He'll no it won't I've worked in refrigeration an with all types of motors the clean up an spills that could come from this will be just as bad if not worse for the eco system planes would even be in danger because of the state of ammonia
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.
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..).
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...
@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.
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.
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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.
@@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.
@@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.
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).
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.
I think your last sentence should read "That replaces the difficulties of trying to make a new fuel work with existing propuslion systems, with the problems trying to make fuel cell systems work". Because right now it reads as though you think fuel cells are an easy solution. Had they been, we would already have been using them.
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.
I mean, of course they wouldnt give out those details about the catalytic Reactor, because they are probably not good enough yet at that stage of development, which is fine since they arent selling it as one, literally. Revealing the performance of an unfinished prototype wouldnt make sense and might harm their reputation against their efforts to improve on it
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
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.
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.
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.
key issue is that nox emmissions out in the ocean are not nearly as problematic as overland, whereas CO2 is, quite literally, the best money for the cause of the apocolypse
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.
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.
@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.
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!
@@_elegans_ Water vapour in the atmosphere absorbs massive amounts of heat from the sun. Water vapour is responsible for most of the greenhouse effect on Earth. And that's good! it'h the reason why the Earth is at a comfortable ~20°C, rather than -10°C or whatever. The thing is the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is regulated naturally through the climate; we don't worry about it because that's not our responsibility unlike CO2, etc. The problem is, if we just change all of our CO2 emissions to H2O then there will be more H2O than normal trapping heat. There is no way that the atmosphere will just accept a change like that, the balance will be broken and it will need to find a new equilibrium. We've seen this before, most desalination plants take water from the ocean, send the desalinated water to the system and dump the salt back to the ocean. I'm sure they say "it's just salt, it was already in the ocean". But if you don't take care to make sure the salt gets distributed around the ocean, then the water surrounding the discharge pipe will increase in salinity and the marine life that lives there maybe damaged or killed. And its the same thing with CO2, you can just say 'oh as humans we are always releasing CO2' the problem was when we burnt fossil fuels, released way more CO2 than the atmosphere was used to and everything got messed up. I think we will probably need to use H2 and ammonia and more fossil fuels even to keep going with our lives but we need to be very careful with the effects of our consumption, because we are not supposed to have an unlimited amount of water in the atmosphere. Environmental equilibrium has been achieved through natural process through hundreds of thousands of years and when humans think they're cleverer and create massive disruptions bad thing happen.
@@onwardstovictoria7541 Water can be carried in the atmosphere, but the air can only hold so much moisture. When the amount exceeds what can be held, water usually condenses into droplets and falls out of the sky. You may have observed this phenomenon in the form of clouds that produce rain. According to NASA, “a molecule of water vapor stays in the atmosphere just nine days, on average.” The amount of H2O produced by the combustion of hydrocarbons, hydrogen, or ammonia is also negligible to the amount already in the atmosphere. Desalination plants, by comparison, produce brine much more concentrated than seawater. Additionally, thermal power plants (including nuclear power plants and the like) still currently used to meet a large proportion of our energy demand require cooling. This can be done using wet cooling towers, which (as you may have guessed) evaporate water to function. The current combustion of fossil hydrocarbons already produces H2O as a byproduct and also produces CO2 that is generally not recaptured. But according to NASA, “increased water vapor doesn’t cause global warming. Instead, it’s a consequence of it. Increased water vapor in the atmosphere amplifies the warming caused by other greenhouse gases.”
@@onwardstovictoria7541 Water can be carried in the atmosphere, but the air can only hold so much moisture. When the amount exceeds what can be held, water usually condenses into droplets and falls out of the sky. You may have observed this phenomenon in the form of clouds that produce rain. According to NASA, “a molecule of water vapor stays in the atmosphere just nine days, on average.” The amount of H2O produced by the combustion of hydrocarbons, hydrogen, or ammonia is also negligible to the amount already in the atmosphere. Desalination plants, by comparison, produce brine much more concentrated than seawater. Additionally, thermal power plants (including nuclear power plants and the like) still currently used to meet a large proportion of our energy demand require cooling. This can be done using wet cooling towers, which (as you may have guessed) evaporate water to function. The current combustion of fossil hydrocarbons already produces H2O as a byproduct and also produces CO2 that is generally not recaptured. But according to NASA, “increased water vapor doesn’t cause global warming. Instead, it’s a consequence of it. Increased water vapor in the atmosphere amplifies the warming caused by other greenhouse gases.”
