The ammonia solution
An Oregon startup sees a way to deliver the fuel of the future.
By Dan Sadowsky
Ammonia is one of the most common chemicals on earth. It cleans
countertops, fertilizes crops and keeps industrial freezers
cold. But can it propel our cars into an age of clean-burning
fuels?
A small band of Oregon scientists thinks so. They own the
rights to use an ammonia-based fertilizer known as guanidine as
an engine fuel.
Their unique plan relies on a theory that is well-known to
chemical and automotive engineers — that ammonia is a
high-capacity carrier of hydrogen, often called America’s
fuel of the future. But as the U.S. Department of Energy
recently noted in a study of ammonia’s potential in a
hydrogen economy, “If ammonia is to play a role in the
transportation system, all associated safety issues must be
completely resolved.”
To address that, the company proposes cloaking ammonia in
guanidine, a safe and easy-to-handle substance that Don Hagge,
CEO of Oregon Sustainable Energy, likes to say could
“sell in six packs at the corner store.”
Hagge’s company plans to develop a product that turns
guanidine into ammonia. From there, the ammonia can be
“cracked” into hydrogen using existing technology.
Hydrogen fuel is considered critical to the country’s
automotive future because it can be made from renewable sources
and burns cleanly in a fuel cell, a power-generating device
that combines hydrogen gas with oxygen from the air to create
electricity without emitting pollutants.
OSE’s guanidine-to-ammonia-to-hydrogen logic string
piques the interest of government scientists and potential
investors mainly because it could solve the biggest technical
hurdle standing between today’s gas guzzlers and
tomorrow’s fuel cell cars: hydrogen storage.
FUEL CELL CARS SIMPLY AREN’T FEASIBLE without enough
hydrogen on board to drive at least 300 miles between
refuelings. No one has yet figured out how to do that cheaply
and compactly, while still meeting other technical benchmarks
for hydrogen-storage technology, such as durability and weight.
The problem is hydrogen’s relatively low energy density;
even if the lightweight gas is compressed to 700 times
atmospheric pressure — close to its limit — to hold
enough you’d need a fuel tank so big it would crowd out
other necessary engine components. Automakers and energy
companies have teamed up with government engineers to test a
number of other approaches.
“There’s a big push to find a hydrogen storage
material,” says Tim Armstrong, manager of the Hydrogen,
Fuel Cells and Infrastructure Technologies Program at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Tennessee. Efforts include a $150
million initiative by his employer, the U.S. Department of
Energy. “All new materials like guanidine deserve a very
good look, because they could be the one material we
haven’t found that could be the real winner.”
That winner stands to gain a sizable chunk of what an industry
analysis projects to be a $1.7 trillion fuel cell market by
2020. Hagge, a veteran of startups in the telecom,
chemical-instrument and semiconductor industries, insists his
company’s odds of success are good. Guanidine, he says,
is renewable, storable, distributable, safe and clean, and
overcomes the most significant objections to using ammonia to
store hydrogen.
But the company faces several roadblocks on the road to
commercial success. For starters, it must show that guanidine
is worth the money and energy required to produce it and then
decompose into ammonia. Laboratory work to determine those
costs and to build a prototype reactor are expected to take 12
to 18 months. More importantly, Hagge and his colleagues must
sell their idea to a government-led hydrogen consortium that
remains largely unenthusiastic about ammonia, and to
alternative-energy investors more interested in the here and
now of biofuels than in long-term bets on an unproven
market.
Hydrogen is considered the vehicle fuel of the future, but it’s a
lightweight gas that has defied attempts to squeeze it into
a reasonably sized fuel tank.
Ammonia is an
energy-efficient way
to store hydrogen —
but it’s toxic.
Guanidine is a safe way
of packaging ammonia. OSE thinks it may be the best way to
store 300 miles’ worth of hydrogen in a car.
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ON PAPER, AMMONIA LOOKS like an attractive way to store
hydrogen. Made up of three atoms of hydrogen and one of
nitrogen, an essential plant nutrient, ammonia is one of the
world’s most hydrogen-dense molecules. “You can get
hydrogen out of ammonia fairly easily,” says Kevin Drost
of the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute in Corvallis.
“The trouble is, people aren’t any more fond of
having a tankful of ammonia in their car than a tank-ful of
hydrogen.”
That’s because ammonia can be downright nasty. Prolonged
exposure can cause bronchitis, pneumonia or fluid buildup in
the lungs. Lab chemists who handle liquid ammonia —
ammonia dissolved in water — wear goggles and gloves
because contact can burn the eyes and skin. Releasing ammonia
into the atmosphere can turn green plant leaves brown; spilling
it into waterways, even at extremely low concentrations, can
poison fish and other aquatic life.
