For some time, advocates of clean ammonia have touted its potential as a very low-carbon alternative for power plants, ships and other hydrocarbon consumers. Still, solid plans for US projects to produce large volumes of ammonia from clean hydrogen were few and far between. Until recently, that is, with the recent uptick in project announcements fueled in large part by the supercharged Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the efforts recently strengthened by power. generators in Japan and South Korea to make clean ammonia a significant part of their fuel mix in the future. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the progress clean ammonia has made since the IRA became law and the growing list of projects moving towards a final investment decision (FID), construction and production
We’ll start with a short refresher course on what clean ammonia is, how it’s produced, and what it can be used for. Next, we will look at the main drivers behind the development of clean ammonia production facilities (and ammonia export terminals), and then (in Part 2) we will discuss in detail the set of US projects that are being planned.
What is pure ammonia?
First, there is some confusion around the definition: some say that to qualify as “clean,” the ammonia in question must be produced in a way that reduces carbon dioxide (CO) .2) are released into the atmosphere in at least a certain percentage, usually 90% or more. That being said, the popular opinion is that clean ammonia includes “blue” and “green” ammonia – Oh no, those evil colors again! – which are produced by reacting blue or green hydrogen with nitrogen (supplied from an air separation unit) using the Haber-Bosch process (a catalyst, high temperatures and high pressure). Blue hydrogen is produced by passing natural gas through a steam methane reformer (SMR) or automatic thermal reformer (ATR) and capturing and sequestering most of the CO2 generated by the process, typically about half of the CO2 when using an SMR and 90% more with an ATR. Green hydrogen, in turn, is produced by running water through an electrolyser powered by renewable energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen, without CO2 occurs, so there is no need for CCS.
