Oz will trial green hydrogen to make ammonia.

[stannn]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-hydrogen-incitec-pivot/australia-backs-trials-to-produce-green-hydrogen-to-make-ammonia-idUSKBN1WF0CF

[oliver90owner]

Needs funds for investigating/trialling the process of electrolysing water?  Ridiculous.  The economics should be well known from information previously gleaned.  I suppose it will keep a few scientists and engineers off the streets for a while.

The Haber process, for ammonia production, has been in use for many decades.  The only way to make electrolysis cheaper than natural gas, for hydrogen production, is to have an excess of cheap renewables or increase the cost of using fossil fuel for that process.  The cost (to the environment) of using fossil fuel as a process chemical is likely not taken into consideration by the politicians, as per usual.

[brackwell]

What has brought this to the forefront is cheap RE but also big improvements in the electrolysers to a point it is now viable. At the same time the Aussies have found a cheaper way of making Ammonia i believe which is not the Haber process and does not involve FF  https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fuel-made-sun-air-and-water-could-power-globe-without-carbon  basically a fuel cell in reverse.  This will improve the economics of transporting H2 in Ammonia form which is more dense,safer and does not require the same conditions to liquify. THIS IS THE FUTURE.

There is going to be an absolute explosion of RE,H2,NH4 with all that land and RE.  It will easily surpass that of the oil and gas industry is my guess.  If i was CEO of a petro Co i would be wading into this.

Also https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/may/19/how-australia-can-use-hydrogen-to-export-its-solar-power-around-the-world

Ken

[brackwell]

Further reading

 https://ammoniaindustry.com/renewable-ammonia-demonstration-plant-announced-in-south-australia/

//ammoniaindustry.com/green-ammonia-pilot-plants-now-running-in-oxford-and-fukushima/


://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/7/5/hydrogen-made-by-the-electrolysis-of-water-is-now-cost-competitive-and-gives-us-another-building-block-for-the-low-carbon-economy



Almost all hydrogen is made today from what is known as ‘steam reforming’, usually of methane (the main constituent of natural gas). A stream of gas is mixed with high temperature steam in the presence of a catalyst. The eventual output of the process is a mixture of CO2 and hydrogen. The valuable hydrogen is collected and the CO2 vented to the atmosphere. If my calculations are correct, the hydrogen produced today through the steam reforming process is resulting in approximately 500 million tonnes of emissions a year, or well over 1% of global GHGs. [1]

[Nickel2]

A bit on the beeb this morning about a plant at Rotterdam:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49725741
Surely there must be a way of linking similar plants together in several processes to get a zero CO2 balance?