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.
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.
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!
@@fidelcatsro6948 The thing is, for the use in such engine, the ammonia fuel has to be pressurized all the way to 80 bar (basically subcooled liquid but very pressurized) prior to injection. That's lots of potential energy ready to burst during leakage situations.
0:12 DW news doesn't understand the term "emissions". CO2 are but one small part of Emissions. In other words, go in to your kitchen, close all windows and doors, and light a gallon of ammonia and let me know how "almost zero emissions" is.
With perfect combustion, it will only produce nitrogen gas and water. So, you would be fine. (unless it used up too much of the oxygen in your kitchen obviously)
Well, at higher temperatures, the conversion (destruction) of N2O exceeds its formation, so net emission rates are reduced 👉www.jstor.org/stable/27034495 and it was found that increasing the combustion temperature prevented N2O formation and increased the ammonia combustion rate 👉www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544223026853 We are glad you liked our video! Don't forget to subscribe to our channel, we post new videos every Friday ✨
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.
Independently of the results, it's very nice that we're seeing many efforts to solve the same issue. Any step is still a step, a step on the right direction leads us to the right way and a step on the wrong direction warns us of where to not go.
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.
When you said just look at that cylinder, you were pointing at the crankshaft and not the cylinder (combustion chamber) itself. Just like in a car the crankshaft area takes up a lot of the space of the whole engine. A nice and well made documentary regardless, thanx =)
All these shipping container ships should run on nuclear energy. They've been running submarines on it for 50 years. There are plenty of small nuclear reactors being built right now. They are the size of one, maybe two shipping containers. NO pollution.
The first generation of nuclear powered cargo ships were commercial failures. Nuclear powered subs have a significant number of specialised crew to operate the nuclear propulsion system. In the commercial world this translates into much higher operating costs.
@@davidjones5280 Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) have come a long way. In the space of a shipping container or two you could power a ship that carries thousands of containers.
@@jonathanrichter4256 And how many specialised high-cost crew to operate the nuclear propulsion safely? Not currently competitive, or big shippers would be doing it already
Container-sized microreactors like the Westinghouse eVinci (not in production yet) produce around 5MW of useful power. Large container ships require 30-75MW.
Nice video and great clarification of the technical challenges. I think compared to batteries ammonia is a good way of reducing carbon on ocean-going ships but as you say has many difficulties in reducing NOx and N2O. I particularly liked the helicopter flying over the ship to measure the emissions, maybe this could be done more economically with drones and "flying PEMS" to keep the engine / ship makers and operators honest that their vessels are really emitting as low as they claim.
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.
Nitrous Oxide is an oxidizer. Probably the best way to do deal with it is probably to filter it out of the exhaust stream and cycle it back into the intake of the engine. People have been using NOS for years in hot rods. For temperatures, you could place a heater to heat the exhaust before it reaches the catalyst. But all this is theoretical. With all the listed disadvantages of using ammonia, I do not see it replacing carbon based fuels anytime soon. A more viable solution is nuclear power, but that presents it's own issues as well. But a ship could travel for 20-30 years before needing a reactor core refueling. I have read a few recent news articles that all ships can reduce their fuel consumption. By slowing the ship down 10%, a ship can reduce power requirements by up to 27%. That reduction in power requirements means fuel savings which in turn reduces emissions and operating costs. So just changing the way that these ships are operated can save money in the short term which is a big boon in the shipping industry where you have tight margins already.
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.
Ammonia is a great refrigerant but the surrounding precautions make it unviable except where extremely cold temperatures (colder than minus 20⁰c) are necessary. The dangers of a leak mean evacuation proceedures must be drilled into all staff. If used as fuel leakage will be almost unavoidable with subsequent fatalities being almost inevitable😢
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.
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.
They should not assume that shipping volumes will remain constant. As transportation gets more expensive, it should drive some level of re-localization.
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.
