Why firms are racing to produce green ammonia
k.a.c...@sympatico.ca
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
Bryan Zetlen
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k.a.c...@sympatico.ca
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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Keith Henson
generating hydrogen was higher than the cost of the electrical power
they used. The problem does not seem to have a solution because
platinum is scarce and so far there is not a good substitute for it.
Intermittent PV is available about 1/3 of the time. If the hydrogen
generators are only used 1/3 of the time, that increases the capital
cost of the hydrogen by a factor of 3.
Another example is direct air capture. Again, the capital cost of the
plants is immense. It is intolerable to run them 1/3 of the time on
intermittent power, the cost effect is so extreme that it looks like
it is worth building power satellites just to get steady power for air
capture (if we decide to do it).
I read it and it is not clear the people working on green ammonia are
focused on economic problems.
> 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; I‘m sure that Keith will have thoughts on the relative merits of using electricity-derived ammonia as a fuel, versus electricity-derived hydrocarbons.
Ammonia does not work very well as a fuel.
> 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).
isn't such a problem. High temperature electrolysis is one step in
that direction.
Keith
> Although, of course, there’s plenty of other baseload power demand around 😊.
>
> - Kieran
>
Opener of the Way
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Mark Sonter
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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Keith Henson
<openerofthew...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
snip
> If you want platinum, there is a main belt asteroid with more platinum than has been mined on earth in the past eight thousand years.
https://htyp.org/Mining_Asteroids
> So go get it.
There are several reasons projects are not done, even if they look
like they will make money. In this case, the technology isn't quite
there, the scale is too large and the payback time is too long.
> Plants are already in carbon dioxide deficit. It's not a good idea to make Earth uninhabitable to save the world from a two degree temperature change. But I don't expect to be heard, so go ahead with the discussion.
will come from too little, not too much. (Though after last summer, I
might be wrong.) Carbon is the best engineering material. When we
have nanotechnology fabricators running on sunlight and making houses
out of diamond the drawdown from the atmosphere could be sudden.
Keith
Keith Henson
Please tone it down.
Keith
k.a.c...@sympatico.ca
The work mostly focused on spacecraft mission and system design. But we gave some thought to the logistics associated with getting product to market (i.e., Earth orbit), for any asteroid that turned out to have economically mineable resources. After all, there's not much point opening a mine someplace where the cost of transporting the ore back to a refinery is so high, that it more than eats up your profits --- a huge factor in planning mines here on Earth, of course.
This led us to do some deep diving into the economics of moving things in bulk around the solar system. The main conclusions were:
- Forget about main-belt asteroids. They're too far out from the Sun, and the very high delta-V needed to get ore back from there makes the cost of transportation just too high. Plus, being quite far from the Sun, they're cold, and there's not much sunlight for generating power, increasing the mass of any equipment you want to send there, and hence its transport cost as well.
- So we focused on near-Earth objects (NEOs), for which relatively low-delta-V trajectories are available to get there from Earth, and back from Earth. The kicker turned out to be synodic period. The asteroids that are easiest to reach in delta-V terms (and hence least costly to reach in terms of transportation cost), are in orbits whose periods are close to that of Earth's orbit around the Sun --- obviously. But this means that for such an asteroid, its orbital position only lines up with Earth's orbital position once every many years --- the closer the asteroid's orbit is to Earth's the longer the period of time between favorable orbit positions with respect to the Earth. Trajectories between the Earth and the asteroid are inexpensive when the two bodies are in favorable relative positions, but are much more expensive at all other times. This means that if you have a mine on such an asteroid, you can only afford to send product back to Earth once every n years, where n can easily be larger than 5. Once you start factoring in the time cost of money, this impacts the economics of such a mine negatively.
It all seemed so easy when we started out! But once we dug into the details, i.e., did a realistic engineering design and ran the numbers, it didn't look anywhere near as easy as it had at first.
(I haven't seen *anyone* else do any significant amount of engineering design for such missions, and most people are operating at the "it looks so easy" level when they talk about asteroid mining.)
This isn't necessarily a killer for asteroid mining --- it's just another cost (plus a logistics hassle). For the right commodity, it could still turn a profit. But I wouldn't believe anyone's numbers, until I'd seen some very significant detail in the design of the transportation spacecraft they planned to use to get there, and to bring product back.
