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14 April 2023
By
John Kingston
Amogy: Don’t burn hydrogen, split ammonia instead
Tugboat powered by ammonia to come after tests with
drone and truck
![](images/images_04_18_2023/pic9.jpg)
Left, Seonghoon Woo, CEO of Amogy in
front of the demonstration truck for its ammonia test; right, an
ammonium tank on that truck.
(Photo: FreightWaves)
The future of hydrogen
as a transportation fuel has numerous hurdles to climb, but one of
the most basic is just how it gets used in an engine.
Most of the focus has been on the debate between combustion — using
hydrogen in an internal combustion engine engineered for it — or
injecting it into an onboard storage tank where it is then fed into a
fuel cell. The fuel cell generates electricity and the waste product
is water.
Both have environmental issues. Combustion of hydrogen creates
problematic emissions of nitrous oxide. Hydrogen in a fuel cell hasn’t
improved emissions if the hydrogen was produced using electricity
generated from a fossil fuel.
But there is a third option that is being pursued by some companies,
with a well-funded startup called Amogy based in Brooklyn — yes,
Brooklyn, New York — preparing for an on-the-water test of its
approach later this year on the Hudson River.
The Amogy process involves using ammonia, which is made up of hydrogen
and nitrogen. But instead of combusting ammonia or injecting it into a
fuel cell, the technology behind the Amogy plan is to crack the
ammonia into the separate hydrogen and nitrogen molecules — with
nitrogen vented into the atmosphere, where it is already the largest
element — and then use the pure hydrogen as a fuel to be injected into
a fuel cell. The electricity coming off the fuel cell would then power
an electric drivetrain.
Amogy’s business model is based on the idea of using ammonia built
from green hydrogen, the industry’s term for hydrogen produced from
renewable sources like wind and solar. If the hydrogen from the
ammonia can be mapped back to one of those sources, then it can wear
the badge of green hydrogen and be eligible for several key benefits:
It can receive various tax breaks, and companies looking to meet a
low-emission or zero-emission goal can count its consumption toward
meeting that target.
It’s a plan that recently pulled
in almost $140 million in new venture capital funding. Investors
include the Saudi state oil company’s VC arm, Aramco Ventures.
“We see through our partnerships with the producer side that ammonia
is going to be more available in the future,” Amogy CEO Seonghoon Woo
said in an interview with FreightWaves at the company’s offices at the
Brooklyn Navy Yard, the site of ship construction years ago but now an
incubator for startups like Amogy.
Specifically, with world ammonia supplies now
somewhere between 200 million and 250 million tons per year, Woo said
based on projects in the pipeline, supplies should rise another 100
million tons by 2030.
But even though a lot of work is getting done in Brooklyn, the target
of all this effort is a test later this year north of New York City on
the Hudson River. It will be the third live test of the Amogy system
in which a form of transportation — in this case a tugboat — will be
powered by the Amogy cracker/fuel cell combination.
The first, Woo said, was a truck. The second was a drone. An existing
piece of equipment was used in both instances, and they are both
onsite at the Navy Yard.
The tugboat is being retrofitted north of New York City on the Hudson
River, preparing for a 12-hour journey that is likely in the fall,
according to Woo. The duration of that voyage will test the ability of
the Amogy system under more real-life conditions than for the drone
and Class 8 tractor.
Woo said the tugboat test will require the production of more
electrical output than the other tests and also gauge the ability of
the system on the open water, with the challenges that vibrations and
environment pose there. The 12-hour duration is expected to be the
capacity of the ammonia onboard.
The arguments Woo makes against the alternative ways of the use of
hydrogen besides ammonia were extensively discussed at the recent
CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, where one speaker joked
that the conference should be renamed Hydrogen Week since the fuel was
such a major topic of discussion.
The most common “con” observations heard about hydrogen mostly are
centered on issues of storage, infrastructure, transportation and
density, which were the same challenges the energy world has conquered
with natural gas and the growing market for LNG.
But for ammonia advocates like Woo, the difference between the LNG
transition and ammonia is that the latter is already an extensively
used product worldwide and it’s liquid at room temperature. Ammonia
transportation is a fully developed market, as the human-made compound
has long been a vital fertilizer.
Amogy has a far-flung footprint, a function in part of regulation and
where it sees its future opportunities. Beyond the headquarters in
Brooklyn, and the work on the tugboat near Albany, New York, it is
also building a manufacturing facility in Houston that will construct
the Amogy cracking system. The core of that system is a
ruthenium-based catalyst for the cracking process. Ruthenium, a
platinum-group metal, is now about $465 per ounce. At the start of
2018, it was less than $200 per ounce.
But the focus of much of Amogy’s work, according to Woo, is Norway.
It’s one of the world’s major locales for international shipping
companies and it has some of the most stringent rules for
decarbonizing marine traffic.
“Norway wants to decarbonize shipping by 2030,” Woo said. A move to
LNG-fueled shipping in recent years has moved that process along, “but
we came to the point where everybody understands we have to change the
fuel, and ammonia is recognized as one of the most important parts of
the fuel of the future.
“We are piggybacking on mature fuel cell technology so we can go to
market first,” Woo said.
As a result, Woo said, he would expect the first deployment of the
Amogy system to be in Norway.
There’s another factor that would push ammonia
adoption in Norway first: the price of carbon. The U.S. has no
carbon-trading system, but the European emission trading system does.
At 100
euros per metric ton recently, the
price of carbon is near all-time highs. (The dollar equivalent at
current exchange rates would be about $110 per metric ton.)
“So long as the price of carbon is near 70 or 80 [euros], it can give
us price parity to diesel,” Woo said, adding that Amogy envisions the
price of carbon going to 200 euros by 2030, “and that’s what gives us
confidence.”
And on the other side of the ocean, Woo said he sees the $3 per
kilogram credit for green hydrogen in the Inflation Reduction Act,
combined with other incentives to spur infrastructure such as hydrogen
hubs, as providing a huge lift to the hydrogen industry and ammonia by
extension. And while there may be no U.S. carbon tax, Woo said
companies with internal decarbonization targets generally have an
internal cost of carbon that is used in their calculations.
Looming in the background is the International
Maritime Organization, with its aggressive shipping decarbonization
targets for 2030 and 2050 and a growing consensus that hydrogen,
in one form or another, wlll be key to meeting those goals.
The overriding goal in hydrogen is “diesel parity,” a phrase that is
at the center of any discussion of hydrogen’s viability as an
alternative fuel. A kilogram of hydrogen and a gallon of diesel both
have about the same amount of energy, so the comparison between the
two is relatively easy.
The cost of producing hydrogen varies wildly
around the world. S&P Global Commodities Insights has set up a hydrogen
“wall” with costs around the world,
illustrating the vast differences.
But Woo notes that just making green hydrogen isn’t the end of the
process. Saudi Arabia and Australia are considered some of the
lowest-cost producers in the world, but to get the hydrogen to market
involves moving it as a gas with all of the issues that entails. The
Amogy value proposition circles back to the argument that Woo makes:
The transportation of ammonia and its embedded hydrogen molecules is
likely to make that form the solution for a hydrogen-based energy
transition.
Woo noted that ammonia is not without its shortcomings in some
applications. It’s toxic and using it for passenger vehicles, with all
of the human foibles that can accompany people filling up their cars,
could be particularly dangerous if ammonia is the fuel. Those issues
are more easily managed if the refueling is done under professional
conditions, rather than personal handling.
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
Spokane, Washington. 99212
www.exactrix.com
509 995 1879 cell, Pacific.
exactrix@exactrix.com
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