Another very bad idea that never goes away.

[NNadir]

Ammonia as a Carbon-Free Energy Carrier: NH3 Cracking to H2 Elvira Spatolisano, Laura A. Pellegrini, Alberto R. de Angelis, Simone Cattaneo, and Ernesto Roccaro Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2023 62 (28), 10813-10827.

The paper begins with the usual fucking nonsense:

In the energy transition era from fossil fuels to renewables, a radical change is happening in the energy system to achieve the decarbonisation target. In this framework, hydrogen plays a leading role as an energy vector for the generation of clean and sustainable energy. (1,2)

There is no "energy transition." We are using more dangerous fossil fuels than ever, and the year to year growth rate for each of these easily outstrips the entire amount of so called "renewable energy," itself a bad idea that didn't work, isn't working, and won't work, produced at a cost of trillions of (wasted) dollars.

The more we lie to ourselves; the worse things will be.

One reason that the hydrogen scam has failed despite 50 years of mindless delusional horseshit about how it's "green energy" is that hydrogen has horrible physical properties, an extremely low critical point, incompatibility with many metals, extremely low viscosity, but the biggest most important reason is that it is not, and never will be on this planet, primary energy. It's manufacture - yes, it's manufactured - destroys exergy.

None of these factors are subject to change.

Thus hydrogen manufacture is an exercise in wasting energy.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

To overcome the issue of the extremely low critical point, for decades people have been carrying on about the use of ammonia as a hydrogen carrier.

"It has no carbon!"

What a wonderful idea! Let's put pipelines all over the world that, carrying a toxic, corrosive liquid, if they spring a leak, will blind everyone in the immediate vicinity, before killing many of them.

Let's switch over to a chemical that drives eutrophication in bodies of water and, for added pleasure and fun, raises the level of the ozone depleting greenhouse gas nitrous oxide in the planetary atmosphere.

Wonderful!

I really don't get it. One reason that the planet is on fire is that people confuse energy storage with primary energy. This is an appallingly stupid idea.

Every day it gets worse and worse.

Enjoy the holiday weekend.

[Think. Again.]

1. Just think of...

...how much higher the growth rate of fossil fuel use would be if we weren't building out the 'renewables' that we are.

But I agree that our build out of non-CO2 emitting energy sources and storage is far too slow and that we must replace CO2 emitting energy sources much, much faster!

[John1956PA]

2. In my inorganic chemistry class, the professor said said that ammonia will combust, but not readily.

The context of his comment regarding ammonia's combustibility had nothing to do with its use as an energy source. However, he offered thoughts about the chemistry of coal and the storage of kinetic energy for residential heating purposes. I have kept in touch with him over the years.

[NNadir]

3. Well, like hydrogen itself, it's a thermodynamic nightmare.

It's also a prescription for the formation of nitrogen oxides, and as stated earlier for the degradation of water supplies through eutrophication.

It is, in my view, possible to produce hydrogen by exergy capture rather than exergy destruction, as is practiced now, but this is only achievable with very high temperature systems, only available with nuclear energy. In this case, the means to address hydrogen's horrible and dangerous physical properties, which make it useless for consumer purposes is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide, preferably to form DME, which has a high critical temperature, is non corrosive and can drop in to replace all uses of all dangerous fossil fuels using existing infrastructure. It's atmospheric half life is about 5 days and it's nontoxic. The major current industrial use for DME is as a propellant in hair spray cans.

However this technology has not been developed industrially, DME from nuclear energy, although it is well known on pilot and lab scales.