The tricky road to reaching ammonia's full potential [Gas in Transition]

The tricky road to reaching ammonia's full potential [Gas in Transition]

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Natural Gas News
The tricky road to reaching ammonia's full potential [Gas in Transition]

Summary

While there are challenges to the adoption of ammonia as a marine fuel, these are well known and there is strong impetus among industry players to overcome them. Whether all the chips fall into place in time however, remains to be seen. [Gas in Transition, Volume 3, Issue 4] by: Vincent Wee

Better the devil you know, as the saying goes, might be an appropriate analogy for the use of ammonia as a marine fuel. The easily available but toxic gas has many things going for it, including a long history of being produced and supplied globally, mainly for agricultural and industrial uses. However, while the Global Maritime Forum, among others, increasingly sees ammonia as having a key role to play as a zero-carbon fuel, the gas's advantage – no carbon emissions during combustion – is also its Achilles heel. The problem is ensuring this characteristic is retained during the production process, is able to be reliably certified and can be scaled up quickly enough to meet demand. The keyword here being "green ammonia" – when the gas is produced using renewable energy or other zero-carbon methods, and results in no carbon being emitted on a well-to-wake basis. According to Bureau Veritas, ammonia is among the top contenders as a fuel of the future. As a commonly transported cargo, ammonia use and handling is familiar to many marine actors while it benefits from existing production and storage terminals at many ports around the world. Thus developing associated ship-to-shi...