From what I understand, production of green ammonia has the same issues of green hydrogen: far more electrical energy input compared to the output, the lack of thousands of industrial scale electrolytes which will take a decade or more to ramp up, the redesign of ship tanks to make up for the lower energy density. Yet a battery electric ship that crosses the ocean is not feasible with the actual density. On the other side, ammonia seems easier to transport and store than hydrogen, and engines are more similar to the diesel ones. Am I correct?
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.
@@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.
@@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.
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.
@@LeksDee 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.
Ships use bunker fuel, nasty stuff, they should also be plugged in at port and shut the engines down. Ammonia may be more suited to stationary engines where it's much easier to control and avoid the downfalls. Less energy also means less cooling needed. All factors considered it may be a good idea. Definitely worth looking into further.
So if nuclear propulsion for commercial shipping was a viable option, wouldn't we be seeing it in use already? The reality is that there's a whole bunch of operational & commercial issues that limit the adoption of nuclear propulsion for commercial shipping.
So it helps to be running these engines either at full power or not at all? In which case would it be better to run them as electricity generators filling a battery with the battery running the ship? Then you top up the battery when you need to out at sea. Plus you can recharge the battery when in port and not have emissions near the shore. I can imagine some kind of hybrid ship being the way to go.
I don't have any prior knowledge of the subject, buy hey, the quality of this video is beyond superb. Highlighting pros and cons in a realistic and unbiased way, this is what journalism should be about... Shame that it is increasingly only propaganda, nowadays...
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?
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.
Nitrous oxide is used in dragsters. Nitrous oxides are ALREADY in diesel trucks, fixed by catslytic converters or adblue (urea) injected into the exhaust. BOTH OF THESE can be taken care of with catalytic converters on the exhaust. Like almost ALL vehicles have had since the 90s. Btw ammonia ALREADY comes up out of the ground in (former) Yugoslavia I believe.
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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.
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.
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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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!
Because CO2 extraction from air (0,04% of the air) is very energy intense and expensive, unlike nitrogen, which is the main component of air (78%). Nevertheless, I think, methanol (CH3OH) has better chances than ammonia.
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.
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.
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%.
Very interesting, tomorrow i am presenting my bachelor thesis called "prospects of green hydrogen as a key enabler for the Swedish steel industry" it has made me think a lot about things like this
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I feel like for shipping, liquid hydrogen makes a lot of sense. You can make use of more efficient fuel cells so need less volume for fuel comoared to ammonia, and because you're immediately using the fuel that will minimise boil off. Also by being liquid it doesnt need massive 700 bar pressurised vessels, just well insulated 5 bar ones which can take a wide variety of shapes to fit the ship design
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.
As you were discussing how green ammonia is made, with the first step being electrolysis to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water, my immediate response was, "well, why not just use the hydrogen directly," either via fuel cells or as a combustion fuel. So yeah, why would we use ammonia when we could just use the hydrogen that needs to be produced to create ammonia in the first place?
This would be really cool. But i would like to see if alcohol could be used as the pilot fuel. So that it wouldnt need any fossil fuels. I feel like the nox emissions are going to be a huge problem. They make it sound like its not a problem.. but i think it might be a huge problem. But also storing a bunch of anhydrous ammonia is a problem. And producing anhydrous ammonia is a very energy intensive process.. so i dont know if it would actually be greener currently, or any time soon.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)?
When it comes to cutting down on emissions the importance of increasing efficiency is often overlooked, it plays an important role if fuels are created with electricity. For example it doesn't matter if hydrogen powered cars only emit water vapor, even if the hydrogen was produced with green energy, because we must assume that this electric energy is a scarce commodity. Creating hydrogen, compressing it, shipping it around all costs energy, energy that could also be used directly in electric motors, electronics, industrial processes and households. When we use it to create combustable chemicals we lose some of it due to innefficiencies, it turns into heat mostly or some unwanted byproducts or used up for maintaining the facilities for that extra step. To me it seems using ammonia is one of those routes where the inefficiencies are so high that it doesn't really lead to the entire world being turned upside down for trillions of Dollars in order to make the switch. There has to be something that is so different and efficient that it cuts our more processes until you end up with some sort of fuel or energy storage on ships.
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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.