(The complete lack of knowledge about the nature of the equipment needed to do the mining, and any on-site refining, is a whole 'nother kettle of fish!)
- Kieran
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2024 7:08 PM
> To: Opener of the Way <openerofthew...@gmail.com>
> Cc: k.a.c...@sympatico.ca; power-satell...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: Why firms are racing to produce green ammonia
>
> Q9YXdJfG3o6i0Fxv4Kqtw%40mail.gmail.com.
Keith Henson
>
snip
> Platinum is not the best catalyst for ammonia synthesis.
Platinum is for making hydrogen from water.
> Samarium-doped cerium oxide is better and cheap.
Hmm. Not up to date, I think the original catalyst was iron or iron oxide.
Keith
> -----
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Keith Henson
>
snip
> This led us to do some deep diving into the economics of moving things in bulk around the solar system. The main conclusions were:
>
> - Forget about main-belt asteroids. They're too far out from the Sun, and the very high delta-V needed to get ore back from there makes the cost of transportation just too high.
it for gold and platinum group metals those are, and you make large
amounts of powdered iron from the process.
Someone would need to develop an engine that used powered iron for
reaction mass and ejected it at say 10 km/s.
> Plus, being quite far from the Sun, they're cold, and there's not much sunlight for generating power, increasing the mass of any equipment you want to send there, and hence its transport cost as well.
> - So we focused on near-Earth objects (NEOs), for which relatively low-delta-V trajectories are available to get there from Earth, and back from Earth. The kicker turned out to be synodic period. The asteroids that are easiest to reach in delta-V terms (and hence least costly to reach in terms of transportation cost), are in orbits whose periods are close to that of Earth's orbit around the Sun --- obviously. But this means that for such an asteroid, its orbital position only lines up with Earth's orbital position once every many years --- the closer the asteroid's orbit is to Earth's the longer the period of time between favorable orbit positions with respect to the Earth. Trajectories between the Earth and the asteroid are inexpensive when the two bodies are in favorable relative positions, but are much more expensive at all other times. This means that if you have a mine on such an asteroid, you can only afford to send product back to Earth once every n years, where n can easily be larger than 5. Once you start factoring in the time cost of money, this impacts the economics of such a mine negatively.
>
> It all seemed so easy when we started out! But once we dug into the details, i.e., did a realistic engineering design and ran the numbers, it didn't look anywhere near as easy as it had at first.
>
> (I haven't seen *anyone* else do any significant amount of engineering design for such missions, and most people are operating at the "it looks so easy" level when they talk about asteroid mining.)
>
> This isn't necessarily a killer for asteroid mining --- it's just another cost (plus a logistics hassle). For the right commodity, it could still turn a profit. But I wouldn't believe anyone's numbers, until I'd seen some very significant detail in the design of the transportation spacecraft they planned to use to get there, and to bring product back.
>
> (The complete lack of knowledge about the nature of the equipment needed to do the mining, and any on-site refining, is a whole 'nother kettle of fish!)
refining and Mond process. I put a guess on the processing plant of
around the same as a 30 GW power satellite, perhaps in the range of
$75 B.
Keith
Turner, Ron
APIS (Asteroid Provided In-Situ Supplies): 100MT Of Water from a Single Falcon 9
ICS Associates Inc.
Lake View Terrace, CA 91342-6810
2015 Phase I
Optical Mining of Asteroids, Moons, and Planets to Enable Sustainable Human Exploration and Space Industrialization
TransAstra Corp.
Lake View Terrace, CA 91342-6810
2017 Phase II
Mini Bee Prototype to Demonstrate the Apis Mission Architecture and Optical Mining Technology
TransAstra Corporation
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Sutter: Breakthrough Telescope Innovation for Asteroid Survey Missions to Start a Gold Rush in Space
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From: power-satell...@googlegroups.com <power-satell...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of k.a.c...@sympatico.ca
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2024 7:37 PM
To: 'Keith Henson' <hkeith...@gmail.com>; 'Opener of the Way' <openerofthew...@gmail.com>
Cc: power-satell...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Why firms are racing to produce green ammonia
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