Can this magic fuel clean up the shipping industry?
The shipping industry is responsible for three percent of global emissions. One of its best bets to get these down is fueling their vessels with ammonia. It releases no carbon when burnt and is cheaper than other alternative fuels like methanol. The catch: building a specialized engine is extremely difficult - and there's pretty much no green ammonia production today. So can it really fix shipping's emission problem?
#PlanetA #Ammonia #Shipping
We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world - and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
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Credits:
Reporter: Kai Steinecke
Camera & Video Editor: Neven Hillebrands
Supervising Editor: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann, Kiyo Dörrer, Joanna Gotschalk
Factcheck: Aditi Rajagopal
Thumbnail: Em Chabridon
Special thanks to Dr. Nicole Wermuth who double checked critical parts of the video and gave background information about the engine concept as well as its current weaknesses.
Read More:
Ammonia as a fuel in shipping:
www.emsa.europa.eu/newsroom/l...
Role of efuels in decarbonizing transport:
www.iea.org/reports/the-role-...
Deep dive on ammonia as a shipping fuel:
ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/sta...
The future of marine fuels:
maritime.lr.org/l/941163/2023...
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:39 Ammonia 101
01:25 How ammonia engines work
04:23 The oxides problem
07:42 False promises?
08:31 What's next for ammonia engines?
09:17 The space challenge
11:22 Green ammonia challenge
14:22 Conclusion
Do you think ammonia is going to clean up shipping emissions?
What are your thoughts on China's nuclear powered cargo container ship which it launched yesterday?
Not holding my breath 😅
The issue is not about if can clean up shipping emissions, the question is if the "lobbies" from traditional fuel industry allows it
Yes it will, if the natural hydrogen developments of late keep going in the right direction. Because green hydrogen will be way too expensive.
No why cant use Biodiesel no need to change engine
I was glad to see the N2O emissions being acknowledged as an issue due to their GWP100 values being higher than CO2's. I am a chemical engineer and I hear a lot of people in the industry talk about the development of fuel ammonia technology, but I seldom see anyone talk about that. It is refreshing to see a video geared towards the general public explain it so clearly.
Many people thinks the SCR is the magic bullet to the solution, while the reality is much more complicated than that.
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It is also barbaric. Efficiency of electricity to ammonia conversion is quite low too. Burning ammonia is like burning grain for fuel.
N2O is considered also in the coming EU ETS legislation
Thank you very much for the excellent questions, it was a true pleasure having the DW team at our facilities :) For the purpose of clarity: When burning ammonia in our engine, NOx emissions are 40% lower than NOx emissions from fuel oil engines. NOx emissions are regulated by IMO and 9/10 engine orders we get today need to comply to stringent NOx emission levels because they trade in Tier III areas. We therefore have thousands on such engines on order and in service. In that way, NOx emissions for ammonia engines are even more easy to handle compared to any other fuel types, and it's with existing very proven technologies. NO2 emissions are more importantly also extremely low, and basically it is no challenge to avoid the formation in a two-stroke engine. We will guarantee that and the GHG emissions reductions when taking N20 into account, and CO2 from pilot oil, are above 90% compared to existing engines, and it can be reduced even more :) All in all the ammonia engine will be a very important pillar in the maritime energy transition, and MAN ES are leading the way, and as the good journalism also showcase - the only engine designer willing to showcase a full scale two-stroke engine running on ammonia, because our biggest competitor doesn't have one - yet.
Hi Bidstrup, thanks for clarifying the NOx emissions part. When you say "NOx emissions are 40% lower than NOx emissions", what is the basis for comparison? Same engine feeding NH3 vs fuel oil for same power output? It's an exciting and challenging process to revolutionize one of the biggest emission source (shipping). I appreciate very much about the transparency you are providing here. Thank you and I wish you the best in this important endeavor for mankind.
Hi, The 40% reduction in NOx are for an engine with similar output.
How does MAN see the mass production of Ammonia part working out? The video made it sound like it essentially relies on Hydrogen--which is being pushed as an alternative by the fossil fuel industry as a means to continue using fossil fuels as it's mostly made from methane and making it with clean sources is ridiculously inefficient compared to using those sources to directly power the grid. Given green Hydrogen makes no sense at a mass scale until probably 2050 after we've converted all lower hanging fruit (electricity, cars, anything else that can directly use electricity), does this end up any cleaner than just using fossil fuels directly? Separately, has MAN explored using electric storage to power ships? Just basically dropping in grid scale batteries in the hull? I know their energy density doesn't compare to fossil fuels generally, but ships are huge so it might not be drastically different than the massive quantities of fuel + engines today.
Grey ammonia wil not be used as a fuel for ships as it incresse lifecycle emisions by 35% compared to fuel oil - everyone knows that. Blue and green ammonia will however be used at a large scale. In 2027 40 million tons of green ammonia will be produced given the current number of ongoing projects which is increasing weekly, and more than 20 million tons of blue ammonia. Upcoming carbon tax which will level out the price between conventional fossil fuels and low or zero carbon alternatives will drive the FID for many of these production projects. Keep in mind the shipping industry is a hard to abate industry where H2 derived fuels will play a huge role Batteries are not possible as propulsion power for large merchant ships. Size would be similar to the ship itself, lifetimd poor and therefore it's impossible. Only possible for short sea (very short sea..).
How about always running the ammonia engine at full power in a plug-in-hybrid system where entering ports and going slow are on battery?
