Smoother Sailing with Ammonia
The Brooklyn Navy Yard no longer bustles with people assembling the latest and greatest in seafaring technology. Instead, its city block-sized buildings that used to house ships now hold startups—one of which is working on a technology that could extend the Navy Yard’s reputation as a center for nautical innovation.
That company is Amogy, which is focused on creating electricity with ammonia, an industrial chemical that holds allure in clean energy circles as a kind of win-win alternative fuel. Ammonia offers plenty of hydrogen that can be mined to make power without any of the carbon that fossil fuels carry and emit.
Amogy team members work to advance the
company's ammonia-to-energy system. Photo: Amogy
Amogy’s “powerpacks” combine liquid ammonia with fuel cells and have shown potential in a handful of smaller applications. The next device the company’s equipment will power is a tugboat, marking Amogy’s first steps into the shipping industry to which it ultimately wants to cater.
Other companies and industry organizations agree ammonia might help the world’s roughly 100,000 ocean-going commercial vessels cut back on their emissions. But ship operators would have to accept, install, and pay for ammonia equipment if it were to be beneficial. Those hurdles could prove more challenging to resolve than designing the cutting-edge technology itself.
Founded in 2020, Amogy’s team took just a year to power up its first appliance—a small drone. In 2022, an electrified tractor trundled across a farm in upstate New York thanks to a tank of ammonia in the back and a power cell mounted just behind the front wheels. The third and largest demo so far is the company’s semi-truck. Equipment attached to the back of the cab powered the vehicle, emblazoned with Amogy’s orange inverted “V” logo, through a closed test track and a large concrete courtyard just off the company offices in the Navy Yard.
Though operating at different scales, the underlying technology in each Amogy design is the same, which Abigail Jablansky, head of project management at the company, unveiled by turning over flaps on top of the drone. Liquid ammonia feeds into a reactor, which splits the molecules into hydrogen and nitrogen before both molecules carry on to a fuel cell. Amogy works with a proton electron membrane fuel cell, which is one of the most common versions of the technology available off-the-shelf. Here, the flow of the hydrogen electron from one end to another generates electricity. Any ammonia that doesn’t get converted seeps into waiting absorbers.
As operations beneath the packaging show, the real power source Amogy provides is hydrogen.
Check Out This ASME Video: Cracking Liquid Ammonia
“We are now in the hydrogen age,” said Ibrahim Dincer, P.E., a mechanical engineering professor at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario. “We need shortcut solutions. In these, ammonia is a critical player.”
For all its appeal as a way to create electricity, pure hydrogen is challenging to handle. It’s a highly-flammable gas and only liquefies at -423 °F. Liquid ammonia, on the other hand, is one part nitrogen for every three parts hydrogen—it holds more of the desirable element than liquid hydrogen itself. The gas also condenses at a comparatively-balmy -28.5 °F.
“It’s orders of magnitude more practical,” Jablansky said. Ammonia could be a safer, more compact way to deliver energy, either directly fed into combustion engines or deployed as a way to get hydrogen to fuel cells.
The portability of ammonia could also make it a convenient replacement for the heavy fuel oil most ships rely on today. A residual of crude oil refining, heavy fuel oil—along with combustibles like diesel and liquefied natural gas—are part of the reason why the shipping industry accounts for about 3 percent of the world’s annual human-generated emissions.
Discover the Benefits of ASME Membership
Though a mile of shipping releases a fraction of the carbon that a mile of trucking does, nations still expect the industry to reduce its contribution to climate change. The International Maritime Organization agreed in July 2023 to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions sometime around 2050. A law in the European Union could put on a bigger squeeze: Starting in 2025, shipping companies will have to buy carbon permits from the bloc to cover 40 percent of their emissions.
Pressure to change (or pay up) could explain why some alternative fuels are slowly working their way into the maritime markets. According to the classification society DNV, 2023 saw 138 orders for methanol-powered ships compared to 130 for liquefied natural gas engines—the first time the former fuel eclipsed the latter. Even if methanol-powered boats only account for a couple dozen ships currently sailing, the fuel option is similar to ammonia in that it can also be manufactured with lower emissions.