Instead of the problems currently associated with using ammonia as a fuel as cited here, what about replacing such marine diesel engines with small modular (nuclear) reactors - SMRs to generate steam to either produce electricity and or to directly power a ship's steam engine there?
Usually the proposals for alternative energy seems wonderful at the beginning, then it gets crappier as it gets near to viability and never gets relevant. This one is several steps ahead, sounds crap right from the starting line!
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?
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
He'll no it won't I've worked in refrigeration an with all types of motors the clean up an spills that could come from this will be just as bad if not worse for the eco system planes would even be in danger because of the state of ammonia
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?
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...
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.
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
Nitrogen fertiliser is not an issue.
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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.
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.
Love it! Even for a well connected danish researcher finding the right people and getting them to talk can be quite a task. You did a good job.
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).
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.
I think your last sentence should read "That replaces the difficulties of trying to make a new fuel work with existing propuslion systems, with the problems trying to make fuel cell systems work". Because right now it reads as though you think fuel cells are an easy solution. Had they been, we would already have been using them.
"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.
I mean, of course they wouldnt give out those details about the catalytic Reactor, because they are probably not good enough yet at that stage of development, which is fine since they arent selling it as one, literally. Revealing the performance of an unfinished prototype wouldnt make sense and might harm their reputation against their efforts to improve on it
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
Very interesting video. Well done!
I like the guy that gave you the tour of the engine. Excellent disposition and honest.
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.
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, …
Thanks for digging into this and not just marketing it :)
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@@DWPlanetA I thought I had - done
Good work giving a realistic view and asking hard questions
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
key issue is that nox emmissions out in the ocean are not nearly as problematic as overland, whereas CO2 is, quite literally, the best money for the cause of the apocolypse
Great overview. I appreciate the comparison and details of emissions and strategy to continue to work on.
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.
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
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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I get how nitrogen oxides might be a problem, but H2O is literally just water.
@@_elegans_ Water vapour in the atmosphere absorbs massive amounts of heat from the sun. Water vapour is responsible for most of the greenhouse effect on Earth. And that's good! it'h the reason why the Earth is at a comfortable ~20°C, rather than -10°C or whatever.
The thing is the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is regulated naturally through the climate; we don't worry about it because that's not our responsibility unlike CO2, etc. The problem is, if we just change all of our CO2 emissions to H2O then there will be more H2O than normal trapping heat. There is no way that the atmosphere will just accept a change like that, the balance will be broken and it will need to find a new equilibrium.
We've seen this before, most desalination plants take water from the ocean, send the desalinated water to the system and dump the salt back to the ocean. I'm sure they say "it's just salt, it was already in the ocean". But if you don't take care to make sure the salt gets distributed around the ocean, then the water surrounding the discharge pipe will increase in salinity and the marine life that lives there maybe damaged or killed. And its the same thing with CO2, you can just say 'oh as humans we are always releasing CO2' the problem was when we burnt fossil fuels, released way more CO2 than the atmosphere was used to and everything got messed up.
I think we will probably need to use H2 and ammonia and more fossil fuels even to keep going with our lives but we need to be very careful with the effects of our consumption, because we are not supposed to have an unlimited amount of water in the atmosphere. Environmental equilibrium has been achieved through natural process through hundreds of thousands of years and when humans think they're cleverer and create massive disruptions bad thing happen.
@@onwardstovictoria7541 Water can be carried in the atmosphere, but the air can only hold so much moisture. When the amount exceeds what can be held, water usually condenses into droplets and falls out of the sky. You may have observed this phenomenon in the form of clouds that produce rain.
According to NASA, “a molecule of water vapor stays in the atmosphere just nine days, on average.”
The amount of H2O produced by the combustion of hydrocarbons, hydrogen, or ammonia is also negligible to the amount already in the atmosphere. Desalination plants, by comparison, produce brine much more concentrated than seawater.
Additionally, thermal power plants (including nuclear power plants and the like) still currently used to meet a large proportion of our energy demand require cooling. This can be done using wet cooling towers, which (as you may have guessed) evaporate water to function.
The current combustion of fossil hydrocarbons already produces H2O as a byproduct and also produces CO2 that is generally not recaptured. But according to NASA, “increased water vapor doesn’t cause global warming. Instead, it’s a consequence of it. Increased water vapor in the atmosphere amplifies the warming caused by other greenhouse gases.”