"you're a critical journalist" 😁 go get them! ask till they dripping wet of sweat! 👍
It's good indeed. We needed more of this 15y ago when they were launching the biofuel hype and there was too little pushback.
I saw a good hearted scientist and a good hearted journalist. On the opposite side but both at the border. I had a genuine good laugh at this point!
It is certainly good to ask these questions. But from an R&D point of view I also completely understand the guy from MAN here. They are still testing the engine and catalyst so it is really hard to give specific information about emissions. They either lack enough data, are testing only specific modes of operation or think they can actually do better at larger scale. So every figure you give at this stage is either not representable, is too good to believe or is too bad and will be seen as a "it doesn't" work.
With all the disadvantages mentioned in the video, I dont see ammonia as a solution.
your logic is theoretical.....
@@caddesigncdd7387So is theirs, they dont have the data.
if replacing the most cost-efficient fuel was easy - the world would have changed by now.
@caddesigncdd7387 I'm not just theoretical here. I'm actually practical. Ammonia has lower energy density than the feul it is replacing, it cost more to produce, it requires its own engines, it stills produce Nitrogen Oxides and lower power output, man, tell me why a ship owner would consider Ammonia instead of the Heavy Feul Oil (that he currently uses) or LPG.
@@emildavidsen1404 that's true. A king won't be dethroned without a good fight.
Love the honest questions that are not political focus, keep up the good work and the good focus
The political focus is baked into premise of the video. "Carbon is bad" is the political focus. We're made of carbon, does that mean we're inherently bad?
@@andyharman3022 People release CO2 so yeah you can argue people are "bad" for the environment. But since people cannot run on batteries, that premise is stupid. Everything possible to make our emissions sustainable should be tried before we go towards deeper waters like "population control". I seriously hope that the estimated global population peak of 10 billion people in the year 2100 can be made sustainable and that global leaders don't pivot towards things like wars and "final solutions" to "solve" our climate problems...
I have an idea: put sails on ships and use the wind for propulsion. 😅
That's also under consideration.
Might not be too farfetched as a supplementary power source but wouldn't be able to solely power a whole container ship
Cargo ships will never use that thing, they want to squeeze every square meter of space for containers.
Take a look at a modern container ship. Where do you put them? Sails take deck space, reducing cargo capacity.
@@vylbird8014 yeah unless ships become even larger to accommodate 15 000 - 24 0000 containers and sails, but that will open another can of worms (like canals being not big enough to handle them etc). Also building new ships is a pretty big deal, and shipping companies are replacing them after 2-3 decades. It's worth mentioning that these new sail attachment are bit more compact than what they used to look like.
Although the problems are very well summarized here, I hope there would've been more discussion on the hazard of ammonia fuel. It's dangerous even at very low concentration, like few hundreds of ppm. Even worse in the event of release in that engine room, conventional mitigations like water sprinkler would not work here because ammonia-water contact is so exothermic it creates much more ammonia vapor clouds instead of reducing it. Ventilation might do some of the job but installation of really heavy duty vents (like above 30 air change per hour) would do some dents in the capital investments. Ditto with double-walling of piping. And although ammonia can be detected by smell at even lower concentration than the hazard threshold, the current debilitation of olfactory ability in population level (due to mass repeated infections and lingering effect of Covid) may necessitate more cost-efficient detection measures (you can't put too much sensors everywhere!).
Trust me, at even just 20 ppm (factor of 10 below health hazard levels) you'd have to be missing your nose entirely for it NOT to scream at you that something is in the air. Other than that, your points are factual.
Finally somebody acknowledging the impact of chronic debilitation on the maritime industry!
where is the crew going to go to escape the ammonia cloud that would envelope the ship possibly killing the crew in minutes.
@@kevinchastain727 Everyone going into that engine room needs to use Type A PPE (the full-body cover), though modern engine rooms tend to be unmanned during voyages.
@@kevinchastain727 It MAY not get that bad, because ammonia gas is much less dense than air, and thus would rise out of the way fairly quickly. But your overall point is still valid. A rupture of a tank or a pipe and a mass release of ammonia (gas or liquid) will kill everyone in the area very quickly.
Fun fact, according to Wikipedia global ammonia production from the Haber process is about 230 million t/year and is responsible for ~3% of global CO2 emissions. According to the video, future state, the shipping industry is likely to need 900 million t/year of NH3. I think that we have a fundamental math problem here. Let's start with making low emissions ammonia for normal use before we start finding new uses for it.
Yes, fertilisers like urea is a much better use of low emission ammonia, that’s how they produced ammonia for making fertilisers 100 years ago before they started using natural gas. It’s a well known production method
Yes fertilizer and chemical production will need lots of it, but that shouldn't be a reason to not work on other ways to propel big ships without fossil fuels. I guess it will take still a long time, developing engines for all sizes of ship's. Getting maybe over time a bigger share in newly build ships. Hopefully getting some other extras as a parasail reducing the need for fuel. Enough time to ramp production up.
@@maltekoch1632Fertiliser and chemical production will use all of it and more. Burning it would be inefficient and wasteful.
@michaeloreilly657 of course combustion engines are kind of shitty, but big marine engies are on the top ones of them. Reaching up to 50% efficiency. Big question: What other options do we have? Direct H2 usage via fuel cells would maybe get more efficient but would need even more space, as well as energy intensive storage.
