Preface. This optimistic article is honest enough to say that the new process of not emitting NOx when using ammonia for energy is a long way from commercial viability, and has myriad hurdles.  This is not the most promising way to make ammonia, the point of this post is to analyze why this article gives false hope, as nearly all breakthrough articles do, so that you can learn to critically think about the dozens that appear every day in the news on your own. I sure don’t have the time, there are millions of these articles if you do an internet search on “breakthrough” and your favorite alternative energy.

Ammonia is a natural gas based fertilizer that keeps 4 billion of us alive, made out of natural gas and also energy from natural gas to create the very high temperatures and pressures required.

So you’re going to use ammonia for transportation instead of feeding people, with 3 billion more on the way by 2050? Really? With the war between Russia & Ukraine taking vast amounts of food and fertilizer off world markets? And how can anyone think we can scale ammonia production up enough for transportation for vehicles and fuel cells that haven’t been invented yet to replace trillions of dollars of existing vehicles. Or build the hundreds of thousands of miles of distribution lines and service stations to dispense highly toxic ammonia?

On top of that, this new process requires the extremely rare element ruthenium, which is both highly toxic and carcinogenic, and one of the rarest elements on earth. Only about half of it is recycled, with just 5,000 tonnes of potential reserves as a byproduct of mining for other metals.  What little Ruthenium exists is already spoken for by other industries such as the electronics industry for chip resistors and electrical contacts, to coat the anodes of electrochemical cells for chlorine production, as a catalyst in  ammonia and acetic acid production, in solar cells, etc.

Only 30-35 tons are mined per year, requiring a great deal of energy.  With world peak oil production likely in 2018, oil will become scarce and expensive, making Ruthenium more expensive as well.  And everything else on earth for that matter, where do you think inflation comes from? Since fossil fuels make everything possible, from transportation to manufacturing to 500,000 products made out of fossil fuels, when their price goes up, so does everything else.

Awful as it may be as a fuel, it’s five times the system-level energy density of a lithium-ion battery, at more than 700 Wh/kg. It takes less time to refuel a tractor than charging a battery too (Lavars 2022).  But fuel cells are far from being commercial, they’re hugely expensive, and with peak oil in 2018, we’re out of time for invention and scaling up.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Luntz S (2022) Wind turbine blades could be recycled as…Gummy Bears? IFL science.

Wind turbine blades are usually made out of fiberglass and half as long as a football field, which makes them hard to dispose of in landfills.

Researchers at Michigan State University to the rescue! By combining glass fibers and polymers made of plants and synthetic materials, a new kind of resin can be made. So rather than sawing the enormous blade into smaller bits and tossing it in the landfill, it will be melted down into gummy bears. Though I’ll take the plant-based polymer bears and you can have the synthetic polymer bears, and we’ll both hope all the glass fibers have been removed… If that doesn’t work out, there are other pie in the sky ideas: make them into roofs for emergency shelters, pedestrian bridges, saw into tiny bits and add to cement or pellets. Sounds like the gummy bear researchers have a clear path to victory if they just add a bit of cannabis.

A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. Built to withstand hurricane-force winds, the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer. Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years (Martin 2020).

Researchers estimate the U.S. will have more than 720,000 tons of blade material 100 to 300 feet long to dispose of over the next 20 years, a figure that doesn’t include newer, taller higher-capacity versions. The blades have no value as scrap (Stella 2019).

Taking apart a 720 foot tall, 300-foot three bladed turbine for recycling can be expensive, energy intensive, and cost more than construction, because takes it high-powered equipment to break down and haul away on specialized equipment. Turbine blades are made of really strong, durable resin and fiberglass (NPR 2019) for a bit of bend, but don’t have good scrap value. As mentioned earlier, it’s hard to get a wind turbine to its generation location, and it’s nearly as hard to take it to a landfill, since the pieces are so huge.

Turbines sit on top of thousands of cubic feet of steel and cement. For example, at the San Roman Wind Farm before placement of the new turbines, the site was excavated to a depth of 10 feet and filled with a reinforcing cage containing 68.5 tons of steel and 18,000 cubic feet of cement. The steel towers were assembled in 65 to 100 foot segments.

Turbines are dependent on petroleum, since their fiberglass is made from finite fossils, so it is a shame they can’t be re-used or renovated to be useful beyond the very short age of oil (Lozanova 2017).

Zaremba H (2021) Could The World Run On Nitrogen? oilprice.com

Scientific paper: Nature Chemistry Spontaneous N2 formation by a diruthenium complex enables electrocatalytic and aerobic oxidation of ammonia”

The researchers found that “the addition of ammonia to a metal catalyst containing the platinum-like element ruthenium spontaneously produced nitrogen, which means that no added energy was required,” according to reporting from SciTechDaily.

While ammonia has been used as a fuel source for the better part of a century, its combustion creates a nitrogen oxide gas which is highly toxic. Scientists have pursued the idea of ammonia as a clean energy source, however, since it’s abundant, easy to store, burns similarly to propane, and emits no greenhouse gases. Plus, it’s efficient: an ammonia fuel cell has10 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery.

The method discovered by the research team at the University of Wisconsin can be used to create clean energy, releasing nothing but protons and nitrogen gas as byproducts, neither of which pose a threat to the atmosphere. What’s more, the metal used in the process can be recycled and reused, making the process efficient, green, and low-waste. If we can scale up this technology for widespread use in the future, it could be a hugely promising advance in the fight against climate change and the global push for the decarbonization of our largely coal- and oil-fueled economies.

“The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy,” Christian Wallen, one of the authors of the Nature Chemistry paper was quoted by SciTechDaily. “It’s not a great economy because we burn hydrocarbons, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We don’t have a way to close the loop for a true carbon cycle, where we could transform carbon dioxide back into a useful fuel.”

A nitrogen economy could be the answer for a cleaner, greener, and more liveable world in the future. Emerging technologies and outside-the-box thinking are a hugely important part of the struggle to decarbonize. While proven technologies need to be prioritized in the clean energy transition since there is absolutely no time to waste, humans are going to have to get creative in order to meet the massive scale of the challenge ahead of us, and to do so in time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. To this end, the brand new U.S. Infrastructure Bill has provisioned a brand new branch of the Department of Energy called the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which will direct $21.5 billion at the oversight of brand new pilot projects that push the envelope on new and innovative clean energy technologies.

References

Kobayashi H et al (2019) Science and technology of ammonia combustion. Proceedings of the Combustion Institute.

Lavars N (2022) Modified John Deere makes tracks as world’s first ammonia-fueled tractor. Newatlas.com

Lozanova S (2017) Can wind turbines be recycled? Earth911.c9om

Martin C (2020) Wind turbine blades can’t be recycled, so they’re piling up in landfills. Bloomberg.

NPR. September 13, 2019. Podcast: How AI is influencing decisions in police departments. Science Friday.

Stella C (2019) Unfurling the waste problem caused by wind energy. NPR.org