A National Renewable Ammonia Architecture

This paper describes the current manufacture and uses of ammonia as well as describing a path forward to a fully renewable future for this vital fertilizer ingredient. The primary author and editor is Neal Rauhauser with assistance in its development rendered by Dave Bradley, Bryan Lutter, and Larry Bruce.

I recently met Bill McKibben, founder of http://350.org, at a conference in Boston. He showed this video and talked a bit about it being language neutral - it's easily understandable - the Arabic numerals used are globally ubiquitous.

We've worked for this last year exploring what to do with stranded wind, solar, and hydroelectric power, and ammonia has been a particular focus. This commodity chemical is the basis for about half of all protein humans consume and we go through twenty million tons a year in the United States alone.

Three quarters of ammonia plants run on natural gas and the rest are coal based. I knew that we'd had hydroelectric powered plants, most notably the Norsk Hydro facility in Tinn, Norway, closed eighteen years ago. What I did not know until today is that the largest one ever built, the Sable Chemicals plant in Kwekwe, Zimbabwe, is still in operation, albeit with great difficulties.

I gathered up what the Google could tell me about it and I'm trying to make sense of the operation.

Last night I heard I was getting a ten minute slot on WNJC 1360 AM, a Progressive radio station out of Philadelphia. I guess I did OK, because the host, Rob Kall, editor at OpEd News kept me talking for half an hour.

I'm a good enough speaker on agriculture, energy, and economy that I'd like to do more of this, but I'm not sure how to get started. Are there any other outlets, either Progressive or Conservative, that might be willing to have me?

This has been a busy year for the Stranded Wind Initiative and I'm not sure I take the time to sum things up as often as I should. We've launched a hydroelectric powered ammonia plant, assisted in fundraising for a solid state ammonia synthesis method, filed a patent for a methanol synthesis method suitable for use with wind power, and our next effort will be the exploration and possible patenting of the century old Haber Bosch ammonia synthesis method, making it behave with the variable power typical of renewable sources.

If we execute on all of the things describes above we'll have cut the first little bit of brush on the path to freeing our agriculture from fossil fuels for both transportation and fertilization.

This is just about as grim as it gets:

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- In the third quarter of 2007, Volvo AB booked 41,970 European orders for new trucks. Guess how many prospective purchases Volvo, the world's second-biggest maker of heavy rigs, received in the third quarter of this year?

Here's a clue. Picture a highway gridlocked by 41,815 abandoned trucks -- because Volvo's order book got destroyed to the tune of 99.63 percent, with customers signing up for just 155 vehicles in the three-month period, the Gothenburg, Sweden-based company said last week

The fifth annual Ammonia Fuel Network meeting was held September 29th and 30th in the McNamara alumni center on the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus. A hundred and forty registered attendees crammed into a sometimes standing room only auditorium to hear twenty nine presentations ranging from highly technical catalyst development to ammonia safety to updates on various clean production methods.

The sense among the attendees is that we're at a tipping point ? the end of the beginning for ammonia fuel, and the beginning of a much more broad interest in the only hydrogen carrier that can be produced renewably. Per closing remarks by Dr. John Holbrook, the co-founder of the network, this is probably the last free annual meeting and had they pushed a little harder they could have doubled the number of attendees.

The presentations fell into several broad categories: improved ammonia synthesis methods, ammonia combustion efficiency, ammonia safety, various energy storage schemes, and five ammonia production schemes, four of which were based on renewable energy sources.