How Green Ammonia Is Helping To Drive The Hydrogen Transition

Hydrogen is the most abundant element on Earth and has been identified as an important clean fuel for the energy transition, emitting only water when burned instead of carbon dioxide. However, producing hydrogen can be carbon intensive, and storing and transporting it is a challenge due to the extremely low temperatures and high pressure needed to keep it stable.

For it to be a feasible alternative to fossil fuels, new methods for storage and transportation are required. Enter Nium, a spinout company from Cambridge University in the UK, which is pioneering a ground-breaking process for getting hydrogen from A to B using ‘green’ ammonia.

Turning hydrogen into ammonia – which is made up of hydrogen and nitrogen from the air – makes it much easier to move around. Nium uses nano catalysis, powered by renewable energy, which achieves this conversion at significantly reduced temperatures and pressures compared to the Haber-Bosch process – the way that ammonia has been produced for nearly 100 years. When the ammonia reaches its destination, the decentralised nature of Nium’s system means it is easy to turn it back into hydrogen using the same green process.

Green hydrogen provides a way to decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors such as transportation by truck or train, or heavy industry. Green ammonia, meanwhile, replaces ammonia produced through the traditional polluting process, which emits around 500mt of CO2 annually. And, in addition to being a means of transporting hydrogen, ammonia itself can be used in new applications such as shipping fuel, and it remains a key ingredient in fertilizers, which around 50% of the world’s food production relies upon.

Nium’s new process is turning ammonia into a tool for the future, while cleaning up its use in the present.
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At the moment, the best alternative we have, in many people’s minds, to fossil fuels is hydrogen. So, you need to store it at liquid
cryogenic temperatures; that’s colder than anywhere
in our solar system. If you want to have it as gas,
you need massive pressures; that’s costing you a lot of energy and it’s a nightmare to store
and transport around. That’s why, when people talk
about the hydrogen economy, we believe that the hydrogen economy
is probably more like the ammonia economy. We say turn it into ammonia. Ammonia is an energy vector. So you turn renewable energy
into hydrogen. From there you can turn that into ammonia,
and that makes it much more transportable. So that’s the first step. Then you have the second step. About 70% of ammonia goes
towards fertiliser production, and also beyond that,
ammonia is everywhere: so, we use ammonia in our cleaning
products, in our toothpaste, also in our pharmaceuticals,
ammonia is a very important chemical. On top of that ammonia is interesting
for other reasons: we need more fuel and we
need to get off fossil fuels. How do we do that? Ammonia burns as a clean fuel. When it burns, you get water
vapour and nitrogen. So it’s currently being looked at as a direct
replacement for diesel and petrol, and ammonia looks like a potential
good use case for shipping in the future. So what you ask, is ammonia
part of a green transition? It’s got to be. The trouble with that is, ammonia today relies on massive industrial facilities
totally reliant on fossil fuels. We burn oil, we burn gas, we burn coal
in order to make the massive pressures and temperatures that ammonia
traditionally requires, taking hydrogen and nitrogen,
they activate a catalyst, and then you have ammonia coming
out the other end, and that process is known
as the Haber-Bosch process. Nium exists to eliminate emissions. We want to clean up that
process to make sure that all the ammonia being made is green. So, Nium is an entrepreneur, that’s me, a former race car engineer
and a nano-scientist, Yubiao. When I first met Yubiao, he started
talking about nano-catalysis, and I was like, yeah, I kind of get catalysts,
you basically pass gases over a catalyst and then it makes something
else, in this case, ammonia. I grew up somewhere close
to a Haber-Bosch plant. Every time you breathe, you could feel
it, this is really something unpleasant. I then went to university and
studied chemical engineering and I felt like, so now it’s an opportunity
to turn that heavy industry into a more sustainable way
to make ammonia. Do the same thing in a much cleaner way,
that would be a really great thing. Yubiao drew me a system: we build small
scale reactors, we call them the Minion, which has a nano-catalyst
that he invented in, and that’s powered by renewables. Catalysis is all about
the surface science. So if you can have loads of
surface area in a small volume, you have a very good catalyst
for ammonia production, at a much lower temperature,
much lower pressure. So we put the most promising catalyst in and then introduce nitrogen and hydrogen
and we monitored the gas coming out from the chamber and
we detected some ammonia signal. At that moment we thought,
this is a huge breakthrough and then we got really excited. What a nano-catalyst does, is that is
has a much greater surface area. So that greater surface area means you can
drop the heat, you drop the pressure. And what that means is you no longer
need to rely on fossil fuels. And then we can power the whole
set up with renewables. So this is our mark one, our test reactor, effectively a scaled down minion. We are taking nitrogen and hydrogen and combining them in the presence
of our catalyst to produce ammonia. Once we’ve tested the catalyst here,
we can put a larger quantity in the mark two, and test its ability
to produce ammonia at scale. Nium uses small, one metre long reactors,
that produce one tonne of ammonia a day. If you need to produce twenty tonnes,
you just have twenty minions. And unlike Haber-Bosch, the big
plants that take three days to power up, we take
half an hour to power up, and we start making green ammonia
from the energy that’s available. Our catalyst enables green ammonia
on demand. The colour of the ammonia is
a reflection on the way that feedstocks that go into it are made. So you need green hydrogen
to make green ammonia. So green ammonia on demand
means you can decarbonise, means you can decentralise your
global ammonia supply chain. And then finally, obviously start to help the hydrogen
economy really take a foothold. So hydrogen is very good in terms of
an energy source when you need it, but how do you move that from A to B? Hydrogen, very tricky, ammonia, we’ve got a global infrastructure. Our grandparents established
this infrastructure, we’ve been using for fertiliser
over the last hundred years. it means that we can then tap
into that network, and move that hydrogen energy in the Global South,
that have a lot of sun and a lot of wind, up to the Global North, where there are more people
and we consume much more energy. We have the technology to
make a big impact when it comes to solving the climate crisis.