@@maltekoch1632initial use would likely be on ammonia tanker ships which would be the testbed
The US military has used ammonia as fuel in the past, including in the late 1960s as part of its Mobile Energy Depot (MED) program.
not "used" , the US military only "investigated (and evaluated) producing and using" ;-)
Apparently the military saw that the toxicity of ammonia and the added complexity of an ammonia engine when compared to the fuels lower energy value makes it practically and logistically very unappealing.
I’m concerned about the N2 emissions you said 245 times more potent a green house gas than CO2. It only takes a very little to do a lot of damage and having hundreds of these ships out there that leak only a tiny amount each, and that’s under ideal conditions not considering poor maintenance & management means you make things much worse not better.
You mean N2O, N2 is 78% of air :D
@@TheFlyingDogFish NOx gases
@@tjampman No, N2O is the one that is 273x as potent than CO2.
Its like hydrogen, but with NOx and N2O and still uses some fossil fuels.....
There are better alternatives for Diesel and heavy fuel
@@johumm455 Please elaborate!
Not like 98% of hydrogen is still made through steam reformation of methane. It's really trading blows tho. Hydrogen being more energy dense per kg, but huge volumes even in liquid form and needs active cooling, ammonia easier to handle/transport but still toxic af etc. etc.
@@NuclearTopSpot amonia is made from hydrogen so all problems with hydrogen is carried over to amonia. And it is easier to make hydrogen by electrolysis, and a benefit of hydrogen is that it can be used in fuel cells which are more efficient than combustion engines.
@@stian1236. One word: energy density. H2 is a gas, ammonia is a Vapor at room temperature. You can’t put that much hydrogen in a tank. Unless you cool it to crazy low temperature
'how about to get rid of nitrous oxide?' really made the MAN - Employee nervous. Assuming, this hole thing is rather vaporware
higher combustion temperatures lead to higher NOx emissions, N2O may be lower but NOx was the whole reason for the diesel gate, so not a great product to create i would assume. this is fairly straight forward. the higher the temperature, the more gas is going to react with each other. that's why compression igniters have more NOx emissions compaired to spark igniters. as a side note, NOx and NO2 are not two different things. NOx is the group of nitrous oxide emissions. so NOx can be NO or NO2, the x is their to indicate that you can have x = 1 or x = 2. very cool to see that MAN let you in on their development.
Thanks! Thought that too
Since green methanol as a fuel for container ships started last year. I would appreciate a closer comparison with ammonia. This includes costs of the fuel, the potential speed of scaling up the fuel supply, and scenarios where the two technologies co-exist until the better technology wins out.
Add biofuels (for instance, biodiesel) to the mix, although it's more like a local/situational solution where renewable energy intensity doesn't really make economic sense to be used for green hydrogen feedstock (e.g. in humid and cloudy tropics).
The first ammonia ship went into operation in the port of Singapore. It’s the brain child of “Fortescue” an Australian company, a leading in the hydrogen industry. Fortescue also owns “Williams Engineering “ worldly known for the engine technology and formula one Grand racing. ASX CODE FMG.
Nope it's just a relatively small-scale bunkering trial. The ship isn't powered by ammonia just yet. Still very necessary baby step towards the real use and bunkering practice though.
8:58 "... we will not do anything good for the environment, *more importantly* , we will not have a commercial product!" I genuinely liked the honesty in this statement.
Very interesting video. Well done!
That sounds like a Ship crew's nightmare engine room.
Especially during loss of containment. Ammonia's toxicity threshold is so low that it can be dangerous even at very low concentration (like few hundreds of ppm). It's much bigger hazard than that of fire or explosion (it burns relatively very slowly after all). Even worse, unlike diesel fuels, low-sulfur fuel oil, and methanol, water sprinkler as mitigation is useless here because ammonia will vaporize and form even thicker cloud when in contact with water!
For sure
We stopped using ammonia as a refrigerant for a reason... Small leaks in confined spaces will kill people.
Not only is a lot of ammonia needed, but it has to either be refrigerated or kept at over 120 PSI (8 atm) to be stored as a liquid. You can't just build an odd shaped bunker to store it. Its fumes are also extremely toxic.
Our biggest obstacle is asking "what else can we burn in the engine" rather than "what better ways can we use to propel the ship". A paradigm shift, if you will. Ships are already mostly powered by diesel-electric drivetrains, i.e. the diesel engine drives a alternator only, and electric motors propel the ship. It seems to me our efforts are much better spent finding a suitable fuel that works well in a fuel cell. That eliminates a lot of the difficulties of trying to make a new fuel work with existing propulsion systems.
Current gas-steam turbine combination can get up to 60% efficiency and they can work on much cleaner burning LNG and LPG. Add new advancements in screws and electric motors, and, possibly, some sails, better hydro and aerodynamics would make a ton of difference. IMHO, fighting for every % of efficiency is much more, well, efficient, then diving into some obscure and expensive fuel technologies.
Diesel electric propulsion has a worse efficiency than standard low speed 2 stroke diesel engines. At the moment these engines are the best we have. Not saying it’s good enough tho. But that’s where dual fuel comes in to make these engines even better. Also diesel electric propulsion is not typically used in the merchant navy. You really only see it in ferries and cruise ships, the latter is btw something we can get rid of when comes to easy emission reduction.
