Ammonia has a formula of NH3, or one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. There are energy in the bonds just as there are in methane, which has a formula of CH4, or a single carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. Methane is better known as the primary component of ... natural gas.

Natural gas is piped into our homes for cooking and heating and in some countries it is used as a vehicle fuel. We'll never have that with ammonia. Ammonia has to be pressurized to 125psi or cooled to about -35F for storage and it's quite an inhalation hazard if it gets loose. Ammonia will be a farm fuel or industrial fuel, but never a road fuel or heating/cooking fuel.

There are three ways to use ammonia as a fuel.

Ammonia can be burned in a spark ignited piston engine, behaving quite a bit like an ordinary gasoline engine, except it will perform at compressions of as high as 25 to 1, which is even better than diesel's 17 to 1 limit. Ammonia does not burn without an extremely hot spark or a starter fuel, so hydrogen or propane is used as a starter fuel. Ammonia can also be used in a diesel engine provided a small amount of diesel/biodiesel is mixed with it to get the combustion started.

Ammonia will burn in a turbine, which would be used for long term electricity generation, say in a "peaker" style generation facility intended to replace a natural gas generator. This would be a machine in the multimegawatt range.

The third method of producing electricity from ammonia is to use it in a fuel cell. This has always been possible but development has favored hydrogen fuel cells rather than direct ammonia fuel cells thus far. This should change as ammonia generation and distribution methods spread from agricultural areas to any place that has stranded renewable electricity sources that need to be firmed.