We’ve had many discussions here about the costs and benefits of SPS versus other power sources, with intermittent versus baseload power being a significant discriminator between SPS and terrestrial renewables (solar farms and wind farms). KeithH in particular has provided analyses of such things as using electricity to synthesize hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 (to replace those being pumped out of the ground), and has pointed out that some of these processes really want steady power, and suffer if it is intermittent.
Which is why this article caught my eye today:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68230697
Making NH3 out of water and atmospheric N2, using electricity, with intermittent electricity being OK (as the process, once up and running, has a short turn-on/turn-off time). Apparently making Nh3 using the current Haber-Bosch process produces about 2% of the world’s atmospheric CO2 production, so this addresses a small but significant part of “the CO2 problem”. If the technology works in full-scale production, and can be economically implemented in small plants, this could allow NH3 production to be distributed widely, reducing transportation costs to customers of fertilizer.
Nh3 as a fuel is also mentioned; ‘m sure that Keith will have thoughts on the relative merits of using electricity-derived ammonia as a fuel, versus electricity-derived hydrocarbons.
Anyway, interesting. It doesn’t help build the case for SPS, quite the contrary. But competition is a core element in the economics of anything, and this looks like maybe a piece of the competition --- making windmills and solar farms much more useful than they are currently, and chipping away at the presumably-baseload power that Haber-Bosch plants consume, which otherwise would be potential customers for SPS’s (but not windmills and solar farms, due to intermittency).
Although, of course, there’s plenty of other baseload power demand around 😊.
- Kieran
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Bryan;
Indeed --- while we all love the technology associated with SPS (as a spacecraft engineer, that’s a big part of what drew me into this, many years ago), if we focus just on that, then we’re stuck in the position of trying to do a “technology push,” rather than a “market pull” --- which is usually a recipe for failure.
The core fact is that we are promoting a new product, into an existing market (actually many markets spread around the world, although they are linked together by the global transportability of coal, oil and natural gas). The existing market has been well-established for many years, and has many existing vendors with whom our product would compete. To succeed in a product launch in such an environment, one must be very aware of the nature of the market into which we’re trying to sell, including knowing the customers that we want to sell to, and the competitors from whom we want to peel away business. (This is all Marketing 101 stuff.)
Our product (SPS) won’t succeed unless it is seen as being preferentially desirable by at least some customers, who will agree to buy from us. We have one main selling advantage into the baseload power market (which is a very large part of the global electricity market): that our product produces far fewer negative impacts on the environment (CO2 production, production of nuclear waste) than does the competition (nuclear power plants, and coal, oil and gas power plants). We do not as yet have a cost (price) advantage over those competitors, so our selling story is that there is an environmental cost that should be weighed against the dollar cost (e.g., by government-imposed mechanisms such as carbon offsets), and that once you do that SPS wins out (we hope). In the big picture, our argument is that those toxic emissions and byproducts produced by those competitors must cease, or else the planet will become unbearably polluted. This argument has picked up a lot of steam since it was first floated in the 1990s, with the Anti Global Warming movement becoming a major political force world-wide; SPS could be riding the coat-tails of that movement much more effectively than it has to date.
Note that we are *not* trying to compete directly with intermittent power sources such as wind and solar farms --- we don’t have any environmental advantage over them, and for the intermittent power market they have a huge cost advantage over SPS.
Note that those intermittent terrestrial sources cannot seriously compete in the baseload power market, because to do so, they would have to add huge amounts of ferociously expensive batteries, in order to ride out windless and sunless periods that could last for days, maybe weeks. And they’d have to enormously oversize their wind or solar farms, to provide the power to charge up those batteries during windy/sunny days, enough to be able to fill in the gaps when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. (This is all spacecraft power subsystem design 101 stuff --- solar array and battery sizing for a spacecraft that experiences eclipses.) This would enormously increase the cost of baseload power from terrestrial wind and solar farms, making them very uneconomic. So instead what they do, is pair each wind-farm and solar-farm with a natural-gas power plant --- for 10-20% of the time the “renewable” power source is generating power, the other 80-90% of the time the natural gas plant is producing the power. In the baseload market, wind and solar farms are minor adjuncts to natural gas power generation, a way to slightly reduce the operating cost of the natural gas plants, while also politically “greenwashing” them. (That’s the way it works here in Ontario --- after a previous provincial government mandated installation of a large number of wind and solar farms in this province, the local electricity operator had to quickly install a bunch of new, huge natural gas power plants --- one of which was installed in my neighbourhood, I can see the chimneys of it from my house.)
Also be aware that the existing vendors in the baseload market quite like their revenue streams, which have made many of those companies very large and their owners very wealthy. And that they will naturally resist new competition coming in and trying to eat some of their lunch. And they have huge amounts of money to bribe politicians with (er, “contribute to the campaigns of politicians, and to Political Action Committees, and to commission articles in the media while buying advertising from those media, etc.”). This is a headwind that SPS has faced since the 1970s, and will continue to face.
Anyway, just an initial few thoughts on why one needs to be giving thought to the business basics, including market positioning and strategy, rather than getting totally immersed in the wonderful technical details of the space segment of SPS’s.
- Kieran
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Oh Dear..
Ammonia is nasty stuff.
Have worked at two uranium mills where NH3 was used for U precipitation, at both we had events where the ammonia bullets’ relief valve blew and *everybody potentially downwind* had to retreat to the ‘ammonia-safe’- refuge -rooms while the emergency response crew made it safe..
I was out there with the response crew hosing big quantities of water into the plume to knock it down, all kitted up in full face respirator of course..
And people want to splash this stuff around like its gasoline…
Mark
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From: power-satell...@googlegroups.com <power-satell...@googlegroups.com>
On Behalf Of Opener of the Way
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2024 11:52 AM
To: Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com>
Cc: k.a.c...@sympatico.ca; power-satell...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Why firms are racing to produce green ammonia
It occurs to me to question the premise that it is a good idea to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide that every plant depends on and sequester it underground. Combined with the "green" idea of chopping down forests to bury the trees and denude the landscape, this sounds like a crazy at best and evil at worst plan. I studied paleontology and I don't believe that we are in the warmest epoch.
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