Sooner rather than later, Amogy would also like to join the list of high sea power suppliers. That’s why a tugboat retrofitted to hold Amogy powerpacks and run on electricity will sail through a New York waterway in 2024. Until then, the company is still fine-tuning the technology that will go into the boat with teams collaborating from New York, Norway, Houston, and Singapore.
Amogy’s third location is in Houston, a center of the natural gas and ammonia industry in the United States. Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma combined produce 60 percent of the country’s ammonia and 43 percent of its natural gas. The regional overlap reveals a weak point in the potential for ammonia to cut shipping emissions. Fossil fuels, namely natural gas, supply 95 percent of hydrogen globally, which producers combine with nitrogen to make ammonia. A process called steam methane reforming blends the fossil fuel with high pressure and a catalyst to extract the element.
A tugboat that was originally
built in 1957 is being outfitted
with a 1-megawatt version of
the ammonia-to-power system. Photo: Amogy
Hydrogen production releases enough carbon that running a ship on what is ultimately fossil fuel-derived ammonia could be no better than heavy fuel oil. Depending on if measurements are by weight or volume, ammonia has about half to one-third the energy density of the standard shipping fuel. To drop the liquid into a ship’s combustion engine, an operator would need at least twice the volume of ammonia as it would fuel oil to complete identical trips.
Producing that volume of ammonia would actually generate more emissions than making and burning the equivalent fuel oil would, said Fayas Malik Kanchiralla, a doctoral student in maritime studies at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
If ammonia were to become a cleaner fuel from production to the moment it’s used—or from “well to wake,” as the shipping industry would phrase it—its manufacturing process needs to change. Some companies plan to pair traditional production with carbon capture, while others want to ramp up electrolysis, which is how less than one percent of ammonia is made today. Though it might seem water-intensive to rely on the resource as a source of hydrogen, electrolysis requires about as much of the liquid as other standard methods of hydrogen manufacturing.
Editor's Choice: Wing Sails for Cargo Ships Pass First Test
Ultimately, the most carbon-intensive part of producing ammonia comes from the power needed to run the manufacturing process, no matter where the hydrogen comes from. The go-to method for combining the two elements into ammonia is called the Haber-Bosch process, which also draws a lot of energy.
So, while it’s important that hydrogen feedstock be non-fossil fuels, another meaningful way to cut back on ammonia production emissions is to run it all on clean power, Dincer said. Even then, ammonia power providers have to confront the nitrogen oxides (NOX) ammonia can create. Though ammonia doesn’t release carbon-based greenhouse gases, it can release nitrogen and oxygen-based versions. Nitrous oxide, for example, has 273 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Any equipment or engine suppliers have to mitigate those gasses, including Amogy. Lab testing has shown trace amounts of NOX are emitted from Amogy’s powerpacks, so company researchers are working to further reduce the quantity released.
Efforts to supply shipping with a cleaner version of ammonia would require new infrastructure built up cheaply and at high volumes. Today’s supplies are already in demand for fertilizers, plastics, and more. Meanwhile, the shipping industry uses an estimated 87 billion gallons of fuel a year.
A retrofitted semi truck was
field-tested on ammonia in
January 2023. Photo: Amogy
“These ships use tons of energy,” said David Hume, a former merchant marine and head of climate programs at logistics company Flexport in San Francisco. “A lot of people don’t appreciate just how much.” Some large commercial models go through 100 or 200 tons of heavy fuel oil a day. Burning through such high volumes of liquid requires the fuel to be cheap—which it is. Cleaner versions of ammonia are up to three times more expensive per ton, with renewable-powered, electrolysis-derived versions on the higher end, said Kanchiralla. The U.S. Department of Energy is trying to address part of the expense problem with a goal of bringing the cost of clean hydrogen down to $1 per kilogram by 2031.
Accommodating new and more fuel requires ships themselves to adapt, too. Cargo space could be lost—a typical tanker, which ferries around liquid goods, would drop two of its 12 storage compartments if it took on a fuel that needed double the space of heavy fuel oil. A vessel’s entire layout could change if new safety requirements determine that, for example, ammonia needs to be housed away from specific equipment.
