This is a very interesting study in my opinion. Ammonia has popped up in many articles
during the last 18 months or so as a possible solution to the hypothetical hydrogen
economy's problems. There was some technological progress in efficient hydrogen release from ammonia a few years ago.
I suppose Ammonia (they really need to make up some fancy name like "FutureFuel" for it to dispel the association with its pungent smell!) might become the fuel of the future for most land vehicles that need more range than is economical (regarding the vehicle costs, not the energy costs) with solid state batteries.
Ammonia
could also (maybe in hybrid designs with substantial solid state
batteries) become standard fuel in future military land vehicles
(ammonia stored in pressurized tanks) if it succeeds in civilian
automotive sector long range applications.
The
U.S. military has looked into biofuels and biofuels are also popular
with many conservative politicians in Europe (mostly because they want
to give their farmer voters some gifts), but biofuels make very little
sense. Nature is ridiculously efficient at many things with its
evolution-optimised organisms, but it is horribly inefficient at
converting sunlight into usable energy. Photovoltaic cells have an
efficiency of beyond 20%, while photosynthesis has efficiency of less
than 2%, commonly less than 1%. Technical energy gathering solutions are
more area-efficient than biofuel production by an order of magnitude
(even taking into account the later value added steps till we have
comparable fuels). Utility scale photovoltaic power is now also among the cheapest power sources in the world.*
We should gather energy in poor vegetation
productivity areas with much solar irradiation (some areas of Spain come
to mind, we don't need to go to Africa for that) and use the more
productive areas for food and non-energy raw material production (or let
them recover to avoid soil degradation and erosion).
I reckon from the
current point of view that future transportation propulsion should
be mostly about solid state batteries, ammonia fuels (the latter
often for use in fuel cells) and for both ships and large aircraft; liquid hydrogen.
This would have huge implications for military logistics, but also for very low temperature operation of motor vehicles.
S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
.
*: https://aneconomicsense.org/2019/06/20/the-increasingly-attractive-economics-of-solar-power-solar-prices-have-plunged/ There has been a flood of very recent study publications about the extreme economical advantages of solar and hydro power in pure money economics (even before taking into account external effects). Only natural gas powerplants can compete (if there's a pipeline or gas field nearby). Coal and nuclear power are a waste of money right now, and to build any new coal or nuclear powerplants is utterly stupid. This does put a huge question mark on what the Saudis want "civilian" nuclear power tech for.
The idea to use ammonia as fuel and/or long term storage form of electricity is not that new, it makes sense from a chemical point of view. E.g. you find articles on ammonia fuel cells publishes in 2003.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there are competing approaches, IMHO the liquid organic hydrogen carriers are the most promising. Less problems with storage, fuel cells available....
"Technical energy gathering solutions are more area-efficient than biofuel production by an order of magnitude"
There you have to be more careful: The by far most efficient approach to produce synthetic methane is the combination of a bioreactor with electrolysis (+ CO2 in future?), biological systems have the ability to catalyse reactions at ambient temperatures and pressures and make chemists cry. :-)
Conclusion: Pure biological approaches will not work due to the low efficinecy of photoysnthesis, but hybrid approaches may still beat purely organic approaches.
Ulenspiegel
Well, it's not "energy gathering" if you put electrical power into the process (for electrolysis). That's a conversion electrical to chemical energy process.
DeleteYes, but you have to compare the total energy you need in a purely chemical approach, which starts with the same electrolysis, with the total energy in a hybrid process.
ReplyDeleteIn principle the bioreactor delivers the catalysts and one has to analyse the disadvatage to use some biomass on one hand with the advantages of less actication energy, low pressure etc. on the other.
Ulenspiegel
Catalyst or not, you don't end up with more usable energy than you gave as input. So it's not energy gathering (or colloquially 'production').
DeleteStrictly speaking you use also carbon and hydrogen from the biomass, such a process would therefoer be a haybrid, biomass delivers catalysts and part of the carbon and hydrogen.
DeleteAnd yes, I hope that most of the energetical input comes from RE sources (electricity) in future.
Or from another POV: We have actually two different issues
1) Supply for liquid hydrocarbons in certain fields like aviation, ocean going ships, military.
2) Long term storage of electricity generated by fluctuating green generators.
Therefore, you have to check whether there is a useful solution that covers both fields or whether you provide different solution for the issues.
I am more on the different solution side and, therefore, profer an hybid approach for the liquid hydrogen generation.
I should have explained that better.
Ulenspiegel
The very idea of catalysts is that they aren't input.
