We the Six Billion: The Ammonia Economy
11/19/2009 2:09:00 PM
by Joe Steinberger
Saturday morning I attended a powerpoint presentation at the Strand Theatre. The presenter was Matthew Simmons, of local and international fame, who had been invited by the Island Institute to take part in its Sustainable Island Living Conference.
Simmons, a part-time Rockport resident, is a local benefactor (he is, coincidentally, responsible for the beautiful restoration of the Strand Theatre, among other things) whose Houston-based company deals in energy investing. He is a leading proponent of the "peak oil" concept and the author of several books on the subject. He recently founded the Ocean Energy Institute, which describes itself as a "think-tank and venture capital fund addressing the challenges of U.S. offshore renewable energy."
His presentation, entitled "The Gulf of Maine: What Lies Beyond the Fossil Fuel Horizon," was billed as "describing the role that off-shore wind can play in reducing Maine's unsustainable dependence on fossil fuel based energy resources."
At the Strand he pulled no punches in describing the challenge he believes we are facing. According to Simmons, heating oil will probably not even be available in five or ten years. Not only is oil running out, but fresh water is running out too, with even more dire consequences. Then he proposed a solution: floating offshore windmills that will produce both fresh water and liquid ammonia.
I found it fantastical. I do not doubt that increasing demand for oil, combined with its limited supply, is bound to make it more expensive over time, and that Maine's dependence, especially on heating oil, is a disaster in the making. What I find incredible is the idea that we are going to solve the problem by fueling our cars and heating our homes with ammonia, and that this ammonia - let alone a significant supply of fresh water - is going to be produced by windmills in the Gulf of Maine.
There is wind, of course, in the Gulf of Maine, and there is a great deal of energy in that wind. There is wind all over the earth, especially over the oceans, and the total amount of energy in the wind is much greater than all the energy currently used by humanity. The same is true, even more spectacularly, for solar power. The problem is that these sources cannot easily be tapped like oil that gushes from a hole in the ground.
Wind is notoriously variable. As I write I have checked the wind conditions on the Maine coast and at this moment it is quite calm. Because of its intermittence, using the wind to produce a fuel has a great advantage over using wind to produce electricity for direct use: calm periods do not mean that people's lights go off.
Producing ammonia from electricity is a well-understood technology. Ammonia is a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced by passing an electric current through water, and electricity can also be used to combine that hydrogen with nitrogen from the air to produce ammonia. This process was used for many years to make ammonia for fertilizer at a hydropower site in Norway, a site too far from population centers to be otherwise useful. It is an inefficient and expensive process, however, and is not currently being used. Ammonia is today made mainly from natural gas.
Using ammonia for fuel is also a well-known possibility, though this again is rarely done. As a fuel, it is the hydrogen that is useful. Using ammonia is just a way to make hydrogen more storable and transportable. When ammonia burns, just water and nitrogen are released, so it is clean. A pound of ammonia carries about as much energy as a half-pound of oil, which is not bad.
Ammonia, however, is a deadly poison in concentrated doses. Liquid ammonia boils at -33 °C and at normal temperatures must be contained in a pressure vessel, so a broken tank or hose can have fatal consequences. In small doses it is not harmful to air-breathing creatures, but for marine life it is a serious environmental hazard even in very small amounts.
We could live with this, of course, but I seriously doubt that the need will arise.
The problem with this whole vision of an ammonia economy based on offshore windmills is that it assumes that producing ammonia from wind will somehow be cheap, the way producing gasoline and fuel oil from oil wells has been cheap. If in fact the price for that ammonia is much more than what we pay now for oil, it won't solve our problem. After all, if the great majority of people could not afford to heat their homes with oil at $10 or $20 per gallon, neither will they be able to heat their homes with ammonia at such prices.
Will wind-produced ammonia be cheap, though, like oil in its heyday? Next week I will explain why I think the answer is certainly no, and I'll try to suggest more likely ways for us to survive the energy crisis.
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