 Hey Aloha and welcome to Stand the Energy Man here in Think Tech, Hawaii. In case you're kind of questioning my sanity regarding the title of this show. Yeah, I'm saying. But most of you probably never thought about the relationship of ammonia to energy other than how much elbow grease it takes to scrub your floors in your bathroom or something using ammonia. You know, ammonia is a really useful and amazing thing for a lot of reasons we need an agriculture to make fertilizer. Of course it's got a household purpose for around the house and there's probably a whole bunch of old saws from old folks that tell you how to use ammonia to do everything from curing a common cold to, you know, clean it up after your dog and cat. Ammonia is a really versatile chemical, and it's been around so long that we really have all the safety protocols for it. But it is very useful in energy. So today's guest is down going seems to be we have him here all the time and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. And, in fact, we're going to probably change the name of the show to stand and down the energy men, because I have them here all the time but down thanks for being on the show and know you've got the handle on how we make ammonia, and the story of what the different uses are but I want to capitalize for the audience first that in terms of hydrogen which everybody knows if you watch the show more than once is my favorite favorite thing is hydrogen. Hydrogen is one of those things that's very hard to contain, because and I'll use a real technical engineering term, it's really fluffy. It's very buoyant. And you've either got to compress it to 10,000 PSI or higher to squish it into a container where you can scram it up hydrogen in there to make it useful. And liquid hydrogen is, I once asked a bunch of natural gas people, if you could use natural gas. What they called doers, the thermoses, the whole liquid hydrogen like you can with liquid natural gas. And they said well stand natural gas is cold. Hydrogen is really really freaking cold. You know it's like magnitude of degree higher cold. So the problem with hydrogen, like I said before is compression and having to squeeze it into those little containers, or having to turn it into a liquid. And the other ways you can turn it into a liquid is to make ammonia, which if you remember from chemistry classes and each three. So three nitrogen atoms or three hydrogen atoms and one nitrogen atom, and the air that we breathe is like 70 something percent nitrogen so nitrogen is all around you. And that's the process of taking some of that nitrogen from the air and turning it into with hydrogen into ammonia. So Dan's going to go through some stuff and kind of give us a nuts and bolts of how that process works. And maybe some of the utility for hydrogen so hit it down all yours. Thanks Dan so those are the folks out there they're kind of wondered what the screen is behind me that's a control system for a G gas turbine so I use that as my, my background so it's some utility guys so I'm going to begin to talking about about about ammonia and hydrogen and we'll also talk a little bit about cryogenic hydrogen and the difference between pressurized hydrogen and the cryogenic hydrogen that everybody seems to everybody knows a lot about. So some of this I've already written down some want to read it off, and then we're going to talk about it and I'm going to go through some of the history of this hydrogen is a lot of history that most of the public doesn't doesn't know about. So throughout the 19th century the demand for nitrates and ammonia for use as fertilizers and industrial Feastock had been steadily increasing. The main source was mining night or deposits and Guano deposits from tropical islands so a lot of the islands out in South Pacific were actually mined for the guano from it from the seabirds laying guano under their nesting areas. And a lot of those islands were basically the habitats for destroyed for these birds just mining nitrates show. At the beginning of the 20th century at it had been predicted that the reserves could not satisfy future needs in fact they were predicting by 1920 that they could have mass starvation because there was a shortage of fertilizers around the world. And this was at a time when the population of the earth was only about 1.5 billion people so you can imagine how acute the situation could become today. If it ever became an issue again. There was a lot of new research right so okay so and research into the new potential sources ammonia started becoming very important so although atmospheric nitrogen is abundant and comprising nearly 80% of the air that we breathe it is exceptionally stable. And does not readily react with other chemicals as converting nitrogen into ammonia proposed a pretty significant challenge for the canvas globally throughout the world. Professor Haber Fritz Haber if I can get you to show page number two please. Okay Fritz Haber and Carl but so Professor Fritz Haber with his assistant Robert Lee. Ross and gall developed the high pressure devices and catalysts need to demonstrate the hover process at laboratory scale data straight with their process in the summer of 1909. By reducing ammonia from the air drop by drop at a rate of about 125 milliliters per hour the process was purchased by a German chemical company called BASF which signed a young man at that time Carl Bosch. The task is scaling up the harbor process from a tabletop machine to an industrial level production. Now that gentleman there Carl Bosch is also the founder of the Bosch chemical company, which today in Europe is a significant