More For You: Infographic: Cruising Toward Sustainability
The safety concerns for ammonia in comparison to other fuel options are striking. Some risk of traveling with ammonia is already broadly accepted in the industry. Ships are how the liquid gets around the world, after all. But supplying the material for power raises new issues. Contact can burn or cause blindness, while inhalation can be lethal. Ammonia is also extremely corrosive and harmful to wildlife, making it hard on ships and their surroundings.
A report commissioned by the European Maritime Safety Agency assessing the feasibility of ammonia as a high-seas fuel pointed out that ships would likely require strategically-placed ventilation, emergency procedures in case of incidents, piping that leaks before it breaks, and more changes for ammonia to be safely deployed. Shipping classification organizations like the American Bureau of Shipping and nonprofits like the Mærsk McKinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping in Copenhagen have started researching what safety standards would be adequate as well.
For Amogy, the tugboat is a chance to prove the technology can comply with safety regulations in New York waters. All previous demonstrations ran on private properties, so this will be the first powerpack to move through shared spaces.
Amogy demonstrated
its ammonia
technology on a
mid-size John Deere
tractor in June 2022.
Photo: Amogy
“If something happens on a truck, you can run away,” Jablansky said. “On a boat, there’s nowhere to go.” Process safety automation and redundancy become more important, even more so because the tugboat will have a 1 MW capacity—three times that of the semi-truck Amogy previously tested.
This past spring, Amogy engineers in Stord, Norway, were running final tests on nine metal frames—each the size of standard refrigerators—containing the scaled-up reactors, fuel cells, and absorbers for the boat. Though costly, fuel cells generate power quickly and are a standout candidate for tugboats, which have to provide massive amounts of torque to push and pull ships. Getting to the anticipated sailing day has required the company to work through everything from what maintenance might look like to sourcing gaskets made of materials compatible with ammonia, said Michael Berger, manager of powerpack integration with Amogy.
Given all the research and preparations Amogy has done just for a demonstration, such efforts could be considered incredibly daunting for an industry that is slow to change. Commercial vessels last at least 20 years. Buyers need to know that whatever tech or power supply is operating on the maiden voyage will be there to support the vessel through its whole life, not to mention be affordable for all that time. A hesitancy to leave known, popular fuel sources behind is why methanol-powered engines are a safe bet—many can be fed with diesel instead.
You Might Also Enjoy: Blog: Sailing Toward Sustainable Cruising
Even the first ammonia-powered, four-stroke marine engine to be made available for order, which debuted this past November from Finland-based marine technology company Wärtsilä, also operates on existing, standard fuels like diesel and natural gas.
Amogy also expects its earliest customers to have dual systems aboard.
Still, the shipping industry might not completely let go of familiar fuels without outside pressure, such as legal requirements or customers demanding that the vessels carrying their goods operate with cleaner technology. Even taking on a new power system like Amogy’s and being willing to troubleshoot requires something special.
“What we’re looking for is companies that are willing to do this with us and be first,” Jablansky said. “The willingness has to be there.”
Leslie Nemo is an independent writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
That company is Amogy, which is focused on creating electricity with ammonia, an industrial chemical that holds allure in clean energy circles as a kind of win-win alternative fuel. Ammonia offers plenty of hydrogen that can be mined to make power without any of the carbon that fossil fuels carry and emit.
Amogy team members work to advance the
company's ammonia-to-energy system. Photo: Amogy
Other companies and industry organizations agree ammonia might help the world’s roughly 100,000 ocean-going commercial vessels cut back on their emissions. But ship operators would have to accept, install, and pay for ammonia equipment if it were to be beneficial. Those hurdles could prove more challenging to resolve than designing the cutting-edge technology itself.
Hydrogen in disguise
Founded in 2020, Amogy’s team took just a year to power up its first appliance—a small drone. In 2022, an electrified tractor trundled across a farm in upstate New York thanks to a tank of ammonia in the back and a power cell mounted just behind the front wheels. The third and largest demo so far is the company’s semi-truck. Equipment attached to the back of the cab powered the vehicle, emblazoned with Amogy’s orange inverted “V” logo, through a closed test track and a large concrete courtyard just off the company offices in the Navy Yard.
