Can this magic fuel clean up the shipping industry?

The shipping industry is responsible for three percent of global emissions. One of its best bets to get these down is fueling their vessels with ammonia. It releases no carbon when burnt and is cheaper than other alternative fuels like methanol. The catch: building a specialized engine is extremely difficult – and there's pretty much no green ammonia production today. So can it really fix shipping's emission problem?

#PlanetA #Ammonia #Shipping

We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

Credits:
Reporter: Kai Steinecke
Camera & Video Editor: Neven Hillebrands
Supervising Editor: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann, Kiyo Dörrer, Joanna Gotschalk
Factcheck: Aditi Rajagopal
Thumbnail: Em Chabridon

Special thanks to Dr. Nicole Wermuth who double checked critical parts of the video and gave background information about the engine concept as well as its current weaknesses.

Read More:
Ammonia as a fuel in shipping:

Role of efuels in decarbonizing transport:

Deep dive on ammonia as a shipping fuel:

The future of marine fuels:

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:39 Ammonia 101
01:25 How ammonia engines work
04:23 The oxides problem
07:42 False promises?
08:31 What's next for ammonia engines?
09:17 The space challenge
11:22 Green ammonia challenge
14:22 Conclusion

[DWPlanetA]

Do you think ammonia is going to clean up shipping emissions?

[irokpe]

With all the disadvantages mentioned in the video, I dont see ammonia as a solution.

[HolmBidstrup]

Thank you very much for the excellent questions, it was a true pleasure having the DW team at our facilities :)

For the purpose of clarity: When burning ammonia in our engine, NOx emissions are 40% lower than NOx emissions from fuel oil engines. NOx emissions are regulated by IMO and 9/10 engine orders we get today need to comply to stringent NOx emission levels because they trade in Tier III areas. We therefore have thousands on such engines on order and in service. In that way, NOx emissions for ammonia engines are even more easy to handle compared to any other fuel types, and it's with existing very proven technologies.

NO2 emissions are more importantly also extremely low, and basically it is no challenge to avoid the formation in a two-stroke engine. We will guarantee that and the GHG emissions reductions when taking N20 into account, and CO2 from pilot oil, are above 90% compared to existing engines, and it can be reduced even more :)

All in all the ammonia engine will be a very important pillar in the maritime energy transition, and MAN ES are leading the way, and as the good journalism also showcase - the only engine designer willing to showcase a full scale two-stroke engine running on ammonia, because our biggest competitor doesn't have one - yet.

[TripleHHHelmsley]

I was glad to see the N2O emissions being acknowledged as an issue due to their GWP100 values being higher than CO2's. I am a chemical engineer and I hear a lot of people in the industry talk about the development of fuel ammonia technology, but I seldom see anyone talk about that. It is refreshing to see a video geared towards the general public explain it so clearly.

[johumm]

"you're a critical journalist" 😁 go get them! ask till they dripping wet of sweat! 👍

[JusticeAlways]

I have an idea:
put sails on ships and use the wind for propulsion. 😅

[kjlovescoffee]

Our biggest obstacle is asking "what else can we burn in the engine" rather than "what better ways can we use to propel the ship". A paradigm shift, if you will. Ships are already mostly powered by diesel-electric drivetrains, i.e. the diesel engine drives a alternator only, and electric motors propel the ship. It seems to me our efforts are much better spent finding a suitable fuel that works well in a fuel cell. That eliminates a lot of the difficulties of trying to make a new fuel work with existing propulsion systems.

[mcln]

Love the honest questions that are not political focus, keep up the good work and the good focus

[fbkintanar]

Since green methanol as a fuel for container ships started last year. I would appreciate a closer comparison with ammonia. This includes costs of the fuel, the potential speed of scaling up the fuel supply, and scenarios where the two technologies co-exist until the better technology wins out.

[lontongstroong]

Although the problems are very well summarized here, I hope there would've been more discussion on the hazard of ammonia fuel. It's dangerous even at very low concentration, like few hundreds of ppm. Even worse in the event of release in that engine room, conventional mitigations like water sprinkler would not work here because ammonia-water contact is so exothermic it creates much more ammonia vapor clouds instead of reducing it. Ventilation might do some of the job but installation of really heavy duty vents (like above 30 air change per hour) would do some dents in the capital investments. Ditto with double-walling of piping.

And although ammonia can be detected by smell at even lower concentration than the hazard threshold, the current debilitation of olfactory ability in population level (due to mass repeated infections and lingering effect of Covid) may necessitate more cost-efficient detection measures (you can't put too much sensors everywhere!).

[stian]

Its like hydrogen, but with NOx and N2O and still uses some fossil

[ds]

People are really putting a lot of effort into keeping consumerism guilt free. Do all of these goods need to be shipped in the first place? Working late so I can afford to pay for my coffee, so that I can work late. Very well produced video as always!

[Naxt]

'how about to get rid of nitrous oxide?' really made the MAN - Employee nervous. Assuming, this hole thing is rather vaporware

[lindsaydempsey]

Fun fact, according to Wikipedia global ammonia production from the Haber process is about 230 million t/year and is responsible for ~3% of global CO2 emissions. According to the video, future state, the shipping industry is likely to need 900 million t/year of NH3. I think that we have a fundamental math problem here. Let's start with making low emissions ammonia for normal use before we start finding new uses for it.

[ichbinwiederda]

That sounds like a Ship crew's nightmare engine room.

[IOSALive]

DW Planet A, Subscribed because your videos always make me smile!

[arnokilianski]

6700 hp is actually quite inadequate for a commercial freighter. Multiply by six or eight, and we're talking turkey...

[stevesmith-sbdf]

The US military has used ammonia as fuel in the past, including in the late 1960s as part of its Mobile Energy Depot (MED) program.

[lowercherty]

Not only is a lot of ammonia needed, but it has to either be refrigerated or kept at over 120 PSI (8 atm) to be stored as a liquid.

You can't just build an odd shaped bunker to store it. Its fumes are also extremely toxic.

[stijn]

higher combustion temperatures lead to higher NOx emissions, N2O may be lower but NOx was the whole reason for the diesel gate, so not a great product to create i would assume. this is fairly straight forward. the higher the temperature, the more gas is going to react with each other. that's why compression igniters have more NOx emissions compaired to spark igniters. as a side note, NOx and NO2 are not two different things. NOx is the group of nitrous oxide emissions. so NOx can be NO or NO2, the x is their to indicate that you can have x = 1 or x = 2.

very cool to see that MAN let you in on their development.