@@onwardstovictoria7541 Water can be carried in the atmosphere, but the air can only hold so much moisture. When the amount exceeds what can be held, water usually condenses into droplets and falls out of the sky. You may have observed this phenomenon in the form of clouds that produce rain.
According to NASA, “a molecule of water vapor stays in the atmosphere just nine days, on average.”
The amount of H2O produced by the combustion of hydrocarbons, hydrogen, or ammonia is also negligible to the amount already in the atmosphere. Desalination plants, by comparison, produce brine much more concentrated than seawater.
Additionally, thermal power plants (including nuclear power plants and the like) still currently used to meet a large proportion of our energy demand require cooling. This can be done using wet cooling towers, which (as you may have guessed) evaporate water to function.
The current combustion of fossil hydrocarbons already produces H2O as a byproduct and also produces CO2 that is generally not recaptured. But according to NASA, “increased water vapor doesn’t cause global warming. Instead, it’s a consequence of it. Increased water vapor in the atmosphere amplifies the warming caused by other greenhouse gases.”
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.
now the US navy is using nuclear power for its subs & aircraft carriers
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.
so interesting and frank and clear the description .. the decarb route is still long and plenty of untold stories..
Thank You
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.
They should use 2 stroke ammonia engines they have less parts😺👍
@@fidelcatsro6948 The thing is, for the use in such engine, the ammonia fuel has to be pressurized all the way to 80 bar (basically subcooled liquid but very pressurized) prior to injection. That's lots of potential energy ready to burst during leakage situations.
0:12 DW news doesn't understand the term "emissions". CO2 are but one small part of Emissions. In other words, go in to your kitchen, close all windows and doors, and light a gallon of ammonia and let me know how "almost zero emissions" is.
With perfect combustion, it will only produce nitrogen gas and water. So, you would be fine. (unless it used up too much of the oxygen in your kitchen obviously)
Great journalism, even got acknowledged at 7:33 ❤
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@@DWPlanetA That comeback was awesome! "We are not marketing people." :D
who wouldnt acknowledge a message with such a cute cat picture?
5:36 It's the other way around, higher temp -> more NOx.
Well, at higher temperatures, the conversion (destruction) of N2O exceeds its formation, so net emission rates are reduced 👉www.jstor.org/stable/27034495 and it was found that increasing the combustion temperature prevented N2O formation and increased the ammonia combustion rate 👉www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544223026853
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@@DWPlanetA That is just one of the oxides. Is it the most important one?
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.
Independently of the results, it's very nice that we're seeing many efforts to solve the same issue. Any step is still a step, a step on the right direction leads us to the right way and a step on the wrong direction warns us of where to not go.
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.
78,084% of the atmosphere is N2
When you said just look at that cylinder, you were pointing at the crankshaft and not the cylinder (combustion chamber) itself. Just like in a car the crankshaft area takes up a lot of the space of the whole engine. A nice and well made documentary regardless, thanx =)
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All these shipping container ships should run on nuclear energy. They've been running submarines on it for 50 years. There are plenty of small nuclear reactors being built right now. They are the size of one, maybe two shipping containers. NO pollution.
Nuclear energy is very difficult special on sea base moving platform
The first generation of nuclear powered cargo ships were commercial failures. Nuclear powered subs have a significant number of specialised crew to operate the nuclear propulsion system. In the commercial world this translates into much higher operating costs.
@@davidjones5280 Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) have come a long way. In the space of a shipping container or two you could power a ship that carries thousands of containers.
@@jonathanrichter4256 And how many specialised high-cost crew to operate the nuclear propulsion safely? Not currently competitive, or big shippers would be doing it already
Container-sized microreactors like the Westinghouse eVinci (not in production yet) produce around 5MW of useful power. Large container ships require 30-75MW.
Nice video and great clarification of the technical challenges. I think compared to batteries ammonia is a good way of reducing carbon on ocean-going ships but as you say has many difficulties in reducing NOx and N2O. I particularly liked the helicopter flying over the ship to measure the emissions, maybe this could be done more economically with drones and "flying PEMS" to keep the engine / ship makers and operators honest that their vessels are really emitting as low as they claim.
