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by pneill 978 days ago
I love that Toyota is forward thinking, but where does the ammonia come from? The most common way to make it is via the Haber-Bosch process, which, as I recall, consumes 1% of global energy product as of today. I wonder what that number would look like if we manufactured fuel that way?
2 comments
bertil 978 days ago
The best option is to use a similar process to HB, but using “green” H2, so yet more inefficiencies from “excessive” renewable electricity generation.

https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-e....

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pneill 978 days ago
Interesting! Thanks for the link, but that just explains how to get the hydrogen for the process.

What about the energy to run the HB reaction? It's super high temp and high pressure. Is there a zero carbon way to make that?

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o11c 978 days ago
Pretty sure this is best read as an alternative to Hydrogen for the "future renewable energy will be plentiful, but sometimes we still need higher energy density".

It clearly wins by one measure (it's easier to make it a liquid, which is easier to handle than a gas), but I'm not enough of a chemist to really understand the table in the link downthread for how it compares by other measures.

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