Green Ammonia Could Decarbonize 60% of Global Shipping When Offered at Just 10 Regional Fuel Ports

January 11, 2024

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(IOP Publishing) A study published today in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability has found that green ammonia could be used to fulfil the fuel demands of over 60% of global shipping by targeting just the top 10 regional fuel ports. Researchers at the University of Oxford looked at the production costs of ammonia which are similar to very low sulphur fuels, and concluded that the fuel could be a viable option to help decarbonise international shipping by 2050.

Around USD 2 trillion will be needed to transition to a green ammonia fuel supply chain by 2050, primarily to finance supply infrastructure. The study shows that the greatest investment need is in Australia, to supply the Asian markets, with large production clusters also predicted in Chile (to supply South America), California (to supply Western U.S.A.), North-West Africa (to meet European demand), and the southern Arabian Peninsula (to meet local demand and parts of south Asia).

90% of world’s physical goods trade is transported by ships which burn heavy fuel oil and emit toxic pollutants. This accounts for nearly 3% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result of this, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) committed to decarbonising international shipping in 2018, aiming to halve GHG emissions by 2050. These targets have been recently revised to net zero emissions by 2050.

After investigating the viability of diesel vessel exhaust scrubbers, green ammonia, made by electrolysing water with renewable electricity, was proposed as an alternative fuel source to quickly decarbonise the shipping industry. However, historically there has been great uncertainty as to how and where to invest to create the necessary infrastructure to deliver an efficient, viable fuel supply chain.

René Bañares-Alcántara, Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, says: “Shipping is one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonize because of the need for fuel with high energy density and the difficulty of coordinating different groups to produce, utilize and finance alternative (green) fuel supplies.”

To guide investors, the team at the University of Oxford developed a modelling framework to create viable scenarios for how to establish a global green ammonia fuel supply chain. The framework combines a fuel demand model, future trade scenarios and a spatial optimisation model for green ammonia production, storage, and transport, to find the best locations to meet future demand for shipping fuel.

Professor Bañares-Alcántara continues: “The implications of this work are striking. Under the proposed model, current dependence upon oil-producing nations would be replaced by a more regionalised industry; green ammonia will be produced near the equator in countries with abundant land and high solar potential then transported to regional centres of shipping fuel demand.” READ MORE

Jasper Verschuur, Nicholas Salmon, Jim Hall, René Bañares-Alcántara. Optimal fuel supply of green ammonia to decarbonise global shipping. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, 2024; 4 (1): 015001 DOI: 10.1088/2634-4505/ad097a

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Batteries & Biofuels Will Power Ships In Our Low-Carbon Future (Forbes)

Excerpt from Forbes: ... Nuclear-powered shipping will remain a nostalgic futurist fantasy as ports will continue to refuse entry as they don’t have safety, operational or emergency procedures for it and capital and decommissioning costs would be exorbitant. Carbon capture on board ships is only slightly less inane an idea than carbon capture on trucks and cars, requiring tanks for almost three times the mass and 2.5 times the volume of carbon dioxide as fuel burned. LNG, while popular with LNG tankers and passenger ferries right now, remains a fossil fuel that must be eliminated.

Frequently touted ammonia if actually green will be four to five times as expensive for the same distance as the ten-year average of the currently common very low sulfur fuel oil (VLSFO), and its toxicity puts crew, port workers and port-area residents at significant risk. More frequently touted green methanol, which had a banner year of dual-fuel ship orders from major carriers, is much safer and easier to handle than ammonia, but if synthesized from hydrogen will be four to six times as expensive as the VLFSO average, far above industry expectations.

The shipping industry is quietly bunkering hundreds of thousands of tons of biofuels already, with 930,000 tons of biofuel blends bunkered in just Singapore and Rotterdam in 2022. Biodiesel burns in the same engines that ships already have, and will burn in the VLSFO engines of dual-fuel ships as well.

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Further, the growth of battery electric shipping in inland and short sea routes, exemplified by the two 700-container capacity battery powered ships plying 1,000 kilometer routes on the Yangtze today, will take a great deal more fuel requirements off the waters of our world.

The end state for maritime shipping burnable fuels in this more realistic world is perhaps 70 million tons of diesel-equivalent fuel in my projection through 2100. Spend a minute looking at the IEA chart. Add up the existing renewable and biodiesel manufacturing today. You’ll note that it’s about 70 million tons of fuel.

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Those 70 million tons of renewable and biodiesel burned on the roads of countries globally today are going to be available for maritime shipping, and the market will drive them into bunkering facilities over time.

