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

[jberryhill]

35. What industry would that be?

Last edited Mon Mar 4, 2019, 11:07 AM - Edit history (2)

"the article does not describe his invention.

i've been working in this industry for over 30 years."

Is it common in your industry, when informed that a Roger Gordon in Canada has a patent on ammonia synthesis, to be uninspired to find that patent within, literally, the seconds it takes to type "Roger Gordon ammonia patent" into Google in order to obtain a detailed description of exactly how it works?

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20110243828A1/en

I mean, granted, I haven't worked directly in engineering for a while, but I seem to recall that engineers and scientists tended to be pretty rabidly curious about stuff like this, and would usually take a look into it before opining about an article in the popular press about a garage inventor being hailed as yet another energy and environmental savior. At least I did.

Without even getting into the details, what does your industry experience tell you about how to perform these steps:

"A process for producing ammonia from air and water comprises producing nitrogen gas from air by pressure-swing-adsorption; producing hydrogen gas by electrolysis of water; compressing the nitrogen gas in a first cylinder to produce pressurized nitrogen gas; compressing the hydrogen gas in a second cylinder to produce pressurized hydrogen gas; compressing a mixture of the pressurized nitrogen and hydrogen gases in a third cylinder; heating the compressed mixture in the presence of a catalyst to react nitrogen and hydrogen to form ammonia; and extracting the ammonia from the mixture. "

You are doing electrolysis of water to get hydrogen, running a PSA reactor for the nitrogen, compressing the products of those processes and then heating the compressed mixture in the presence of a catalyst.

Again, while you didn't specify the industry with which you are familiar, you don't get to run these processes for free. You are not going to go from N2 and H2 to get NH3, so that you can burn the NH3 as fuel, without putting more energy into that process than you are getting out of it. That energy has to come from somewhere. If it is coming from solar, wind or hydro, it is a fair bet (actually something of a sure thing) that you can do better with the solar, wind or hydro directly, than by using that energy for an inefficient process to produce an inefficient combustible fuel. Unless, and only unless, for some reason there is a vehicle which you have to run and which cannot have an electric motor.

Processes which use energy to synthesize fuel are properly characterized as chemical energy storage processes. There's no "extra energy" to be had.

Another thing that can be gleaned from article is that the best area of application is believed to be remote areas. Why? Aside from the outstandingly hazardous basic idea here which might make more sense in a setting in which some hazardous industrial operation is already going on with the use of internal combustion engines (making access to fuel an issue), it is something of a ridiculous process for economical production of NH3 at scale, when there are less costly ways to do it (which use, i.e. better precursors and less energy). Since the inputs here are air and electricity, then there may be situations where the efficiency and energy costs of this process make sense if there is no other way to get vehicular fuel, but one has enough solar, wind or coal power to make electricity.

Obviously, if one is in an environment where electricity is plentiful and the motive power of specialized vehicles is not an issue, then you might as well run electric vehicles instead of using the electricity to run this scheme in order to produce a dangerous fuel at a higher energy than other methods.