Japan carbon pledge boosts hopes of ammonia backers
05 November, 2020
Japan's pledge to be carbon-neutral by 2050 is offering desire to industry heavyweights pushing ammonia as the fuel into the future -- but critics say the corrosive gas continues to be definately not a clear-cut clean energy.
Burning ammonia, unlike fossil fuels, will not emit planet-warming skin tightening and, and it is easier to transport than liquid hydrogen, also touted as a potential way to obtain green fuel.
Which has attracted the interest of a consortium of major Japanese firms, keen to launch large-scale imports in to the country, which has few fossil fuel reserves and limited nuclear capacity because the Fukushima disaster.
"Ammonia may be the cheapest & most viable option" for Japan, Shigeru Muraki, executive vice president and representative director of the Green Ammonia Consortium, told AFP.
Formed this past year, the consortium groups 70 major Japanese organizations who hope to use ammonia first at coal power stations and finally at gas plants too.
The hunt for greener fuels has new urgency after Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga in October set a 2050 deadline for the world's third-largest economy -- still heavily coal dependent -- to attain carbon neutrality.
Muraki believes ammonia could generate a tenth of Japan's electricity needs "before 2040."
But if the gas provides a silver bullet depends a whole lot on future technologies, not least because most available methods for making ammonia themselves emit carbon dioxide.
Ammonia -- made up of hydrogen and nitrogen -- has already been produced en masse from fossil fuels and exported worldwide to create fertiliser.
It maintains a liquid state at around -33 degrees Celsius (-27.4 degrees Fahrenheit), meaning it is easier and cheaper to transport than liquid hydrogen at -253 degrees Celsius.
In eco terms, the holy grail is "green" ammonia, produced with chemical reactions involving water, air and sustainable electricity. It is 100 percent renewable and carbon-free, according to the Royal Society, an independent scientific organization.
Researchers hope "green" ammonia could 1 day power a low-carbon planet, but for now most ammonia is "grey" -- extracted from natural gas or coal.
This method emits on average around 2.4 tons of carbon dioxide for each and every tonne of ammonia produced, based on the International Energy Agency -- accounting for about one percent of global CO2 emissions today.
Comparing the emissions from generating grey ammonia to those from burning coal is complicated, authorities say, but they concur that it won't be looked at green unless produced renewably.
Work is underway to fully capture and store emissions from ammonia production, creating a halfway-house product dubbed "blue" ammonia.
Muraki said the consortium hoped to "eventually use blue and green ammonia."
But, he acknowledged, for the present time "we use cost-effective grey ammonia from existing suppliers, because blue ammonia will not be available for another few years."
Douglas MacFarlane, a chemistry professor at Monash University in Australia, said you start with "grey" ammonia "as a means of developing the supply chain and encouraging producer countries to build up their capability... is practical, but only in the context of finally and fairly quickly moving to blue, then green."
And he warned that grey ammonia "also offers the impact of shifting emissions from an individual country to the producer country."
"That is clearly a sensitive issue in global carbon politics," he told AFP.
There are other concerns, as burning ammonia produces polluting nitrogen oxides, which modern coal plants are built to fully capture, but would require adaptations at gas power stations.
Muraki is convinced that technology will develop rapidly in the sector, driven by demand.
"The power market is quite large compared to fertiliser," he said, adding that ammonia in addition has attracted attention just as one ship fuel -- a worldwide market producers will be keen to expand into.
For now, the ammonia energy market continues to be in its infancy.
In September, Saudi Aramco and Japan's IEEJ energy think-tank organized a shipment of 40 a great deal of blue ammonia to Japan, to be burnt experimentally in a coal power station and two small gas turbines. And even grey ammonia continues to be in test stages in Japan.
Environmental campaigners are unimpressed, arguing the focus ought to be only truly renewable resources instead of repurposing fossil fuels.
Carbon capture and storage "won't materialise on a sizable scale by 2030, and there are many uncertainties about the expenses and risks associated with these technologies", Kimiko Hirata, international director of Japanese environmental NGO Kiko Network, told AFP.
"We are also worried that the industrial and power companies will attempt to justify coal power with these technologies, and so delay actions to shift from coal to renewable energies."
Source: japantoday.com
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