participant in the hydrogen community and the hydrogen fuel cell in the community. In fact, the engineers that are behind the Nikola semi truck are Bosch engineers. Right so that's how far she this history goes back so we're going to talk about players that today are players in the hydrogen world. And they were you know that a lot of the sister goes back over 100 years. Okay switch to sign Carl. Okay. Okay. Okay. He succeeded 1910 a harbor. Professor Haber and Bosch were later awarded Nobel Prizes in 1918 and 1931 respectively for their work and overcoming the chemical engineering problems of large scale continuous flow high pressure hydrogen technology. And I get you to show slide number three please. Okay. Ammonia was first manufactured use the harbor process at an industrial scale in 1913 and BS at the ASS output plant in Germany reaching 200 tons per day. The following year the politics of ammonia lead into World War one Germany had a monopoly on ammonia and the allies had access to large deposits of sodium nitrate and chili. That's chili salt Peter controlled by British companies. Chili salt Peter salt Peter a soon be depleted resource in 1910. The reason why I'm pointing this out is a lot of the politics with Germany having a monopoly on ammonia laid the political foundation for World War one. So understand that the subject we're talking about tonight actually was probably the foundation for starting a world war. Right. And it had to do with food security because Germany was going to have a monopoly on fertilizer production for the world. Today the most popular catastar and if I can get you showed slide number three again please. Okay. Today the most popular catastar based on iron promoted with gas oxide calcium oxide silicon dioxide, lumen oxide and so forth. That's a significant improvement over the original catalyst which were based on uranium and so. But pretty much that was a lot of those catalysts that were developed back in 1913 they're still in use today that pipe you see there on the left hand side that's in front of the. I think it's the German Technic University there in Germany. And that was one of the first reactors first ammonia reactor that was developed back in 1913. Is there a person standing next to it. I think so. It's a pretty big. Yeah, that that reactor there used to when they had a production back in 1913 would produce 20 tons of ammonia per day. Wow. That was a significant amount of money considering that the inputs for making that were just natural gas air and steam. Maybe some electricity also. But anyway, if I can get you show a graphic number slide number four please. Okay. And that's what the process looks like today. And basically the on the left hand side they take steam natural gas makes it with some air. They use it. There's a pressure on the left hand side they're not showing they'll actually pressurize it up to about 100 bar which is about 1450 psi. That first reactor there on the left hand side it's made out of nickel has full of nickel ball bearings. They have to heat that up to 500 degrees Celsius that's 932 degrees. So they burn a lot of natural gas getting that up the temperature. And then once they pass the gases through that they pass it through another compressor. And then they lead it on to a look like a scrubber there and they remove the water and the carbon dioxide from the gas. And then once they do that they put it into a they pressurize it up to 200 bar which is 2,900 psi. And that's they maintain a 450 degrees and then pull it into that reactor that the initial process was developed by Professor hover was only about 5% efficient meaning 5% of the gases they put in when actually turned into ammonia. This device here is only 15% efficient even today. So only 15% of the gases are actually turned into anhydrous ammonia. Now at 2,900 psi remember a liquid supercritical ammonia turning ammonia into a liquid only requires 125 psi. So liquid ammonia will collect in on the left on the right hand side of the machine here where they drain liquid ammonia. And they just continuously have to recycle the gases. This device just so like I said it's only 15% efficient that the fertilizer business today they consume 5% of the world's natural gas just making anhydrous ammonia with this process. Consider how much gas natural gas in this so a lot a huge amount so if I can get you to show. Let's see slide number 5 here. Okay that's from the Department of Energy that's a 2019 figure. Now, as long as natural gas is less than $2 per million BTUs. This process is reasonable and those figures I'm showing there on the screen that actually works out economically. But when you're today I mean even today I think we finally got the natural gas prices to drop down about $3 and 50 cents per million BTUs. It's mainly because everybody thinks we're having a light winter but hey we haven't hit January right wait till it gets cold and you'll see natural gas prices go up. But when natural gas prices are $3, $4, $5 or even higher this process because of very uneconomical. As a case in point there are four fertilizer companies in Europe that have gone bankrupt this year already. And it's because the cost of natural gas so this entire process is becoming uneconomical this process based on natural gas. If I can get you to show slide number 6 please. And the only reason I put that in there is kind of remind me of my roots when I came out of the Department of Navy. When I went to work for Indianapolis Paralype one of the first power plants I worked on was this place here called Perry K. It's in downtown Indianapolis to cross the street from Lucas Oil Stadium so if you've