We here at the Stranded Wind Initiative have a fairly simple rule in fitting with our bias for action - if we can't buy something off the shelf today it simply doesn't exist. We're not against research, mind you, but snake oil will never replace crude oil as an energy source and there is a great deal of that sort of thing in the market these days.
Today we set aside our bias for action and explore the far reaching proposals of Dr. Homer Wang, a thinker on the global scale who has inspired and guided portions of our real world work with wind to ammonia projects.
We believe knowledge of Dr. Wang's thoughts will allow activists to derail sulfate aerosol based geoengineering and perhaps his plan may even be implemented in some form when the Arctic is inevitably developed.
Dr. Wang's proposal is simple, elegant, renewable, and displays an amazingly far reaching vision. His plan, in a nutshell, is this:
The Arctic and Southern Ocean both have essentially constant winds at a very high velocity as well as ocean currents. These can be harnessed to produce electricity but its transmission from such locations is infeasible, so it should be used to produce ammonia instead, creating a renewable fuel and removing excess heat energy from the areas in the process. Dr. Wang suggests that ice creation will also be a component of the extraction of energy from this region.
How would this be accomplished?
This snippet of a graphic from Dr. Wang's 2007 presentation at the Iowa State BECON facility's annual ammonia as a fuel conference, and it shows a high level view of his ideas.
We already build oil platforms in the ocean as well as floating, anchored construction. The wind in the area is 15.0M/s and we're currently jumping at the opportunity to build wind turbine farms in areas with 7.5M/s wind. Wind energy increases with the cube of speed, so the Arctic sites with such wind produce eight times the energy of land based development. There is some work to be done in vertical axis wind turbines of the size required for this duty but this is more an engineering dynamics problem than a true research issue. We suspect there would be several generations of systems before an optimum was reached, just as we've seen with land based horizontal axis turbines.
We can't build transmission lines to the Arctic so we'll extract hydrogen from seawater, use it in the creation of ammonia, and then ship it back to civilization where it can be burned as a fuel.
This will never work due to technical concern [X]!
We've seen some interesting denialism associated with our previous proposed solution using stranded wind to generation ammonia. The Kossacks who are not sure tend to have fairly well considered arguments in terms of policy ... and the ones we see on The Oil Drum can be at once quite technical and equally nonsensical. We suspect fearful oil industry shills in some cases. We refer the reader who wishes to know more to the following conference proceedings for the details of how production and consumption of ammonia as a fuel may work in practice.
Ammonia as a Transportation Fuel II, Norm Olson, Iowa Energy Center
Preliminary Assessment of Energy and GHG Emissions of Ammonia to H2 for Fuel Cell Vehicle Applications, Michael Q. Wang, Argonne National Laboratory
Non-Equatorial Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTC) Applications, William Kumm, Arctic Energies, Ltd.
Ammonia Transportation, Distribution & Logistics, Greg Hutchison, Royster Clark
Ammonia Fuel Cell Systems, Jason C. Ganley, Howard University
Direct Ammonia Fuel Cells for Distributed Power Generation and CHP, Andy McFarlan, Natural Resources Canada
Ammonia is the Fuel for the Hydrogen-Economy, Karl Kordesch, University of Graz, Austria
Internal Combustion Engines and Ammonia (Second Report), Ted Hollinger, Hydrogen Engine Center, Inc.
Opportunities and Challenges for an Ammonia Fuel Economy, John Holbrook, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Wind to Ammonia
Mike Reese, University of Minnesota, West Central Research and Outreach Center
Potential Roles of Ammonia in a Hydrogen Economy: Public Opinion and Input
George Thomas, US DOE/Sandia National Laboratories (ret.) and George Parks, ConocoPhillips
Ammonia Fuel and the Energy-Water Nexus Issue
William Kumm, Arctic Energies Ltd.
Using Ammonia-Fueled Generation to "Firm Up" Intermittent Renewable
Rsources, Such as Wind Power
Preston Michie, Northwest Hydrogen Alliance LLC
Solid State Low Pressure Ammonia Production
Jason Ganley, Howard University
Costs of Delivered Energy from Large-scale, Diverse, Stranded, Renewable Resources, Transmitted and Firmed as Electricity, Gaseous Hydrogen, and Ammonia
Bill Leighty, Leighty Foundation
The Ammonia-Fueled Fuel Cell Locomotive
Arnold Miller, Vehicle Projects LLC
Transportation and Delivery of Anhydrous Ammonia
Ray Hattenbach, Chemical Marketing Services
On-board Storage; Technology Hurdles & Actions
Dave Bloomfield, Analytic Power Corp.
