Offhand between ammonia and non-food sourced biofuels we should be able to create the liquid fuel we need for farming and a few other applications where electricity would not be a usable.

I wish I had all of those numbers. There are a bunch of different companies working on direct ammonia-to-power engines/turbines/fuel cells, as well as crackers for ammonia-to-hydrogen-to-power. I don’t know exactly what performance levels they’ve achieved, but I’d like to.

With industrial-scale ammonia production, you’re looking at consuming ~12MWh per ton ammonia (fuel + feedstock combined). I believe that the newest, most efficient Haber-Bosch technology could achieve ~8MWh per ton ammonia (that’s about the technical limit for Haber-Bosch). Older, less efficient plants can consume three times as much energy per ton ammonia. There’s a lot of research going into alternative production methods, other than Haber-Bosch, which could reduce energy consumption per ton and, by bypassing the need for hydrogen, eliminate the use of fossil feedstocks and the CO2 emissions that follow.

One commercial ammonia fuel project that is running today is the PowerCube: fuel cells running off bottled ammonia (cracked to hydrogen), integrated with solar, providing ‘uninterruptible power’ for way-off-grid cellphone masts in Namibia. http://www.diverse-energy.com/powercube.php. In the case of the PowerCube, the energy lost from the hydrogen-to-ammonia-to-hydrogen conversions become less important, because hydrogen is not locally available but ammonia is. And they’re working on Direct Ammonia Fuel Cells, which would cut one of those conversions out of the picture, reducing energy loss. A whole whack more information about that project is available here: http://nh3fuelassociation.org/2013/04/25/project-alkammonia-ammonia-fed-alkaline-fuel-cells/

For a local farming economy, like Minnesota’s, this is a big deal: although per ton production costs may be marginally greater than for major industrial ammonia plants, the cost to the consumer (the farmer) will be lower because they avoid the distribution costs – and reduce long-term price increase / delivery risks.

Example delivered costs per ton of ammonia (based on natural gas consumption, not specific to this Wind-to-Ammonia project):
– Small-scale distributed: $154 ($15 of which is distribution)
– Typical Gulf producer: $198 ($65 of which is distribution)
– West Canadian producer: $244 ($120 of which is distribution)
[from Glen Buckley, ex-CF Industries, slide 27 of his paper on Distributed Ammonia Production economics: http://nh3fuel.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/buckley-glen.pdf

Add to the equation the fact that this Wind-to-Ammonia model is designed to monetize stranded/curtailed power, and the economics are better. This is excess power – they estimate that only 10% of the power from the turbine will be used to produce ammonia.

Second, to say ammonia fuel makes “zero” sense is bad maths. It makes some sense, in some circumstances. A few bullet points would be:
– ammonia is more dense than hydrogen: it contains about three times as much hydrogen energy than hydrogen by volume (that would be with ammonia at atmospheric pressure, and hydrogen at 10,000psi).
– ammonia is not as dangerous as hydrogen: ammonia isn’t flammable (at least, not nearly as easily as hydrogen, and please don’t confuse it with ammonium nitrate), ammonia doesn’t need to be stored at high pressure (ammonia is stored at around 100psi, but hydrogen is stored at 2,000psi or more), and ammonia is very smelly, so there’s a built-in early warning system for leaks (noticeable odor at 5ppm, and becomes hazardous to our health at 300ppm) – if there’s a hydrogen leak, you won’t know about it. So much ammonia fertilizer is used globally (about 200 million tons every year), and has been for so many decades, that the global health and safety regulatory system, and training, for ammonia is well established.
– ammonia is more easily (hence cheaply) handled and distributed than hydrogen for a few reasons: hydrogen embrittlement of steel (piping requires expensive materials), existing ammonia infrastructure and delivery networks, losses in storage and distribution (put a ton of ammonia in a tank and come back next year – there’ll still be a ton of ammonia in there) – plus the density issue mentioned above, which reduces cost of transportation significantly.
– ammonia is very easily “cracked” back into hydrogen. This can be done on-board a car, or on a much bigger scale for a turbine or fuel cell generator.

When the costs of making-distributing-cracking ammonia are less than the costs of distributing hydrogen, ammonia will be a good solution for getting around some of the problems we’ve had establishing a successful hydrogen economy.

So, ammonia fuel is not the panacea for all fuel requirements – but can it make sense? Yes, absolutely. There’s plenty of space for different clean fuels in the world.

And, since we seem to have some knowledgeable people in the conversation, how about laying out the efficiency and cost numbers for various electricity -> hydrogen/ammonia -> electricity so that we can compare to the cost of other storage technologies.

(I suppose I could download the pdf and read them, but I’m feeling lazy.)

Perhaps more importantly, hydrogen can also be used in hydrogen turbine combined cycle electricity production as backup for periods of low wind. With this non-fossil fuel backup production, wind power can become a large part of (or the entire) baseload electric power source for the grid.

Enel power Company fired up a 16 MW hydrogen turbine plant in Fusina Italy
in August of 2009, but they have been unresponsive to my requests for
information on how that plant is performing. Perhaps you might have more
success.

Gas turbines are currently the least expensive for construction among electric power sources. I don’t know how expensive modification for hydrogen use is. Enel would have a number, but , again, I don’t know how their turbines have performed.

OK now for the rain, sounds like it takes a lot of energy. But then again at times Texas grid has been giving it away for free at night. So if you locate in the right location, and can get the power that would have been dumped for ~free; maybe that doesn’t matter.