ever been in Indianapolis watch an NFL football game. This building is across the street. It's a sin gas plant. It's a steam reforming to produce sin gas sin gas is carbon monoxide hydrogen. The their main customers illa lily they pump sin gas carbon monoxide and hydrogen over to Lily and Lily takes that complete gas and they pulmarize it into plastics on pills. Lily being one of the largest drug manufacturers in the world. The only reason I put that in here I just wanted to make sure everybody understands that that steam reforming is not a bad process if your end product is for good use. The bad thing about using that's whole steam reforming for using ammonia is they've got to remove that carbon dioxide and eventually do something with it. Whether they're just venting into the air or they got to use CO2 sequestration you got to do something with the CO2. The point about the Perry K. power plant there is all the gas goes to Lily and all gets turned into products so none of it's released in the atmosphere. I'm just trying to make sure everybody understand. Please don't throw the baby out with a bad bad with the bathwater. Right. It's not a bad process you just, you know, using it wisely is the important part. Yeah, I don't want to get you off track but just for a couple seconds. Can you talk about some of the other commercial uses for CO2 is everybody thinks you to and greenhouse gases are all bad bad bad period you got to get rid of everything. But we actually, we have to use CO2 for a lot of things. Well, CO2 is a salt when you compress it to greater than 1055 PSI it turns into that supercritical food. I know on this program here we talked about how they use it in oil wells for extracting even more oil out of an almost dead, you know, oil well that's one thing you do. The other thing is it's they use it for extracting caffeine from coffee beans. So if you drink decaffeinated coffee, they use CO2 to remove that. So there's a lot of drug manufacturing processes where they use carbon dioxide as the solvent. And that doesn't include the utility sector. There's a lot of different power systems out there that use carbon dioxide. For example, some of the new advanced geothermal systems don't use water. They use supercritical CO2 as the working fluid. In other words, they pump high pressure carbon dioxide down on the ground, let the rocks heat it up. And when that gas comes back up, they run it through a turbine like that gas turbine behind me to make electricity. So there's a lot of uses for carbon dioxide. And that doesn't include all the things like soda pop and beverages and things like that where it's very, very useful. Pressure cleaning mechanical equipment. You can use it for an alternative for dry cleaning your clothes and stuff like that rather than using hyzer. There's chemicals one of the ways you do this with using CO2. So it's a very useful chemical. It just goes back to how do you use it? And as long as you recycle it, it's very useful and it's not harming the answer. The other thing too is there are places where CO2 is actually used. For example, up in Iceland, they charge the greenhouses up there with carbon dioxide because it's great for the plants. So it's great for pumping into your greenhouse. You want your plants to grow well, they need carbon dioxide. And you just fill your greenhouse with carbon dioxide. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just depends on how you use it. I can get you to show slide number seven. Hey, there's an alternative to that whole process using natural gas. And part of it has to do with this guy right here. There's a guy by the name of Lugi Kassel and George Claude. Now that picture there is George Claude. I couldn't find one of the Lugi Kassel as an Italian guy. But during the interwar years, there was an alternative process that was developed. Interwar meaning before World War I and World War II. The most notably different being the Lugi Claude process. And Lugi Kassel and George Claude are proposed to increase the pressure of the synthesis loop up to 1,000 bar. That's 15,000 psi, thereby increasing the single passive monocroversion and making nearly complete liquefaction at ambient temperature feasible. So what does that mean? Well, first of all, this guy right here, George Claude, he's actually the founder of a company called Aeroliquid. It's a big, yeah. And during the hydrogen business in Europe, Nitrogen, Oxygen, back in the 19th century, he won the Nobel Prize for discovering liquid nitrogen, liquid oxygen, liquid argon. He's the guy that created this machine that actually will compress air to the point of part, turns into a liquid. Now he had to have a try and try and create a compressor to compress hydrogen because he didn't. I understand this was the time before the molecular model, before Niels Bohr, before Albert Einstein. So they really didn't understand the nature of quantum physics and things like what we do today. But anyway, he had developed a process where he would take hydrogen, he would compress it up maybe up to 1,000 psi. He released the pressure when you let gases expand, they get cold. And basically using that same thing, multiple by multiple stages, he could get a certain quantity of the hydrogen to get cold enough to where it was liquid at room pressure. That's minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, the only downside of this process, let's say you start off with 100 liters of hydrogen, only about 10 liters of it are turned into, during the cryogenic hydrogen, right? So you have to recycle a lot of the hydrogen through it. So in other words, this process uses a lot of energy just to