Is Ammonia A Better Fuel?

Whenever we talk about green house effect, the discussion, but naturally, tilt towards the irrational use of fossil fuels. Since the discovery of this Green House Effect, a lot of research has been done in this field. As per a rough estimate, the annual world consumption of fossil fuels is equivalent to 11, 567,000,000,000Kg. In one of my articles, I have told about ethanol blend being used to boost engine performance. Science has been so much developed that we can now have energy from Plastics. But whatever, whenever we say the word “fuel” it reminds us only of ‘Organic Fuels’.

What about ‘inorganic fuels’? The whole energy scenario is waiting to be tapped. One of the fuels is Anhydrous Ammonia. Have you ever thought why we use CNG while we can easily use Ammonia? To clear all doubts, Ammonia can be used as a fuel but in my opinion, CNG or LNG is more preferable, as of now i.e.; in today’s date. But Ammonia’s future as a fuel appears to be bright.

So let us discuss why it is not used and why it should be used. One of the factors is money. One galleon of Anhydrous Ammonia costs Rs.75 to Rs.85 excluding transportation and other services. To top it all price may also increase by about one third to half of what I just mentioned.

Another aspect is its physical properties. Ammonia is 1.3 times denser in energy than H2. Ammonia can be stored in a liquid state at 240K at Atmospheric condition. While Hydrogen is to be cooled to 20.222K and pressurized to about 124.11KPa to maintain it in a liquid state. Also Ammonia is just 40% in volume than that of Gasoline. Well this is both an advantage and disadvantage. Advantage because it weighs less.

So if you were to use Ammonia in place of Gasoline, you are actually reducing the total load on vehicle. This is also disadvantage because you will carry a less fuel, so you will need to refill fuel very often. But there is also good news; we are actually increasing the mileage of our vehicle by about 60%. But whatever, we will have to think something about storage of Ammonia.

Another most important point is that most of the ammonia available today is made from Haber’s process. In Haber’s process we use Hydrogen to react with Nitrogen to form Ammonia. Also Ammonia does not produce any pollution on burning nor produce any green house emissions. Hence we can say that it is an environmental friendly gas. But for every advantage there is a disadvantage present. The Hydrogen used in Haber’s process comes from CNG. So CNG more or less defines the price of Ammonium fuel.

Another aspect is that Anhydrous Ammonia is poisonous, well practically quite lethal. So when we are refilling it, we have to be careful about its safe handling. But in my opinion, even Gasoline has health hazards and you will not want to inhale it every day. So if we can use Gasoline safely, we can of course use Ammonia.

If you know, we use Ammonia in many places, knowingly or unknowingly. We use Ammonia as a coolant in refrigerators, in fertilizers and also potential energy-scale utilities medium. And from all this I can only conclude that Ammonia is safer than Gasoline.  We can successfully handle it.

Well there is a lot more to be said and debated on this topic and we can go on adding more and more points to it.. According to me we may not use Ammonia as a fuel as we are using Gasoline because we are more into development of Non-conventional energy resources. But at one point of time we will also use it. It is a clean source of energy. Our fossil-fuel dominated energy resources are going to be much diverse in the recent future. And Ammonia is only going to be “just one of them”.

Source: #-Link-Snipped-# Image source: TradeNote

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