@@giantdwarfulf You're missing my point: replace the diesel generator in a diesel electric drivetrain with a fuel cell. This is already happening on mines (lots of mining equipment were diesel electric too), but they have the luxury of having space for solar/wind farms and hydrogen electrolysis.
People are really putting a lot of effort into keeping consumerism guilt free. Do all of these goods need to be shipped in the first place? Working late so I can afford to pay for my coffee, so that I can work late. Very well produced video as always!
I personally don't ever see that day coming that home electronics would be made locally everywhere. Currently, the phone you have in your pocket, the clothes you wear, and the TV you are watching this on, has all arrived to you on a container ship coming from Asia
It's not just consumerism, its the logic of globalization which postulates that poorer countries have a comparative advantage of very cheap labor and therefore most manufacturing needs to happen overseas.
Beeing shipped is the most energy efficient way of transport. With biggest ships it can be just 5% of the emissions of a truck. Taking your phone 1000km by truck through europe can be more emissions as shipping it 20.000km from taiwan. With specialed manufacturers there are not enough fabrication points to space them near each customer. As well minerals have to been transported lowering emissions for that is a good point.
@@blackkissi The conundrum. Return to local manufacture removes the large shipping needs though at a cost. A proportion of the "goods" being shipped is useless crap but purchased by consumers wanting the ability to have useless crap. The move to containers opened up the market for the useless crap (before, cargo shipped in smaller quantities was only that required). In the end the greater than 9 billion world population want the opportunity to purchase useless crap so more ships will be needed and the fuel source remains the issue (in a "green" sic world). The article appears to suggest that it still has a long way to go.
@@blackkissi Sure, the question is: do you always need the newest phone or gadget? Same for clothing, …
Ammonia can be clean if it is made through renewable energy (green hydrogen). This is one of the biggest issues of ammonia
Can be in theory, yes - but for that to be financially viable, it needs that renewable energy to be so cheap it's practically free. That's an economic problem, not technical: No solution for saving the world from the effects of climate change can be considered viable unless it is also price-competitive. Those are just the rules we currently work under.
That's one part of the equation the other is the pollutants at the tail pipe as discussed in this video. While this company has a nice little animation and at least a somewhat working catalytic reactor, no one has actually been able to create a viable reactor for ammonia fuel yet. The one in this video only works on only 1 cylinder and only at full load on the engine and is the size of a car itself. Not exactly viable if it only really works at full load on the engine, or if it's 4 times the size...
So you use lots of energy to make hydrogen, then you use lots of energy to make amonia, then you get many times less caloric energy out of that fuel than oil. I am wondering if burning oil in the first place would be better, rather than building all of that infrastructure and spending all of that energy. Its only 3% of global emissions. Maybe we should focus this energy and resources into more polluting sectors like house insulation or agriculture or cement and steal production.
@michasosnowski5918 All the sectors are very small when compared to transportation, which accounts for 74 percent of total emissions. So, we need a viable long-term solution for transportation.
@@hrushikeshavachat900 I dont know where you get your numbers, but quick google search tells me that transportation accounts for one fifth of global emissions, and three quarters of that is road transportation. So shipping accounts for less than 5 %, I think they were talking about 3% in the material. Again, we need to focus energy on more polluting sectors.
I like the guy that gave you the tour of the engine. Excellent disposition and honest.
so interesting and frank and clear the description .. the decarb route is still long and plenty of untold stories.. Thank You
energy for shipping industry is a real tricky one, obviously the best answer is nuclear but thats probably the hardest to do(not for technical reasons though, mostly political ones)
perfectly safe option, good idea! vote @vincentgrinn2665 for president!
Nuclear is already having trouble on land where it benefits from economies of scale and has way smaller prolifiration risk. It has obvious benefits for carriers and submarines but I can't see it ever getting traction in a worldwide commercial shipping context.
Also from a security point of view.
@@E1Luchhaving trouble in backward countries
Nuclear or hydrogen fuel cells
6700 hp is actually quite inadequate for a commercial freighter. Multiply by six or eight, and we're talking turkey...
Thanks for digging into this and not just marketing it :)
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@@DWPlanetA I thought I had - done
Thanks for the update on the search for solutions for fueling the world's shipping. Ammonia does not sound great but it sounds better than pure hydrogen. According to Forbes, about 40% of shipping is for moving fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas). Hopefully, when that needs disappears the amount of a substitute fuel, such as ammonia, will be reduced from the huge amount (800-900 million tons) mentioned in the video.
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Great journalism, even got acknowledged at 7:33 ❤
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@@DWPlanetA That comeback was awesome! "We are not marketing people." :D
Bio-methanol can be way less expensive than e-methanol because it doesn't need DAC, according to IRENA. It can use any biomass feedstock as opposed to ethanol that needs food crops for fermentation, but I'm not sure just how much biomass carbon is theoretically available or if we have proper reactors for it on the market yet. Its way easier to store and burn though and some big ships that can use it are in operation already.
The words Bio-mass, and fuel, don't go together. Bio-mass undergoes such a tiny energy fluxrate that there is simply no way to use biomass to replace fossil fuel. Only nuclear-thermal production of synthetic fuel can come anywhere close to the scalability necessary to replace fossil fuel. But you would still be talking dramatic amounts of new infrastructure. It just happens to be the smallest cost and impact of all the alternatives that require new infrastructure. That said, it can only happen if the NRC is abolished and nuclear regulation authority reverts to DE in a comparable capacity to how it was run prior to the creation of the NRC and the intentionally anti-nuclear regulation paradigm that was created by the sierra club and their cooperators.
