> Ammonia is toxic, explosive, and corrosive
Someone I knew died from inhaling ammonia vapors after the system wasn’t purged properly and they opened a valve. Having a whole ship fueled by it seems like insanity when there is fuel that does to that to a person.
Ammonia tankers seem a good test bed for this tech as they already carry Ammonia and dock in places that handle it.
Other fuel cell based technologies seem to be working on scaling up, they can supplement electrical generation for crew before working with the existing generators with the aim to eventually replace them.
Like trains, ships get technical benefits from being hybrid. This makes it relatively easy then to be made more hybrid, plug into shore power when available, add some batteries and, solar panels etc.
There's no one easy fix but lots of little ones. The most interesting one I saw discussed is contracts that share the blame when delays happen. Previously ships would race to their destination and then wait around because if they missed a connection they would be held responsible. Now they can all go at slower, more efficient just-in-time speeds and the costs of the occasional missed deadline are amortized. With fuel savings they all come out ahead so it's a win-win.
>“Twenty or thirty years ago, the shipping industry made a major shift to natural gas, believing it was the fuel of the future. Now, we know it wasn’t the right step,” says Prousalidis.
This sentence confuses me. The shipping industry runs on natural gas? If so, why is there regret? My impression is that most systems using natural gas right now are in a good position.
What am I missing here?
What is the environmental impact of this ship sinking, leaking, or even dumping the ammonia payload?
Anything to avoid banning bunker fuel, and forcing ship owners to spend more for diesel which is cleaner.
> partnership restarted the project with a specially made gas turbine designed to run on ammonia.
And that gas turbine can also run on many other fuels - LPG, LNG, gasoline, diesel, etc.
My guess is this ship will do 1 run on ammonia for the press release, and then will run on LPG for the rest of its life for economic reasons. The original fuel cell design is far more picky about fuel sources and therefore wouldn't have had that possibility.
Alternative fuel? yes.
Greenhouse gas solution? no.
Ammonia will (and does) leak into the environment where it becomes a part of the natural nitrogen cycle. The end result of the natural nitrogen cycle is N2O (aka laughing gas) which is a greenhouse gas 250-350x more powerful than CO2.
Running the world on ammonia, even if logistically possible, will likely accelerate climate change, not slow it.
Reading about ammonia as a ship fuel gives me strong Ignition! vibes. For those not familiar, Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark goes into detail about all the different things aerospace engineers have tried, including some incredibly dangerous combinations. The conclusion for many of the tests is usually along this lines of "this makes a very powerful, lightweight rocket, but the tendency towards disastrous results makes it impractical".
Interesting. This one says it's a gas turbine, but other articles I've seen say there's also two stroke engines for shipping. I was wondering how this would be petroleum free as a 2 stroke. It makes sense that the turbine could be with sealed bearings.
I never understood why shipping decided to deal with ammonia nonsense. It's dead-on-arrival, due to the complexity and danger of it.
We already have a workable solution: liquid methane. It can be synthesized from captured CO2 about as cheaply as ammonia, and we can just use the fossil methane as a bridge for now. More importantly, there are whole fleets of methane-powered ships now.
Methane has a higher global warming potential, but only if it leaks. And this can be minimized, especially once fossil fuel mining is phased out.
It doesn't seem like a great idea to use what is essentially fertilizer as a fuel. Surely this new demand will drive up the price of fertilizer.
I wonder what environmentally-friendly propulsion system wins in the next decade for large ships: ammonia, hydrogen or nuclear reactors.
Isn't the energy return on investment for this extremely low and/or negative? Am I missing something here?
Why not sails? Wind. That stuff
Meanwhile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Saad%C3%A9-class_conta... <- CMA-CGM LNG-powered
https://www.cma-cgm.com/news/5012/maiden-call-of-cma-cgm-iro...
Ammonia too complicated?
Ammonia...this ship could be run on poop...
I misread, and really hoped, it was “first ammonia-fueled sheep hits a snag.” Boy that was gonna be a fascinating article!
Still read this one though probably, seems interesting.
Hopefully this ship of fools runs aground before it kills its whole crew with the first, inevitable, leak.
Maybe try hydrogen? Or beavers? Have it driven by environmental movements, you finance selective steered into being maximum annoying?
2026 is still a very ambitious startup date for this. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has only just approved interim guidelines for the addition of ammonia to the IGF Code (use of gaseous fuels). There's a lot to it, but this is a good high level overview: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/imo-interim-guidelines-safety...
A lot of commentators believe that since ammonia is less inherently safe it will inevitably be less safe in practice. I am not convinced by that argument, and in general if there's a strong enough business driver then anything can be made safe. But what really swung me against the idea of ammonia as a shipping fuel is that the expected cost is barely any better than methanol (which is much more inherently safe) and is more expensive than biodiesel.
The shipping companies have a real conundrum on their hands - do they go ammonia, methanol, stick with diesel, or try to get near-shore and inland shipping onto electric? Ammonia-fuelled ships have to be THOROUGHLY designed from the ground up specifically for ammonia use; you have to be 100% committed to go down that path. Whereas biodiesel can simply be dropped in (you can of course choose to fill up with a biodiesel blend today, but nobody does because you can put emissions into the atmosphere for free).
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.