create this liquid hydrogen. Now, the only reason why they didn't use the process that I described is the Lusica cell and George Claude process is because the amount of energy it took to come up with liquid hydrogen. What they did was they took one of Fritz Harbour's ammonia reactors and they poured liquid nitrogen and liquid hydrogen into the reactor and put in the shipping plugs in the reactor. And these gases, these fluids, unless you keep them refrigerated, they'll turn into gases. So whenever that happens, the pressure shoots right on up. And when they notice that right around 15,000 PSI, that 90% of those gases on that reactor return into anhydrous ammonia. And that would happen at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit at room temperature. But the only part of this they weren't able to figure out is how do I build a compressor that can press hydrogen up to 15,000 PSI. And like I said, so George Claude, you won the Nobel Prize for creating liquid hydrogen, but he was never able to figure out how to compress hydrogen. So that was one of those mysteries that's been a mystery for about 150 years is how do you compress hydrogen. And that was one of the bigger problems out there. So if I can get you to show, slide into eight, please. So back in 2019, I wrote a paper and sent it off to Tarpa on how to use the electron hydrant compressor for creating anhydrous ammonia. Now the inputs there on the left hand side just says nitrogen and hydrogen. Now the nitrogen, the easiest thing to use for nitrogen is just using an air liquid compressor that compresses air into liquid air and fractionally separating out the nitrogen and the source of the hydrogen can be from electrolysis. So you've got nitrogen from the air using a liquid air compressor to make the liquid air. And that way you've got pure nitrogen. You feed in some pure hydrogen from electrolysis into the electron hydrant compressor, compress it up to 15,000 PSI. And anhydrous ammonia will form in that reactor at room temperature, 7 degrees Fahrenheit, saving a significant amount of energy. Now the reason why this is really, really important is look at the inputs to that system. The inputs are electricity, water, and air. That's the only thing you need to produce anhydrous ammonia. Not only that, but look at the amount of energy that whole process will save. Why? Because the only energy input into that system is going to be your liquid air compressor and the electron hydrodynamic compressor. That's the only energy you're going to have to pump into there. Not only that, but the anhydrous ammonia, the liquid ammonia that you get out of this device, you don't have to cool it down. It's already going to be down at room temperature. And so you can drain liquid anhydrous ammonia directly into a storage tank, like on a rail tank or something like that. So the point being is, like in a place like a wine, you don't need natural gas. You can still make this wife-saving important fertilizer for the rest of mankind, and it doesn't evolve using any natural gas. The other thing about this is if you couple it with, let's say, a PPA, a power purchase agreement, and you buy some wind power contracts, when the wind is blowing, you can make anhydrous ammonia. When the wind is not blowing, you don't have to make any anhydrous ammonia. So it can be really inexpensive fertilizer, a lot cheaper than what it is today. Just by using renewable energy, whether it's wind turbines or solar farms. So when it's shining, it can make a money. When the sun's not shining, I don't make a money. It's as simple as that. So if the process is you could turn on and off, you don't have to. You don't have to have any precursors or any heat-up, any reactor of the 900 degrees or anything like that to simply turning it on and off. And as long as your temperatures maintain right around 70 degrees, it'll be efficient enough to use. So let me bring this home for the folks here in Hawaii to make it personal. If we use geothermal on the Big Island to make electricity, we could be making hydrogen. We could be making liquid hydrogen. We could be making ammonia. And we could be exporting ammonia as fertilizer, or we could be exporting ammonia as the energy piece in a hydrogen system where you could split the ammonia back into its basic forms and use the hydrogen in stationary fuel cells to make electricity and things like that. In Japan, a lot of the hydrogen they're importing, because they have a high demand for hydrogen, they're trying to get rid of their old nuclear power plants. And for the meantime, they're really pushing hydrogen, but they import ammonia from Canada and Australia, and they do it with the hydrogen. The hydrogen is shipped as ammonia, and then they just basically decouple it from the nitrogen back into hydrogen and use the hydrogen in their systems. So Hawaii could be not only self sufficient with its own clean energy from wind power, solar power, hydroelectric and geothermal and ocean thermal and ocean motion and ocean turbines, you know, all the things we talked about. But we could be helping get our own agriculture back into a sustainable mode by not having to import ammonia for fertilizer. And we could be making our own fertilizer, as well as exporting extra ammonia as an energy export to other islands like the island of Oahu. It is kind of poor on clean energy production resources like solar and wind, and is probably going to have to produce electricity from some form coming from the neighbor islands, either wind or solar or whatever. And it would be easy to ship ammonia or that liquid hydrogen to do that. And the hard thing about liquid hydrogen