But what about the shortage of feedstocks? There are two answers to that. The first is that there are about ten pathways with different feedstocks for biofuels today per my assessment in 2023, and most of them are waste biomass from human activities. Every dried ton of biomass can be turned into about 0.4 tons of biofuel. Just our global food waste at present is 2.5 billion tons annually, a full third of all the food we manufacture. Just Europe has 1.5 billion tons of livestock dung to contend with, and last year initiated a straightforward engineering project to manufacture jet fuel out of it.

And that waste biomass is a major climate problem because it emits a lot of methane, the potent greenhouse gas, as it decomposes. Human biomass waste is at least as big a source of methane emissions in our atmosphere as the entire fossil fuel industry, per the Global Carbon Project’s Carbon Budget. While we have to eliminate much of that methane emission with things like seaweed-based supplements for cattle and bubblers for pig manure ponds, we will still have vast stocks of it.

In this category of biofuels, by the way, I include methanol made from human-caused methane from landfills and dairy barns. While I think that the current fad for anaerobic digesters is short-sighted due to inevitable methane leakage, an integrated anaerobic digester and methanol manufacturing facility would reduce that concern. Biomethanol just has to compete with biodiesel on cost, and I doubt it will be able to.

But what else will be biofuels be required for, like airplanes?

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The end state demand in 2100 per my projection could be met just with the crop waste from corn, wheat and rice crops — one of the ten biofuel pathway feedstocks — per OSTI’s metrics. But, of course, that crop waste is currently plowed under as fresh nutrients in some cases, used as animal fodder in others, and burned for agricultural process heat in others, not just dumped in middens to emit methane. There are competitive use cases for biomass waste whose collection can be automated, and market forces will figure that out.

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Much of our arable land is underutilized. Imagine two pathways for green ammonia. One flows into maritime fuel tanks and the other flows onto fields. Which provides the best return?

A ton of ammonia fertilizer creates an average of 28 additional tons of crop yields. Grain crops contain an average of 50% water. Drying brings that down to 14 tons. A ton of dried biomass creates 0.4 tons of biofuels, as noted earlier. A ton of ammonia for fertilizer contains 0.18 tons of hydrogen. A ton of green hydrogen turned into fertilizer can create 31 tons of biofuel. Or you could burn the ammonia or hydrogen as a shipping fuel and get just under 0.5 tons of diesel equivalent energy.

Using green hydrogen to make green ammonia and applying it to crops is vastly more efficient and effective than burning it or putting it into a fuel cell. About 65 times more energy would be available from the ammonia-grown biofuel than from the hydrogen or ammonia used to create it.

There is no competition with food crops except in hyperlocal situations, and while that’s a concern, it’s not a systemic, global concern. At present, we cultivate crops for timber products, biomass fuel, pharmaceuticals, decoration, clothing and also food. The industries which manufacture biomass seek out markets just as every other industry does. There’s zero reason to restrict a subset of them, like corn or sugarcane farmers, from taking advantage of market opportunities, especially as no one is starving as a result.

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Allowing nature to do most of the heavy lifting of creating hydrocarbons, then in many cases using the 8,000 year old technology of fermentation and the 6,000 year old technology of distillation plus more modern technologies like alcohol-to-jet, will always be more cost effective than trying to synthesize fuels from scratch with precious green electrons.

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Field to wake, biofuels are already much lower carbon than they were when benchmarked in 2010. The anti-biofuel hysteria of the 2000s that lingers today should be seen for what it was, amplified disinformation from the industry it is in part displacing more than a modern reality. READ MORE

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wheat water waste-to-fuel VLSFO (very low sulfur fuel oil) supply chain sugarcane South America Singapore shipping rice photosynthesis nuclear Nitrogen fertiliser Netherlands Methanol/Biomethanol/Renewable Methanol methane/biomethane markets/sales market forces Marine/Maritime Bio and Renewable/Sustainable Fuel (SMF) manure International Maritime Organization (IMO) Hydrogen/Renewable Hydrogen hydrogen fuel cells HFO (Heavy Residual Fuel Oil) GHG (Greenhouse Gas Emissions) food waste fertilizer fermentation European Union (EU) electrolysis Electric Car/Electric Vehicle (EV) distillation defossilization corn/maize Chile Carbon Intensity (CI)/Carbon Footprint carbon capture and utilization (CCU) California biomass Biofuel biodiesel Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) Australia Asia anaerobic digester/digestion ammonia alcohol-to-jet (ATJ)/ethanol-to-jet (ETJ) Agricultural waste/residue Africa

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