He's Creating A New Fuel Out Of Thin Air -- For 85 Cents Per Gallon

[NNadir]

16. Ammonia is another energy storage chemical. Energy storage requires a source of primary energy.

Like all energy storage devices, it requires the loss of primary energy. Almost all of the industrial ammonia on earth is manufactured from dangerous natural gas in a reformation reaction to make hydrogen for the reductive hydrogenation of nitrogen gas, again with a loss of energy.

Increases in the efficiency of this process, the Haber-Bosch process, which was discovered in the early 20th century, has led to a vast expansion in scale, with the resultant environmental damage being tremendous, but probably necessary in the sense without it at this point, we would be completely unable to feed three billion people, never mind seven billion people.

These ammonia schemes for cars are not new; not wise; and are in fact very dangerous.

If that guy's car springs a leak, even from a fuel line corroded by base, it may kill people, innocent people.

Pure ammonia is a gas, an easily liquified gas, but a gas all the same. It is corrosive, and unlike gasoline, the vapors will kill or blind a person rapidly. In lower concentrations, ammonia is a terrible, terrible environmental problem inasmuch as it causes eutrophication of water supplies (as agricultural run-off).

Many chemists are experienced with working with liquid ammonia - I am - and we treat it with healthy respect.

If we were going to make a liquid energy storage fuel for our stupid cars, dimethyl ether is a vastly superior fuel. It also is easily liquified, but in contrast to ammonia is non-toxic (it's used as a hairspray propellant), is easily removed from water, does not cause eutrophication of water supplies, in contrast to dangerous natural gas has an atmospheric half-life of about 5 days, and its production is well known on an industrial scale, and can be produced from any carbon source, including but not limited to carbon dioxide.

It would be a very, very, very, very, very bad idea to take this guys "Haber-Bosch plant in your garage" scheme seriously. It is yet another approach to the appalling and dangerous libertarian fantasy of distributed energy, the worst example of distributed energy being the automobile itself, with this scheme poised to make the automobile even a worse disaster than it already is.

It is a shame that people are not required to learn the 2nd law of thermodynamics and understand it deeply by at least junior high school. They would then understand that "energy from air" is a nonsense statement. The very, very, very, very stupid person Ayn Rand in one of her idiot novels made this an element of it. It was dumb then, and is worse now.