@@alexanderx33 "Energy fixtrate" makes absolutely no differenece here, the only thing that matters is how much carbon atoms can be provided. Its not like hydrogen or ammonia come without the need for massive ammounts of electricity during their production either. Also to me it doesnt really matter what powers the process as long as its clean and cheap, but you drastically overestimate how expensive or environmentally damaging renewables are. Some utility scale solar PV installations can now produce energy at 1 cent per kwh, and heat storage for lower-temperature industrial processes is cheap if even needed in the first place. If you're worried about the land needs - first of all, its not that much (recheck your calculations), and second, wind turbines dont take much space at all. And not, their impact on birds is miniscule comared to other causes, such as impacts with duildings, and most importantly CATS. Literally household cats.
Might work in substitutionary basis but not the one that will do the hard carry since the ceiling of total production scale would be too low relative to the demand.
@E1Luch Fluxrate, not fixrate. Although i can kind of understand how they would be related. It means flow per unit area. I was talking about biomass, not ammonia. Because plants are very work intensive and inefficient. The only reason we farm is to convert energy from light and inedible chemical energy into edible chemical energy. As a Source of energy, it's a net negative, ie its not even an option, let alone one of the alternatives. We take advantage of waste biomass because we need to get rid of it anyway, not because it is preferable to primary energy sources.
@E1Luch The issue with wind and solar is two fold (land use is just an incidental benefit of concentrated energy, not the main reason). 1. Time distribution. Hydrogen producing electrolysis in a usably efficinent form requires a continuous source of power and becomes unviable with supply variation. And most other energy consuming activities are the same way including the utility market, though those can live with reduced supply whereas hydrogen just doesn't pencil out period. 2. There is scalability, and there is scalability. PV panels and wind turbines both reach a overall production limit set by the available materials to produce them. Nuclear simply doesn't have that problem, particularly for atmospheric pressure designs that do not require massive containment superstrucures to protect against steam flashing. (these are the main concrete and steel intensive parts of a PWR plant). There is so much less material to deal with.
My bet is on high temperature latent heat Batteries equipped with TPV cells powering ships in the future. At upwards of 1MWh /m2 (around 700kg) when carbon (solid, like graphite) is the thermal mass. That means you can store upwards of a GWh in 10x10x10m of carbon thermal mass. For weeks. @ about $5 per KWh capacity. I think it'll beat anything else on cost, safety and probably every other conceivable metric including the expected lifetime of the battery and the motor.
As usual the journalistic work is of great quality and a very good balance of praise and criticism has been found! One point that would deserve clearing if I may, I would have like to hear some parallels between Ammonia as a fuel and Hydrogen. Like you actually use Hydrogen to produce the Ammonia, so it is not clear to me why not using hydrogen in the first place at this point. I imagine there's a reason for that not being the case? (Higher calorific capacity of Ammonia compared to H2? NH3 less explosive than H2? Although it's toxic which is not great either) I think it would have been important to make parallels with H2 as it's also a type of fuel in full swing in terms of development of green fuels.
They should not assume that shipping volumes will remain constant. As transportation gets more expensive, it should drive some level of re-localization.
exactly. think out of the box. How to lower tansportation costa with local production
Can be a part of the solution, but big ships are extremely energy efficient. Getting to 5% the emissions per Ton and km as a truck. A km with a truck can have the same emissions as shipping 20km the same weight. With that the emissions and costs of transporting a bike from portugal to germany can be higher then from taiwan. Making production more Regional can although push to smaller factories which are less fine tuned. Pushing emissions up. A lot of the time transportation from asia isn't a big part of the over all emissions.
I want to see this in Miata
This is one of the very few videos where I've seen someone talk more about the exhaust products of new fuels. Just saying "it's carbon neutral!" isn't good enough, if we will be producing H2O or NOx as a new waste product on massive quantities we need to measure the effects, otherwise in 200 years we'll have to start saying "it's almost NOx neutral!" and trying to sell diesel engines again. It's good to be optimistic, but be can be willfully oblivious. Good work!
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We are heading towards the wall at 100km/h, and we dont think about slowing down, we only think about having better, safer car with more airbags and clean exhaust. Maybe we should buy less?
Don't worry, we'll buy much less soon. Looks like we may not even be buying food! 🤣
you could also, idk, use nuclear power. just a thought.
look into the NS Savannah and why it didn't catch on
@@dnltbrca economicaly unviable as a result of hybridized design between cargo and passenger ship.
great research and context. tech stuff is well explained. thanks DW
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This is journalism as it always ought to be. Well done!
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Amônia é muito tóxica. Vão usar em transportes assim mesmo?
Even oil and natural gas are toxic. So, it doesn't matter.
Pouco provável. A Maersk, por exemplo, já se decidiu pelo metanol. A amônia é a aposta das petroleiras, nas linha do hidrogênio.
@@sergcerq metanol tbm é tóxico. Mas deve ser menos q a amônia.
@@mtsbr78 bem menos, não muito diferente dos combustíveis fósseis.
let's replace a carcinogenic fuel with a highly toxic fuel. what could go wrong? also it's extremely energy intensive to make the fuel. is zero CO2 the only advantage or am I missing something. Imagine if a ship was damaged in port and the contents of the ammonia tanks leaks out into the surrounding area.
