129 comments on A National Renewable Ammonia Architecture
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
129 comments on A National Renewable Ammonia Architecture
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- What "Lower Consumption" Means
- Tricking and Treating the Future
- Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way - Potatoes?
TOD:Europe
- The US stimulus and "green jobs"
- EROWI - energy return of water invested
- An interview with Stoneleigh - the case for deflation
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Saturday 7th November 2009
- The Bullroarer - Friday 30th October 2009
- Details of Solar Flagships Released
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“So one may almost say that the theory of universal suffrage assumes that the Average Citizen is an active, instructed, intelligent ruler of his country. The facts contradict this assumption.”
—James Bryce (1909, 35)
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
The existing Haber Bosch process prefers to run at 100% but it's possible to throttle it down to around 20% of the normal reaction rate without cooling the system, which would potentially result in catalyst poisoning and metal fatigue. It's possible in the thermo-mechanical realm, but I think not so easy to sell it in the financial.
Why would you build a $100M facility next to a wind farm and run it 85% of the time and only get 40% utilization through the year when you could build next to a dam and get 100%?
There is something to be said for setting up such a system to run on overnight generation but I've not yet dug deep into wind production information to know how much of the off hour production is going to waste. If operators really are paying to have excess electricity hauled away perhaps it would be a good thing to make ammonia on a variable basis.
http://knowledgeproblem.com/2008/12/16/more_on_wind_po_1/
You'd build a $100m facility next to a wind farm because of access to cheap electricity part of the time, and buy the power from the Electricity Superhighway the balance of the time.
Of course, that assumes the existence of the Electricity Superhighway. And then the 5% line loss between the dam and the plant will cost much more per kWh than equivalent 5% line loss if built near the dam and buying cheap power from the wind farm via the Electricity Superhighway when the wind is strong. So you'd still locate near the dam.
You'd throttle demand for power based on current cost based on the trade-off between operating costs and capital costs ... and for the current technology, that trade-off likely says very little excess capacity can be purchased with the operating cost savings of increasing the share of ammonia produced with less expansive power ... which is why the lower capital cost technologies for ammonia production are intriguing.
Interruptable power will get you a much better rate. How fast can an ammonia plant electrical load be ramped up or down? If load can be dropped off or picked up quickly enough the utility might give a much better rate for power. Going from 100% load to 20% load in under a minute would be very valuble. The lower cost of the electricity might make the plant competitive. A large industrial load that can be picked up or dropped off quickly is as good as a gas turbine for load leveling. Bonneville Power has a program to pay industries to reduce load in critical periods, which is cheaper than buying peaking power in certain areas (especially the Olympic peninsula in Washington).
Where can I get more information on the power stuff? That sounds really interesting ...