Delete---
According to my tech understanding, we should use:
Solid state as the only energy storage for almost all motor vehicles (even some long haul trucks), for short duration/short range flight. Also, most boats and ferries could use battery power. Propulsion yb electric motors, of course.
Liquid H2 for most aviation, for ships and for trains on not electrified railroads.
Ammonia for long haul trucks, long distance busses, businessmen who drive hundreds of km at high speeds regularly. Ammonia + fuel cells would lead to a hybrid with solid state batteries used for short distances becuase there are electric motors anyway.
Many ships (not container ships) could make good use of wind power to reduce fuel consumption without changing routes much.
Power generation depending on region;
+ solar in tropical/subtropical/Med climates
+ wind power especially close to coasts and in flat lands not far inland
+ geothermal in volcanic activity areas
+ waste and sewer (decomposition) gases
+ conventional hydropower is almost fully exploited, unconventional approaches disappoint so far
+ natural gas powerplants to remain for about 10...30% of annual electricity production for decades to come (probably capacity = 50% of peak day demand), including base load where chemical industry needs process energy / natural gas powerplants can do carbon capture and storage easier than coal powerplants and will likely do it by 2040...2050 to reach near-zero CO2eq emissions by electricity production by 2050
+ LH2 operation of powerplants is rather uneconomical, but could be done for strategic reasons
Energy storage/transportation
+ centralised batteries only for super-quick reaction supply
+ vehicle solid state batteries as local buffers, not so much in public electrical power network
+ ultrahigh voltage power lines (Portugal-Denmark-Greece)
+ LNG in places without pipelines to gas fields
+ underground natural gas storage as buffer
Carbon (CO2) Capture and Storage is not economical, from what I have seen. The UK government had a competition some years back and the BP Miller gas field, reaching end of life, was a good potential CO2 store. Pipelines to Peterhead gas power station were in place, but the project was cancelled as too expensive (official reason). A few years later there was a new government project and this time Shell Goldeneye was coming to end of life, again with pipelines to Peterhead, again the whole thing was cancelled.
DeleteCarbo capture and storage is much more efficient with gas powerplants than with coal powerplants. The exhaust gas is less polluted with solid particles.
DeleteEven capturing CO2 from the atmosphere technically - the least efficient method for climate protection - costs only about 100 USD/t.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/cost-plunges-capturing-carbon-dioxide-air
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-carbon-atmosphere-climate-catastrophe.html
Germany's CO2 footprint is about 800 million tons CO2eq.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/klima/treibhausgas-emissionen-in-deutschland
To eliminate Germany's CO2 footprint with the least efficient method would cost roughly twice as much as our military spending. The actual costs of going CO2 neutral competently (and along the way getting rid of much pollution that's causing health issues) might cost no more than our military spending does. It might even cost less than 1 % GDP, less than a year's worth of GDP growth.
The propaganda of big business and conservatives suggests that going green or carbon-neutral is really, really expensive and technically beyond our means by decades. That's misinformation. The economics side of going carbon neutral before 2040 is rather relaxed, deep in the "feasible" territory.
It's 99% a question of whether we want to do it.
This could be the "moon landing"-level achievement of our time if we want it.
I like the Carbon Engineering paper. Estimates include construction, operation, and capital costs. The costs are only for capture, there are no estimates for pipelines, injection wells, or any infrastructure for storage.
DeleteThe capture processes include heating to regenerate the absorbent and separate the CO2 gas. Heating and power for pumps and other equipment generates nearly 50% extra CO2 to add to the captured CO2.
Instead of storage, CE mention further processing of the CO2 into liquid fuel. Some of the processes are common with capture and are paid for by selling the fuel giving the cheapest capture cost. I don't like this because burning the produced fuel puts the CO2 back out.
I guess that processing combustion products from a power station will be better, both for cost and extra CO2, but I don't know. Further processing captured CO2 using mainly off peak wind or other renewable generation to give gas that the power station can burn seems an elegant solution. This may be more expensive than storage but I would put money first into development of power-to-gas.
I suppose natural gas powerplants should do CCS, but the other carbon capture efforts should be about concrete and reforestation (tundra regions, Iceland, Pampa and even Greenland).
DeleteConcrete as the most popular construction material is contributing several % to CO2 emissions, but CO2-negative concrete is possible - and then it could become a huge CCS sector. To bind carbon in concrete is about as permanent as it gets.
I'd love to see economically viable carbon negative concrete that's as durable as opus caementicium (as used for the Roman Pantheon) in my lifetime. That could be among the 20 most important technologies of the 21st century.