As a marine engineer, I think I’d rather deal with small MSRs than ammonia.
Thank you for calling out tha guy and honest muli angle journalism. We need more of that especially when others aren't. That says something if the correct data had to be privately collected by a heli
China launched nuclear powered cargo ship yesterday.
It seems too challenging to me in all aspects
Mind that conversion of coal as bunker fuel to oil fuel just after the turn to 20th century was also very challenging since it totally threw out the previous assumptions in the industry (and naval) practice back then, yet they did it nonetheless.
@@lontongstroong but this is also challenging regarding how green, healthy and efficient is.
South Australia has just started a Hydrogen district in anticipation of the demands described here. We now have the problem of the grid not being able to handle all the energy produced by roof top solar so putting that into green Hydrogen has great appeal along with some interesting ideas to produce Hydrogen from Methane with a solid Carbon out put!
Thanks, yes it may well come to fruition. Ammonia is a really nasty product to handle and any leak will be very hazardous which is why it would be very difficult to transition to cars. An Ammonia leak at sea in an enclosed engine room would be a serious problem. I have worked with Ammonia,as a solution in water, so actually the hydroxide, and we used it in a SNCR process(selective non catalytic reduction) to reduce NOx from high temperature combustion plant, the lower exhaust temperature from an Ammonia engine engine however requires a catalyst.
Always is the focus on fossil fuels which is undeniably a big issue and environmentalist already agree on this, but almost never do we talk about animal agriculture which is the leading cause of biodiversity loss and many other issues while it's importance still is heavily denied amongst environmentalist.
Did you see what happend when the EU wanted to impose restrictions on farming?😅 It should be said It was a problem that many other factions joined the farmers, so it wasn't just farmers in these protests. I do agree that farming is a big issue. In Denmark, some of our fjords are dead, and the pollution of our waters in the south is extreme. Due to the rivers from Germany and Poland that ends in these waters. It's also stupid that we kill the ocean in the idea that we need more food when the ocean is full of food. We should be better at living in symbiosis with nature and not destroying it.
I haven't heard a single environmentalist denying the impact of animal agriculture
@@TheSteakLP Most of them still eat animal products while media platforms endlessly criticize fossil fuels and almost never talk about our animal consumption.
The impact of animal agriculture is largely a multiplier effect for the impacts of grain agriculture because that's what animals in confinement are fed.
@@TheSteakLP Some people just make up scenarios in their head to argue against.
Green ammonia costs too much to produce, and the electrolysis method requires huge amounts of electricity. Just use the oxygen and hydrogen from the electrolysis method and feed that into a hydrogen fuel cell.
Catalytic reduction reactor- struth, how big would this need to be on a full size container type ship? Doesn't sound like it will get off the ground in practice. Its electricity production that's the big emitter in the scheme of things.
I would have thought that ammonia would have been more effectively used in a fuel cell with direct conversion to electricity. I suspect that a more practical approach would be to cruise at reduce speeds, improve hull forms and use Rankine cycle external combustion engines to give clean combustion.
pressurised combustion to a high voltage electrical charge could layer bi-products and increase thermal mass. then you could liquidise the bi-products and store it to process into concrete and lime-based wall plaster as they do in rubbish burning facilities..
Many problems to overcome but biggest issue is that the international shipping industry is largely unregulated with most ships flying "Flags of convenience" of 3rd world countries and using underpaid poorly trained crews and chasing the lowest possible cost above all else. I can't see them adopting a more expensive fuel technology and even worse managing the very high risks associated with it safely.
Apparently someone has forgotten that there are already very effective automatic sail structures for such ships, and these costs pale in comparison to ammonium.
The guy said that a huge amount of ammonia would be needed for increased growth in shipping. But the amount of shipping should go down substantially because there will be fewer ships transporting fossil fuels. And the amount of methane being shipped will go down because the methane will be replaced by green hydrogen made by electrolysis on location. Instead, the hydrogen needed to make ammonia will come from electrolyzers instead of fossil fuels.
Check out Hyliion - it can use Ammonia for one leg of the trip, Hydrogen for the next, Diesel for the next, CNG for the next ... up to 20 different fuels in one Carnot cycle heat-engine linear generator.
If the requirement for higher combustion temperatures means that engines have to be working at or near full power, I can see only 2 alternatives for port manoeuvring or slow river passages:- 1. Multiple engine installations with engines stationary until needed for use as in the Fell railway locomotive (which was a failure) but possibly with electric drive it might be viable. 2. Individual cylinders cut out until needed- I think Mercedes might have done this with some car engines. There are other considerations too. If "green" hydrogen has to be used as a feedstock, might it not be more efficient to use that directly and also eliminate Nitrogen Oxides completely? There is also the fact that ammonia is really nasty stuff. I was on one ship with a liquified ammonia cargo and during gas freeing operations the accommodation was flooded with the stuff, killing my potted plants overnight, in addition to the difficulty everyone had breathing. One further thing that bothers me regarding any replacement for fossil fuels- If the oil refineries have to close, where do the lubricating oils that will be needed for any type of engine or rotating machinery come from?
Actually whats really happening in river passages is much simpler. They will use conventional fuel in the same engine without the need for additional installations. That’s why imo these dual fuel engines really only exhibit their full potential if used on long trading routes where you can run ammonia in this case for an extended period of time. I’m working on a ship with an LPG powered dual fuel engine, more specifically powered by propane. In river passages we use diesel instead of gas. If you look at the numbers the time when the engine runs on diesel very short in comparison. Two weeks at sea with gas and pilot fuel (usually heavy fuel oil, except inside emission control areas) as mentioned in the video, compared to 5-6 hours of river passage.