As operations beneath the packaging show, the real power source Amogy provides is hydrogen.
Check Out This ASME Video: Cracking Liquid Ammonia
“We are now in the hydrogen age,” said Ibrahim Dincer, P.E., a mechanical engineering professor at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario. “We need shortcut solutions. In these, ammonia is a critical player.”
For all its appeal as a way to create electricity, pure hydrogen is challenging to handle. It’s a highly-flammable gas and only liquefies at -423 °F. Liquid ammonia, on the other hand, is one part nitrogen for every three parts hydrogen—it holds more of the desirable element than liquid hydrogen itself. The gas also condenses at a comparatively-balmy -28.5 °F.
“It’s orders of magnitude more practical,” Jablansky said. Ammonia could be a safer, more compact way to deliver energy, either directly fed into combustion engines or deployed as a way to get hydrogen to fuel cells.
The portability of ammonia could also make it a convenient replacement for the heavy fuel oil most ships rely on today. A residual of crude oil refining, heavy fuel oil—along with combustibles like diesel and liquefied natural gas—are part of the reason why the shipping industry accounts for about 3 percent of the world’s annual human-generated emissions.
Discover the Benefits of ASME Membership
Though a mile of shipping releases a fraction of the carbon that a mile of trucking does, nations still expect the industry to reduce its contribution to climate change. The International Maritime Organization agreed in July 2023 to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions sometime around 2050. A law in the European Union could put on a bigger squeeze: Starting in 2025, shipping companies will have to buy carbon permits from the bloc to cover 40 percent of their emissions.
Pressure to change (or pay up) could explain why some alternative fuels are slowly working their way into the maritime markets. According to the classification society DNV, 2023 saw 138 orders for methanol-powered ships compared to 130 for liquefied natural gas engines—the first time the former fuel eclipsed the latter. Even if methanol-powered boats only account for a couple dozen ships currently sailing, the fuel option is similar to ammonia in that it can also be manufactured with lower emissions.
Sooner rather than later, Amogy would also like to join the list of high sea power suppliers. That’s why a tugboat retrofitted to hold Amogy powerpacks and run on electricity will sail through a New York waterway in 2024. Until then, the company is still fine-tuning the technology that will go into the boat with teams collaborating from New York, Norway, Houston, and Singapore.
Smoother sailing
Amogy’s third location is in Houston, a center of the natural gas and ammonia industry in the United States. Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma combined produce 60 percent of the country’s ammonia and 43 percent of its natural gas. The regional overlap reveals a weak point in the potential for ammonia to cut shipping emissions. Fossil fuels, namely natural gas, supply 95 percent of hydrogen globally, which producers combine with nitrogen to make ammonia. A process called steam methane reforming blends the fossil fuel with high pressure and a catalyst to extract the element.
A tugboat that was originally
built in 1957 is being outfitted
with a 1-megawatt version of
the ammonia-to-power system. Photo: Amogy
Producing that volume of ammonia would actually generate more emissions than making and burning the equivalent fuel oil would, said Fayas Malik Kanchiralla, a doctoral student in maritime studies at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
If ammonia were to become a cleaner fuel from production to the moment it’s used—or from “well to wake,” as the shipping industry would phrase it—its manufacturing process needs to change. Some companies plan to pair traditional production with carbon capture, while others want to ramp up electrolysis, which is how less than one percent of ammonia is made today. Though it might seem water-intensive to rely on the resource as a source of hydrogen, electrolysis requires about as much of the liquid as other standard methods of hydrogen manufacturing.
Editor's Choice: Wing Sails for Cargo Ships Pass First Test
Ultimately, the most carbon-intensive part of producing ammonia comes from the power needed to run the manufacturing process, no matter where the hydrogen comes from. The go-to method for combining the two elements into ammonia is called the Haber-Bosch process, which also draws a lot of energy.