"Solidified" Ammonia as Storage Material for Fueled Cell Applications
Tue Johannessen, Amminex A/S
Reversible Surface Storage of Ammonia
Patrick Desrochers, University of Central Arkansas
Performance of a Commercial Internal Combustion Engine on Ammonia Fuel
Ted Hollinger, Hydrogen Engine Center
Co-generation of Electricity and Hydrogen Using an Ammonia-SOFC System
Pinakin Patel, Fuel Cell Energy Corporation and Randy Petri, Versa-Power Systems
Direct Ammonia Fuel Cell-Recent Results and State of the Art
Jason Ganley, Howard University
An International Ammonia Fuel R&D Agenda/Wrap-up
John Holbrook, AmmPower LLC
Ammonia as a Motor Vehicle Fuel in California
Gary Yee, California Air Resources Board
Ammonia Plant Construction Update
Keith Stokes, Stokes Engineering
Ammonia from Wind, An Update
Mike Reese, University of Minnesota--Morris
?Solid-State? Ammonia Synthesis from Renewable Energy
Jason Ganley and John Holbrook, NHThree LLC
BioAmmonia?A Comparison with Other Biofuels
Norm Olson, Iowa Energy Center, and John Holbrook, AmmPower LLC
The Renewable Ammonia Farm Bill Initiative
Bill Leighty, The Leighty Foundation
Your Carbon or Your Life: Ammonia vs. Emissions
Paul Brown, West Virginia University
A Power-Added Ammonia Internal Combustion Engine Concept
Homer Wang, utMOST Technologies Inc.
Ammonia Transformation and Utilization
Henry Brandhorst and Bruce Tatarchuk, Auburn University, Space Research Institute
Development of Direct Ammonia Fuel Cells for Efficient Stationary CHP Applications
Andy McFarlan, Natural Resources Canada
Ammonia-Fueled Internal Combustion Engines?A Progress Report
Ted Hollinger and Don Vanderbrook, Hydrogen Engine Center
Performance of a Diesel Engine Fueled by Emulsions of Fossil-fuel and Ammonia
Vito Agosta and James A. Harbach, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy
Demonstrate Ammonia Combustion in Diesel Engine
Song C. Kong, Iowa State University
The Hydrogen/Ammonia Hub Concept
Jack Robertson and Preston Michie, Northwest Hydrogen Alliance
Ammonia Fueled Combustion Turbines
Bill Lear, University of Florida
HydrAmmine: The Ammonia-based Counterpart to Metal Hydrides
Debasish Chakraborty, Amminex A/S
A Low Temperature Direct Ammonia Fuel
Jason Ganley, NHThree LLC
Hydrogen from Cracked Ammonia for Alkaline Fuel Cell - Rechargeable Battery Hybrids and ICE Vehicles
Karl Kordesch, V. Hacker, P. Kalal, G. Faleschini, Technical University Graz, and Robert Aronsson, Apollo Energy Systems
Wrap-Up/Ammonia And The Clean Energy Portfolio
John Holbrook, AmmPower LLC
The thing under the bed - current geoengineering proposals:
We have great concern regarding geoengineering proposals involving the creation of sulfate aerosols to reflect sunlight, as we experienced from the 1940s to the 1970s before cleaner diesel was required. We believe the oil industry will twist this into permission to again pollute as we did before we understood the source of acid rain, unless we stand ready to stop them with sensible alternatives.
Dr. Wang's proposal, while requiring some amount of development in currently pristine areas, is definitely a lesser evil when faced with yet another scam from big oil that would result in global acid rain or worse.
Ammonia production from wind and currents is clean, the transport of this substance is does not have the long terms hazards associated with crude oil as the highly reactive substance rapidly dissipates after release, and the combustion of ammonia is very safe. Ammonia burning produces less in the way of nitrous oxides that hydrocarbon fuels do and the exhaust is nitrogen and water that is easily made drinkable by passing it through a water softener to remove any trade of the ammonia.
We feel that while Dr. Wang's proposal is the far horizon for stranded wind the concepts involved are both good for the environment and doable in smaller increments starting immediately, even before support from a Democratic Congress coupled with a Democratic President becomes available to us. We encourage you to learn enough about these things to be able to lead in your area when the time arrives for action at a federal level.