We used to use the wind to propel ships. No pollution there, so we started to burn coal and oil so that we could help to heat the earth up. What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?
Really nice journalist work👏
I am not even sure your correction is correct at 4:16! If that is a 2 stroke crosshead engine similar to regular marine diesel engines, and that is the crankshaft you are looking at, that is just a connecting rod. The piston rod would be a couple of meters above you! Yeah, you are right about those engines being big!
The technical engine problems seem to stem from using a reciprocating engine. A couple of continuous-combustion options come to mind: (1) Burn the ammonia, make steam, drive steam turbines. Everything beyond the combustion is very well understood. (2) Burn some ammonia in some variant of a gas turbine. Have these been tried?
Really useful for a report I am wriitng - thank you. I worry that companies are deciding on one kind of tech solution and then ignoring the downsides because of market pressures. This should be sorted globally for what is best for the planet, not a shipping company. Also ammonia is a serious threat to wildlife and we depend entirely on health oceans for our weather, food and transport of goods.
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Can vanadium flow bayterries be used in shipping and trains?
no, not effectively
Sounds like a lot of problems to overcome. Once the US is on its knees politically and economically, the Belt and Road railways already make much of the shipping obsolete. Part of the remaining shipping will cross the North Pole, reducing sea miles further still. It's easier to power the ships on hydrogen and make them fuel cell/electric. For floating objects without road and size limiting restrictions, large hydrogen storage tanks are less of a problem. In that way, the hydrogen needed to make ammonia can be used directly and the energy needed for the NH3 fusion can be spared.
Really great episode. It makes me think of the Opel delivery vehicle that runs on hydrogen or ammonia. If any country will figure out the engineering, let's hope it's Germany and Namibia working together.
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I missed some cost reduction measures for the ammonia production as well as highlights of the ongoing gigantic projects, i.e. in Egypt.
You know what would help shipping emissions? Shipping less stuff! Bring local manufacturing back.
Hope you like paying more for stuff...
It also requires energy to produce and store/transport NH3
Ammonia can be produced directly via Water electrolysis, Without using Habber Bosh process. Note, This does not 1st convert water into Hydrogen and then Hydrogen into ammonia. Insted this directly converts, Water + N2 + electricity = NH3 + O2. This is completely green if we use Green electricity. This method is used still in Lab environment. But can be commercialized soon. Note- This method was there for very long time but it's efficiency was very low, so it didn't made any economical sense. But recently, its efficiency is increased to mote than 90%.
Do you have any links or anything? Does that method have a name? I haven't heard that before but I would be interested to learn more.
Saw a few papers on that, super low TRL though (like TRL 1 or at best 2).
Ammonia 18-20 Million tons of ammonia tons annually is traded in ships around the world.
Nuclear engines for ships have existed since the late 1950s. I wonder if this would be more effective considering they have 0 emissions and the ships can go without fueling for year/s.
Thank you! Someone else here with some sense, sir
Good information! Maybe smaller ships electrically driven are a way forward??
LNG has the "green"-er marine fuels first mover advantage, which could be important. Some are also excited about exhaust scrubbers. Hydrogen could be a winner for some applications, due to the potential to generate it _in situ_ for local remote/off-grid use, but probably not the best for shipping. Nuclear could work for these enormous new tankers & bulk carriers, though there are political, technical & even supply chain risks.
I keep seeing large variations in the percentage of emissions from world shipping. Anywhere from 1% to 12% depending on who you follow. Is there a Definitive study that gets to the heart of the matter?
They are testing ammonia in train engines in some mines in Australia.
Wait, don't higher temperatures lead to more Nitrogen Oxides formation generally? Is that errata in the video? Or is that relating specifically to catalytic reactors requiring higher exhaust temps to work (hence why they can't be used on diesel engines)?
All that really needs to be done is to refine existing fuel more thoroughly. I was on a cruise ship last week and when it was leaving port the exhaust was almost invisible- but once offshore and out of the emissions control area, they shifted to the cheapest bunker fuel and the hazy smoke got ten times worse. Rether than waste energy making a violently toxic fuel in an inefficient process, modest changes to the existing infrastructure will have great effects. Hell, just scrubbing the exhaust with seawater with no change in the fuel would take the nutrients from the air and put them into the water where the palnkton with bloom, feeding the entire food chain.
Industrial sail freight anyone? Will take a bit longer to get there, but possibly the biggest win in emissions reduction. I've seen some concepts of wind-aided container freight years ago, wonder how those designs are going.
Desperately following every potential hope in the energy transition, has really made me appreciate the '99% Perspiration', in Edison's remark. Engineering, materials science, chemistry, the whole matter seems solved with the birth of the great idea, but watching, solar panels, batteries of every sort, try to make that idea work, at lab level, then that, might not work at prototype, then industrial scale...and then it's just a little too expensive.
While you can try to combust ammonia, you can also pass it through a fuel-cell to produce electricity to drive very efficient electric motors anywhere on the ship. I really wonder how that compares to combustion.
One option for ammonia production is to use high temperature nuclear reactors. Instead of making electricity they could use thermochemical reactions to get hydrogen and then make ammonia.