So, while it’s important that hydrogen feedstock be non-fossil fuels, another meaningful way to cut back on ammonia production emissions is to run it all on clean power, Dincer said. Even then, ammonia power providers have to confront the nitrogen oxides (NOX) ammonia can create. Though ammonia doesn’t release carbon-based greenhouse gases, it can release nitrogen and oxygen-based versions. Nitrous oxide, for example, has 273 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Any equipment or engine suppliers have to mitigate those gasses, including Amogy. Lab testing has shown trace amounts of NOX are emitted from Amogy’s powerpacks, so company researchers are working to further reduce the quantity released.
Old industry, new tricks
Efforts to supply shipping with a cleaner version of ammonia would require new infrastructure built up cheaply and at high volumes. Today’s supplies are already in demand for fertilizers, plastics, and more. Meanwhile, the shipping industry uses an estimated 87 billion gallons of fuel a year.
A retrofitted semi truck was
field-tested on ammonia in
January 2023. Photo: Amogy
Accommodating new and more fuel requires ships themselves to adapt, too. Cargo space could be lost—a typical tanker, which ferries around liquid goods, would drop two of its 12 storage compartments if it took on a fuel that needed double the space of heavy fuel oil. A vessel’s entire layout could change if new safety requirements determine that, for example, ammonia needs to be housed away from specific equipment.
More For You: Infographic: Cruising Toward Sustainability
The safety concerns for ammonia in comparison to other fuel options are striking. Some risk of traveling with ammonia is already broadly accepted in the industry. Ships are how the liquid gets around the world, after all. But supplying the material for power raises new issues. Contact can burn or cause blindness, while inhalation can be lethal. Ammonia is also extremely corrosive and harmful to wildlife, making it hard on ships and their surroundings.
A report commissioned by the European Maritime Safety Agency assessing the feasibility of ammonia as a high-seas fuel pointed out that ships would likely require strategically-placed ventilation, emergency procedures in case of incidents, piping that leaks before it breaks, and more changes for ammonia to be safely deployed. Shipping classification organizations like the American Bureau of Shipping and nonprofits like the Mærsk McKinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping in Copenhagen have started researching what safety standards would be adequate as well.
Tugged into the future
For Amogy, the tugboat is a chance to prove the technology can comply with safety regulations in New York waters. All previous demonstrations ran on private properties, so this will be the first powerpack to move through shared spaces.
Amogy demonstrated
its ammonia
technology on a
mid-size John Deere
tractor in June 2022.
Photo: Amogy
This past spring, Amogy engineers in Stord, Norway, were running final tests on nine metal frames—each the size of standard refrigerators—containing the scaled-up reactors, fuel cells, and absorbers for the boat. Though costly, fuel cells generate power quickly and are a standout candidate for tugboats, which have to provide massive amounts of torque to push and pull ships. Getting to the anticipated sailing day has required the company to work through everything from what maintenance might look like to sourcing gaskets made of materials compatible with ammonia, said Michael Berger, manager of powerpack integration with Amogy.
Given all the research and preparations Amogy has done just for a demonstration, such efforts could be considered incredibly daunting for an industry that is slow to change. Commercial vessels last at least 20 years. Buyers need to know that whatever tech or power supply is operating on the maiden voyage will be there to support the vessel through its whole life, not to mention be affordable for all that time. A hesitancy to leave known, popular fuel sources behind is why methanol-powered engines are a safe bet—many can be fed with diesel instead.
You Might Also Enjoy: Blog: Sailing Toward Sustainable Cruising
Even the first ammonia-powered, four-stroke marine engine to be made available for order, which debuted this past November from Finland-based marine technology company Wärtsilä, also operates on existing, standard fuels like diesel and natural gas.
Amogy also expects its earliest customers to have dual systems aboard.
Still, the shipping industry might not completely let go of familiar fuels without outside pressure, such as legal requirements or customers demanding that the vessels carrying their goods operate with cleaner technology. Even taking on a new power system like Amogy’s and being willing to troubleshoot requires something special.
“What we’re looking for is companies that are willing to do this with us and be first,” Jablansky said. “The willingness has to be there.”
Leslie Nemo is an independent writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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