Ammonia is increasingly recognized as an important, sustainable fuel for global use in the future. Applications of ammonia in heavy transport, power generation, and distributed energy storage are being actively developed. Produced at scale, ammonia could replace a substantial fraction of current-day liquid fuel consumption. This ammonia-based economy will emerge through multiple generations of technology development and scale-up. The pathways forward in regard to current-day technology (generation 1) and immediate future approaches (generation 2) that rely on Haber-Bosch process are discussed. Generation 3 technology breaks this nexus with the Haber-Bosch process and enables direct reduction of dinitrogen to ammonia electrochemically. However, the roadmap toward scale in this technology has become obscured by recent research missteps. Nevertheless, alternative generation 3 approaches are becoming viable. We conclude with perspectives on the broader scale sustainability of an ammonia economy and the need for further understanding of the planetary nitrogen cycles of which ammonia is an important part.

Ammonia is of emerging interest as a liquefied, renewable-energy-sourced energy carrier for global use in the future. Electrochemical reduction of N2 (NRR) is widely recognised as an alternative to the traditional Haber–Bosch production process for ammonia. However, though the challenges of NRR experiments have become better understood, the reported rates are often too low to be convincing that reduction of the highly unreactive N2 molecule has actually been achieved. This perspective critically reassesses a wide range of the NRR reports, describes experimental case studies of potential origins of false-positives, and presents an updated, simplified experimental protocol dealing with the recently emerging issues.

Six basic ionic liquids were synthesised from the natural molecule quinine, including one room temperature ionic liquid. The thermal properties were studied and the basicity analysed by Hammett measurements. The properties are discussed in relation to the crystal structure of one of the salts, [C 4 Qn][NTf 2 ] (2c) and electron density models generated using Spartan. The ionic liquids were shown to catalyse the Knoevenagel condensation of Malononitrile and Benzaldehyde.

We present a new technology based on delayed release of perfume raw materials from new-to-the-world binary ionic liquid mixtures.