No mention of ammonia fuel cells to power electric motors: combustion is inefficient, fuel cells avoid nitrogen containing by-products. No mention of using a catalyst to convert NH3 TO H2 for either.
I would guess that fuel cells have a worse weight/power ratio. But it would have been great for them to go into this. Maybe fuel cells could be more efficient than ICE?
@@alandpost Hydrogen fuel cells feature in portable power-in-shipping-containers that can be used to replace diesel generators for temporary events. Mature enough to be used in that context, and I expect there's potential for improvement.
Thanks for this video. So looks like the answer is that ammonia is no silver bullet. What about hydrogen fuel cells? Are these feasible for marine propulsion? They would surely avoid the emissions issues and cut out the the whole ammonia production thing.
really cool video as always!
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Fuel cell technology should be explored to seperate the hydrogen from ammonia to use the electrons
I think an Idea not being said enough is that we should try to buy less foreign things
The energy input to make NH3 is hugh but to make NH3 H2 Is required which also requires hugh energy input. This will make the NH3 fuel extremely expensive.
Renewables mean that intermittent electrical power is getting ridiculously cheap
@@alandpost Only because centralized power stations, coal and nuclear, cannot ramp down, and are being made unprofitable by the fluctuating prices. Once renewable and storage are the major supply with gas peaking plants for low periods that will change. Additionally there will not be an abundance of power, the resources are only available for a small fraction of current global population.
@@dan2304 Storage will be a major expense. So demand that is flexible will be able to get a much better price.
@@alandpost You don't appear to understand where our energy comes from. Aproximate 33% oil, 24 % gas, 28% coal, 7% hydro, 6% nuclear, the rest made up of every thing else. Fossil fuels are needed to manufacture all the alternative energy sources, very resources intensive. Fossil fuel will be functionally depleted as will many of the metals needed before fossil fuels can be replaced. It is not just energy, both potassium and phosphorus needed in agriculture are in falling supply as with nitrogen made from methane. The cost of doing every thing will increase as energy commodities become more expensive to produce and transport. A point will be quickly reached when it becomes uneconomic.
Let's go back to shipping sails ⛵ absolutely eco friendly❤❤
What about cargo ships with carbon fiber sails? This modern twist could save up to 30% in fuel consumption. ⛵️
This is a great idea to reduce shipping emissions. However, given the life cycle emissions and the life cycle costs mentioned, I don't think this technology will ever be commercially viable or emission free.
I saw a fantastic article about how nuclear-powered cargo vessels were tested back in the day. The poster child of the tech put style before efficiency, and kinda flopped after public perception of nuclear went sour. If we made them today with something like a traveling wave reactor, you could have clean shipping with no need to refuel the reactor for the ship’s lifetime-the reactor can be armored to hell and made to be removed entirely and processed by a separate company once the ship is decommissioned. We already have reactors that are inherently safe and will shut down with zero human intervention in case of the worst happening and the ship sinking. The water entering the reactor automatically shuts it down, with the inert reactor sinking to the seafloor without releasing any harmful radiation. By the time corrosion could be a problem, the seabed will have encased the reactor and it will never be a problem. Nuclear would not really increase the cost of a shipping vessel, there might even be financial savings due to the fact you do not need any fuel. We have the experience with naval reactors from the military, there’s really no reason to not put that path forward
Given that regular ships already have problems with illegal bilge dumping, I'm not too sure how safe nuclear can be in the hands of commercial vessels(I'm aware military vessels have very good safety records). The sea is a wide lawless expanse. How do we know they wouldn't skimp on safety mid transit? We already have ships sneakily dumping waste oil, with little repercussions.
Can't imagine the catastrophy for when there is an ammonia leak on the ship! Seriously fatal gas!
Sounds like it would be smarter to use ammonia in hybrid systems where the engine can be left running at optimal parameters, when the vessel is not moving it is charging the batteries or even generating more ammonia.
We should be making much of our electricity with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, but there still is no concerted effort underway to develop them despite the success of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment over fifty years ago.
With the abysmal calorific value and inefficiency i really dont see it taking hold (noted im as layman as it comes to propulsion technology and engines). I'd say that the small nuclear salt reactors are the way of the future. Having a calorific value greater than anything out there and being the sizes of 2 or 3 shipping containers, while also safe in case of emergencies. then you have a ship that has minimal downtime because you only need to switch the crew and not spend days refuelling it.
Lower calorics values mean lower energy density mean you need more fuel mean bigger fueltank mean more money if the price not significantly lower
I assume that the ammonia-creation process can be ramped up and down fairly easily. So only produce ammonia from CHEAP (ie - excess) renewables (eg: solar around midday). It's not the optimal approach from the perspective of capital utilization, but I think we need a variety of energy-storage approaches to deal with the high variability of renewables.
The answer as usual seems to be electric ships, maybe using kite-sails too. Question is where do we get the electricity? Batteries + solar covers, solar hulls, etc? Hydrogen fuel cells? Nuclear? And in case of hydrogen... to we store it as liquid? Gas? Solid? Or in the form of ammonia?
Imagine getting the technology so precise that you can extract ammonia from the sea itself
I am not sure about your calculation for "up to 1100 fewer containers" The example the engineer gave was 20000 m3 (cubic meters( of ammonia tanks. a 20 foot container takes up about 33 m3, so that would 606 containers fewer loaded on board without any optimization.