss of a very close family member at the end of September and was not able to complete the initial testing of his ammonia ICE engines by the time of the conference. You'll note from his presentation, however, that Ted intends to be selling ammonia ICEs in 2006. It's not clear from talking to Ted what ammonia "mix" he's targeting. A lot of us are encouraging Ted to try ammonia spiked with ethanol. A small amount of hydrogen is another candidate, as is straight ammonia.

Some good news...Ted is back in the saddle (not to mention his company going public) and plans to give a presentation at the Natl Hydrogen Assn meeting in San Diego in late March which begins to lay out the performance data of his ammonia and hydrogen engines. That is, if NHA accepts the abstract.

AG

[Tanada]

Now that I have had a chance to reveiw most of the stuff under your link I find myself rather let down. I was expecting more facts and figures results from experiments with ICE Ammonia and ICE Ethanol/Ammonia mixtures. Did I just miss it or were the results not presented?

I understand (and share to some extent) your disappointment Tanada.

First, you'll note that the conference covered a wide range of ammonia issues--production, safety, delivery, and cost, in addition to FC and ICE applications. It was a good balance and a very successful meeting, though admittedly the FC and ICE laboratory studies are just getting under way and not reporting real performance data.

Also, Ted Hollinger (head of Hydrogen Engine Center, www.hydrogenenginecenter.com, and leader of the ammonia ICE work) suffered the loss of a very close family member at the end of September and was not able to complete the initial testing of his ammonia ICE engines by the time of the conference. You'll note from his presentation, however, that Ted intends to be selling ammonia ICEs in 2006. It's not clear from talking to Ted what ammonia "mix" he's targeting. A lot of us are encouraging Ted to try ammonia spiked with ethanol. A small amount of hydrogen is another candidate, as is straight ammonia.

Some good news...Ted is back in the saddle (not to mention his company going public) and plans to give a presentation at the Natl Hydrogen Assn meeting in San Diego in late March which begins to lay out the performance data of his ammonia and hydrogen engines. That is, if NHA accepts the abstract.

AG

Can you give us an update AG? Anything newsworthy at all going on?

[ammonia-fan]

Hello again--

I wasn't able to log in under my old screen name (ammonia-guy), so I re-registered as ammonia-fan.

Even though things have been quiet on this forum, the concept of ammonia as an energy-dense, clean burning fuel is steadily moving forward.

At this time, we all have the opportunity to comment on DOE's position and plans for ammonia. Here's the link. Let them know what you think. A-F

DOE Seeks Public Comment on Draft Paper on the 'Potential Roles of Ammonia in a Hydrogen Economy'
<http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage5046.html>
http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage5046.html

[Tanada]

Hello again--

I wasn't able to log in under my old screen name (ammonia-guy), so I re-registered as ammonia-fan.

Even though things have been quiet on this forum, the concept of ammonia as an energy-dense, clean burning fuel is steadily moving forward.

At this time, we all have the opportunity to comment on DOE's position and plans for ammonia. Here's the link. Let them know what you think. A-F

DOE Seeks Public Comment on Draft Paper on the 'Potential Roles of Ammonia in a Hydrogen Economy'
<http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage5046.html>
http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage5046.html

I was thinking about this the other day when I remembered something. You can fairly easily convert Ammonia (NH3) into Hydrazine (H2N-NH2) which is a liquid at room temperature and pressure and has been used as a synthetic ICE fuel on occasion. Mostly it is used with NO4 as a rocket propellent, but hey it works in a more or less standard engine with a more or less standard fuel system and is completly misceble with methanol, ethanol and propanol/isopropyl alcohols.

It does have nasty fumes and can give you liver damage in concentrated quantities, but so will the benzene in unleaded gasoline.

Any thoughts?