One solution is to hire VW to fabricate some dreamy emission result.
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.
'how about to get rid of nitrous oxide?' really made the MAN - Employee nervous. Assuming, this hole thing is rather vaporware
Nitrous Oxide is an oxidizer. Probably the best way to do deal with it is probably to filter it out of the exhaust stream and cycle it back into the intake of the engine. People have been using NOS for years in hot rods. For temperatures, you could place a heater to heat the exhaust before it reaches the catalyst. But all this is theoretical.
With all the listed disadvantages of using ammonia, I do not see it replacing carbon based fuels anytime soon. A more viable solution is nuclear power, but that presents it's own issues as well. But a ship could travel for 20-30 years before needing a reactor core refueling.
I have read a few recent news articles that all ships can reduce their fuel consumption. By slowing the ship down 10%, a ship can reduce power requirements by up to 27%. That reduction in power requirements means fuel savings which in turn reduces emissions and operating costs. So just changing the way that these ships are operated can save money in the short term which is a big boon in the shipping industry where you have tight margins already.
Fuel cell technology should be explored to seperate the hydrogen from ammonia to use the electrons
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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6700 hp is actually quite inadequate for a commercial freighter. Multiply by six or eight, and we're talking turkey...
My cat refuses to board any water vessel that has an engine less than 20,000 hp or anything powered with less than 12,000,000 cc
Ammonia is a great refrigerant but the surrounding precautions make it unviable except where extremely cold temperatures (colder than minus 20⁰c) are necessary. The dangers of a leak mean evacuation proceedures must be drilled into all staff. If used as fuel leakage will be almost unavoidable with subsequent fatalities being almost inevitable😢
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.
Thanks for a comprehensive reporting!
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As a marine engineer, I think I’d rather deal with small MSRs than ammonia.
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.
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.
From what I understand, production of green ammonia has the same issues of green hydrogen: far more electrical energy input compared to the output, the lack of thousands of industrial scale electrolytes which will take a decade or more to ramp up, the redesign of ship tanks to make up for the lower energy density. Yet a battery electric ship that crosses the ocean is not feasible with the actual density.
On the other side, ammonia seems easier to transport and store than hydrogen, and engines are more similar to the diesel ones. Am I correct?
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.
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.
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
@@LeksDee 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.
@@LeksDee Some people just make up scenarios in their head to argue against.
Ships use bunker fuel, nasty stuff, they should also be plugged in at port and shut the engines down. Ammonia may be more suited to stationary engines where it's much easier to control and avoid the downfalls. Less energy also means less cooling needed. All factors considered it may be a good idea. Definitely worth looking into further.
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.
So if nuclear propulsion for commercial shipping was a viable option, wouldn't we be seeing it in use already? The reality is that there's a whole bunch of operational & commercial issues that limit the adoption of nuclear propulsion for commercial shipping.
@@davidjones5280 using nuclear power would lower oil profits.
@@battlecruiserna So would other low emission propulsion systems
So it helps to be running these engines either at full power or not at all? In which case would it be better to run them as electricity generators filling a battery with the battery running the ship? Then you top up the battery when you need to out at sea. Plus you can recharge the battery when in port and not have emissions near the shore. I can imagine some kind of hybrid ship being the way to go.
I want to see this in Miata
I don't have any prior knowledge of the subject, buy hey, the quality of this video is beyond superb. Highlighting pros and cons in a realistic and unbiased way, this is what journalism should be about... Shame that it is increasingly only propaganda, nowadays...
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! 🤣
This is journalism as it always ought to be. Well done!
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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.
Dude that’s gonna be awesome.
Nitrous oxide is used in dragsters. Nitrous oxides are ALREADY in diesel trucks, fixed by catslytic converters or adblue (urea) injected into the exhaust. BOTH OF THESE can be taken care of with catalytic converters on the exhaust. Like almost ALL vehicles have had since the 90s. Btw ammonia ALREADY comes up out of the ground in (former) Yugoslavia I believe.
Industrial cooling uses ammonia due to its cost, that's why professionals should be present on this type of engines and not for your average person.
China launched nuclear powered cargo ship yesterday.
Excellent video. I knew nothing about the potential use of ammonia as a fuel until I watched this. Thank you/danke from Australia.
