Stories tagged with "ammonia"

A National Renewable Ammonia Architecture

This white 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, known on TOD SacredCowTipper, with assistance in its development rendered by Dave Bradley, known as nb41, Bryan Lutter, known as CropDuster, Larry Bruce, and others.

Ammonia Fuel Network Conference - 2008

This is a guest post by Neal Rauhauser, known on TOD as SacredCowTipper. He is the executive director of the Stranded Wind Initiative.

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. One hundred and forty registered attendees crammed into a sometimes standing room only auditorium to hear 29 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.

We're Off To See The Wizard - Storing Energy Using Ammonia

There were a couple of small Australian solar power projects that I left out of my look at solar thermal power a little while ago, as I thought they were worthy of separate consideration.

The first of these is being put together by a South Australian company called Wizard Power, which is trying to commercialise research from the Australian National University (ANU) - a solar concentrator dish and a closed loop thermochemical energy storage system using ammonia.

Ammonia and Biofuels

The following is a guest post by Dave Bradley (TOD User: nb41), who has some very good technical essays on wind power (as well as his contact info) here. Dave introduced himself to me via e-mail several months ago, and after exchanging a few e-mails in which we covered many technical issues, it became clear that we share a number of very similar interests. One of Dave's essays that caught my attention involved the very interesting idea of using excess wind power to make methanol, ethanol, or even ammonium nitrate fertilizer. But Dave doesn't just throw an idea out there; he gets into the important technical details. I first mentioned Dave's paper in my essay on Compressed Air Energy Storage.

Dave explains in the following essay how we could use renewable energy to make nitrogen fertilizer, thus taking some of the fossil fuel inputs out of biofuels production. By doing so, the energy return would be substantially improved, which is one thing that must happen before biofuels can be truly sustainable. So, it is my pleasure to present Dave Bradley's ideas for helping to mitigate our energy problems.