Yet despite these and other noxious qualities, a small but
growing number of scientists and chemical engineers say ammonia
is a short- and long-term solution to the country’s
petroleum addiction. They’re holding conferences such as
the ones held in 2004 and 2005 at Argonne National Laboratory
outside Chicago titled Ammonia — The Key to a Hydrogen
Economy, and touting ammonia’s advantages not only as a
good hydrogen carrier, but also as a clean-burning fuel
suitable for today’s internal-combustion engines.
One of the true believers is Ted Hollinger, a former Ford
engineer who now directs the Hydrogen Engine Center in Algona,
Iowa. He argues that ammonia is less dangerous than gasoline,
and that an infrastructure of distributors and retailers
already exists throughout much of the country’s
midsection, where farmers rely on ammonia-based fertilizers to
nourish their crops. And no one disputes his claim that ammonia
holds more energy and pollutes less — including zero
greenhouse-gas emissions — than gasoline.
To advance his argument, Hollinger plans to unveil four
prototype ammonia engines this month and market them to farms
and industrial plants. He believes automakers eventually will
consider switching to ammonia-fueled conventional engines, too,
if only as an interim step on the path toward fuel cells.
“If you don’t have hydrogen and need a clean
solution,” Hollinger says, “ammonia is the way to
go.”
But outside the farm belt, at least, ammonia is unlikely to
shed its reputation as a chemical to avoid. That’s why
Oregon Sustainable Energy thinks guanidine, marketed as a more
palatable form of ammonia, is a winner.
Three Portland-area scientists — Oregon State University
engineer James Van Vechten, veterinarian J.D. Hultine and
Portland State University chemist Bob Graupner — hit on
guanidine a couple of years ago while musing about ways to make
ammonia an acceptable fuel source. They ran some experiments in
Graupner’s Hillsboro garage, bounced the idea off
hydrogen experts and eventually brought on the more
business-minded Hagge to help develop a product.
OFFICIALS WITH THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY’S hydrogen
program give guanidine mixed reviews. On the one hand, it
appears to overcome long-held concerns about ammonia’s
toxicity and safety, says Sunita Satyapal, a chemical engineer
who leads the program’s hydrogen-storage team. On the
other hand, she says, it still presents many of the same
problems ammonia does.
Even trace levels of ammonia can poison the type of fuel cell
favored by automakers, she says, and today’s technology
for cracking ammonia doesn’t meet certain performance
targets set by the agency.
For those reasons, “we’re not really looking at
ammonia for onboard hydrogen storage at the present
time,” Satyapal says. “We’re interested in
new concepts, new materials.”
But her agency has left the door open to materials such as
guanidine. Its preliminary ammonia report, released April 25,
rejects government-funded research for ammonia-to-hydrogen
processing, except if there is a “novel” approach
to storing ammonia. “This is very, very novel,”
says Armstrong, the top hydrogen-program official at Oak Ridge,
who puts guanidine atop his list of promising materials to
test.
Armstrong and Hagge are negotiating a deal to put Oak Ridge
chemists to work optimizing a guanidine-to- ammonia catalyst.
While Armstrong acknowledges that OSE’s technology is
probably more feasible in agriculture or stationary-power
applications than in vehicle engines, he adds: “If this
thing were to work well and be very clean and safe and
efficient and cheap, you never know what somebody might do with
it.”
BUT IT MAY BE TOO EARLY for even early-stage investors to bet
big on fuel cell vehicles. Ask knowledgeable people when a mass
market for fuel cell cars will materialize and the answers
range from 2020 to 2050 to never. Most venture capitalists want
to recoup their investments within 10 years.
“We’ve never made an investment where we’ve
banked on...the mass deployment of hydrogen-powered
cars,” says Nancy Floyd of Nth Power, an energy-focused
venture capital firm based in San Francisco.
“That’s so far out that it’s not a market
application we would bet on.”
Still, Oregon Sustainable Energy’s idea appeals to
others in the energy-investment field, including Wayne Embree,
managing partner of the Portland venture-capital firm Cascadia
Partners. “If they have a demonstration vehicle running,
and all they had to do then was scale up the technology and
sell the ideas to both automotive and production partners, they
could raise a lot of money,” says Embree.
Hagge says he’s met with venture capitalists and angel
investors who might provide the $1 million he needs over the
next year to extend patents, fund lab experiments and develop a
prototype reactor. If that first phase is successful, he
guesses he will need between $10 million and $50 million over
the next four years to bring a product to market.
A five-year time frame might seem overly ambitious, given the
history of pushed-back deadlines for fuel cell vehicles. But a
summer of $3-a-gallon gasoline will only add urgency to the
search to solve the hydrogen-storage riddle.
“All this activity suggests there are a lot of brilliant
minds working on it,” says General Motors spokesman Scott
Fosgard. “I’m convinced someone out there is going
to be the next Bill Gates.”
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