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Ammonia for cars is just too unsafe, because of traffic accidents. Maybe Ammonia for shipping would be safer.
Great report. Very informative for a net zero technology trend.
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Look like Russian Nuclear Powered Ice Breaker Ship use cleaner energy than all of this thing. 😂😂😂
my socialist cat says: Good point!
How do they plan to deal with the health consequences of a possible leak? The exposure time to be detrimental isn't very high.
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.
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.
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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China cntrl C and cntrl V
Good.
They are testing ammonia in train engines in some mines in Australia.
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!
If I understand correctly, NH3 is just H2 but it has extra N added just to make storage and transport easier, right? In that case, why not add C?
Because then it would release COx when you burn it.
Because CO2 extraction from air (0,04% of the air) is very energy intense and expensive, unlike nitrogen, which is the main component of air (78%).
Nevertheless, I think, methanol (CH3OH) has better chances than ammonia.
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.
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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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).
Very interesting, tomorrow i am presenting my bachelor thesis called "prospects of green hydrogen as a key enabler for the Swedish steel industry" it has made me think a lot about things like this
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I feel like for shipping, liquid hydrogen makes a lot of sense. You can make use of more efficient fuel cells so need less volume for fuel comoared to ammonia, and because you're immediately using the fuel that will minimise boil off. Also by being liquid it doesnt need massive 700 bar pressurised vessels, just well insulated 5 bar ones which can take a wide variety of shapes to fit the ship design
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.
As you were discussing how green ammonia is made, with the first step being electrolysis to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water, my immediate response was, "well, why not just use the hydrogen directly," either via fuel cells or as a combustion fuel.
So yeah, why would we use ammonia when we could just use the hydrogen that needs to be produced to create ammonia in the first place?
Energy density, obviously.
@@concinnus And storage & transport requirements LNH3 is so much easier (even hazardous) to deal with than LH2.
This would be really cool. But i would like to see if alcohol could be used as the pilot fuel. So that it wouldnt need any fossil fuels. I feel like the nox emissions are going to be a huge problem. They make it sound like its not a problem.. but i think it might be a huge problem. But also storing a bunch of anhydrous ammonia is a problem. And producing anhydrous ammonia is a very energy intensive process.. so i dont know if it would actually be greener currently, or any time soon.
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!
great research and context. tech stuff is well explained. thanks DW
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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.
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.
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.
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?
What about safety if there is ship accident with the ammonia? Interesting, it is going to be interesting to see if this takes off. Thank you.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)?
When it comes to cutting down on emissions the importance of increasing efficiency is often overlooked, it plays an important role if fuels are created with electricity.
For example it doesn't matter if hydrogen powered cars only emit water vapor, even if the hydrogen was produced with green energy, because we must assume that this electric energy is a scarce commodity. Creating hydrogen, compressing it, shipping it around all costs energy, energy that could also be used directly in electric motors, electronics, industrial processes and households. When we use it to create combustable chemicals we lose some of it due to innefficiencies, it turns into heat mostly or some unwanted byproducts or used up for maintaining the facilities for that extra step.
To me it seems using ammonia is one of those routes where the inefficiencies are so high that it doesn't really lead to the entire world being turned upside down for trillions of Dollars in order to make the switch. There has to be something that is so different and efficient that it cuts our more processes until you end up with some sort of fuel or energy storage on ships.
Hey there! Thanks for sharing your view. We also tackled hydrogen in another video 👉ua-cam.com/video/AGTjKJHu99c/v-deo.html In a few weeks we will publish a video on Europe´s hydrogen strategy. To be notified about it, subscribe to our channel ✨
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.
Really nice journalist work👏
Instead of the problems currently associated with using ammonia as a fuel as cited here, what about replacing such marine diesel engines with small modular (nuclear) reactors - SMRs to generate steam to either produce electricity and or to directly power a ship's steam engine there?
We have this video on SMR's. Only one has been built so far, why is that? ☢️👇
ua-cam.com/video/GhKQ8EP1a1Y/v-deo.html
Usually the proposals for alternative energy seems wonderful at the beginning, then it gets crappier as it gets near to viability and never gets relevant. This one is several steps ahead, sounds crap right from the starting line!