Site items in: United Kingdom

Cardiff University Launches Ammonia Gas Turbine Project
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Last week Agustin Valera-Medina, Associate Professor at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, told Ammonia Energy that work is underway on a £1.9 million (USD $2.3 million) project that will advance the frontiers of ammonia-gas turbine (AGT) technology. Valera-Medina is serving as the Principal Investigator of the Storage of Ammonia for Energy (SAFE) – AGT Pilot, a four-year effort that hopes to develop “a unique, competitive technology that can be implemented to support the hydrogen transition.”

Lloyd’s Register: how ammonia can be the ideal renewable marine fuel
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We've recently reported a series of ammonia-fueled vessel development and demonstration projects led by industry consortia. One of these, in which Lloyd's Register is joined by Samsung Heavy Industries, MISC, and MAN Energy Solutions, is developing "an ammonia-fuelled tanker." In an interview with Ship Technology magazine this month, Lloyd's Register provided some new details about this project and added context for their ammonia-fueled vessel development plans.

Ammonia as a unicorn technology and the UK's opportunity for COP26
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The Guardian newspaper in the UK this week published a comment piece on ammonia's potential as a "unicorn technology," which the authors define as a technology that can "deliver a reduction of at least a billion tonnes of CO2 a year." The article focused on the UK's opportunity, as host of the upcoming COP26 meeting in Glasgow this November, to take a leadership position in solving climate change. The authors, all based at the University of Oxford, outline a strategy by which the UK government could leverage existing British business and academic expertise to build global coalitions, to develop, demonstrate, and roll out "the 'hydrammonia' economy."

Royal Society publishes Green Ammonia policy briefing
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This week, the UK's Royal Society published an influential "Green Ammonia" policy briefing on ammonia as a "zero-carbon fertiliser, fuel and energy store." Rather than provide a comprehensive summary here — the Royal Society policy briefing is freely available to download — I want to focus only on four specific figures. These four illustrations repackage previously available data in valuable new ways, communicating key insights around the barriers to and opportunities for ammonia energy.

Gigastack Phase 2 Receives Funding in the UK
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Earlier this week the United Kingdom’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) announced that a group led by ITM Power has been awarded GBP 7.5 million (USD $9.7 million) for the second phase of a renewable hydrogen project dubbed “Gigastack.” According to the BEIS announcement, “Gigastack will demonstrate the delivery of bulk, low-cost and zero-carbon hydrogen through ITM Power’s gigawatt scale polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolysers . . .” with the goal of “dramatically reduc[ing] the cost of electrolytic hydrogen.” The hydrogen produced will be used for petroleum refining, although the project partners have their eyes on opportunities that go well beyond desulfurization of oil.

Gigawatt-scale electrolyzer manufacturing and deployment
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ANNUAL REVIEW 2019: Electrolyzers have featured heavily at this year's Ammonia Energy Conference, which ended today. How much can innovation increase efficiency? How far can volume manufacturing drive down capex? How much could process integration with Haber-Bosch deliver improved ammonia production? How realistically can new, sophisticated strategies optimize variable and baseload power inputs? These technical questions are all important, but none defines profitability. While progress is being made on all these fronts of research and development, major industrial projects are still moving forward.

The maritime sector's ammonia learning curve: moving from scenario analysis to product development
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ANNUAL REVIEW 2019: The maritime industry is learning about ammonia fast. It is searching for a new bunker fuel, and ammonia is one of the few options that can realistically deliver a 50% reduction in the sector's GHG emissions by 2050. The IMO declared this target in April 2018 and, in last year's Annual Review, I wrote about all the reports that were published demonstrating that ammonia could deliver this outcome. In the last 12 months, by contrast, we have moved quickly beyond analysis and into engineering design, technology testing, and product development.