like you mentioned is the minus 400 and something degrees Fahrenheit that you got to ship it in. And if you think about it. If you somehow sloshed some liquid hydrogen onto you, you can kiss that limb goodbye, because it would be instantaneous frostbite to the bone. So it's it's not exactly a safe thing to work with so that's why the ammonia is actually kind of got a head start on liquid hydrogen because of cost and because of all the safety protocols that are already in existence to handle ammonia. Yeah, just, you know, push on, you know, what what stance time we talked about four by using geothermal there in Hawaii, and also using sea turbines and I, I truly believe that in the future I think Hawaii is going to be a big user of sea turbines because that's going to be a much more reliable energy source for you guys there in Hawaii. And that those sea turbines would provide you guys with more than enough power to do this ammonia thing. But why are we focusing on ammonia versus cryogenic hydrogen. Well, number one, cryogenic hydrogen minus 423 degrees you have to keep this stuff refrigerated. If you don't keep it refrigerated you could end up with a very dangerous situation, very dangerous over pressure situation. And to keep ammonia in a liquid state all it requires about 125 psi. So it's much easier transport, much easier handle, right. I know that some people talk about some of the talk is issues and stuff like that but understand here in Indiana where I live, farmers here have been using anhydrous ammonia for probably close to 100 years, safely I might have, right, which versus there aren't many places you're going to find people using cryogenic hydrogen. One is the refrigeration. The other thing you need to consider when using cryogenic hydrogen is that has to be heated up first before it'll even react with anything. There's another really cool thing that's going on that scientists are working on. They're actually trying to develop fuel cells that can use ammonia directly. Yeah, exactly. So where they've taken basically some of these new catalysts mixed with the platinum, these new catalysts. So going into the cell it'll separate the nitrogen from the hydrogen, right. And then, so the output from this cell would be water and the other side would be just nitrogen gas. So, right, and so one of the things making this all practical is going to be, this ammonia stuff is going to be very practical and probably the most energy efficient way I can think of producing ammonia today that I can prove is actually using the electron hydrodynamic compressors. One of the reasons why I actually built that compressor was really because of this ammonia issue because I knew as we started having problems with natural gas. I mean, here in Indiana we're already seeing some of the problems with natural gas and some of the shows withstand. I know we've talked about some of the issues just leading up to this year. Now, to my wildest dreams I never thought that these problems with natural gas would turn into a full blown energy crisis, but in Europe they actually have. And if you want to know what the foundation of the energy crisis in Europe really is, it has to do with one reason. You have to ask a number of years ago, obviously Europe had plenty of natural gas. What was the source of their natural gas? Does anybody ask that question? Well, the source of our natural gas was something called the North Sea. The North Sea peaked out in the late 90s and it's been terminal decline since then. That's an oil and gas field that's between Scotland and Norway. It's going dry. And one of the things I know I've been going back and forth with Stan about is BP and other these companies that own those old production platforms, they're trying to put wind turbines on them and sell them to green companies. And if you say, well, why are they doing that? Well, because they're liable for plugging up those wells and taking out those old energy platforms and it's going to cost them tens of billions of dollars. And they're trying to push that cost off onto some of these green energy companies. And thankfully these guys are smart enough not to buy into that liability. But that's the sad truth of what's going on in Europe. And we're asking this whole thing play out where you've got the old petroleum companies on one side trying to get rid of a liability, basically, and they're trying to make the rest of the public pay for this liability. And it's a sad situation in my opinion. I hope we don't have to go through that whole situation here. We'll see how it all plays out. And not to go too far further into national security issues, but now we start dragging China and Russia and the Middle East and all those energy players into this discussion. And it complicates this scenario greatly. So, yeah, and I'd like to thank you. We already hit actually we're a little bit over time right now, but, you know, I think you did a great job of condensing a fairly complex issue into, you know, 28 minutes and I really thank you for doing that. You're the only person I can think of that could pull it off and I want to thank you. And we're going to be taking a two week break here at think tech for the next two weeks so it wouldn't have any new shows for two weeks. But I'm definitely going to have you back in the in the next calendar year and we're going to talk a lot more about a lot of these things and maybe we can get some questions from the audience and talk to more about ammonia and compression. I think those two are a great thing. So, thanks again, Dan, and for everyone else have a Merry Christmas and a great new year and we'll see you in 2022.