Techno-economic assessment of green ammonia production with different wind and solar potentials

Campion, Nicolas; Nami, Hossein; Swisher, Philip R.; Hendriksen, Peter Vang; Münster, Marie

doi:10.1016/j.rser.2022.113057

Cited by 65 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Scenarios 1, 2, and 3 featured higher environmental impacts than the Baseline Scenario in mineral resource scarcity, land use, terrestrial acidification, and freshwater eutrophication categories (Figure ). Green ammonia production powered with renewable energy sources increases the consumption of minerals with a direct impact on the mineral resource scarcity category since: (i) PV panels and wind turbines require high amounts of minerals for their construction; (ii) the water electrolyzer consumes large amounts of electricity (∼ 55 kWh/kg H 2 ), which implies that intensive renewable energy supply systems would be needed to meet the energy demand; and (iii) Li-ion battery systems are needed to deal with the fluctuating energy production from renewable energy systems . It is worth mentioning that high consumption of minerals has been identified as one of the main economic and environmental challenges to implement renewable energy systems. , For this reason, the development of technologies aimed at recovering critical raw materials needed for the energy transition will be paramount for the successful implementation of decarbonized chemical processes, such as green ammonia production.…”

Section: Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This theoretical study compares the economic and environmental performances of gray and green ammonia production plants implemented in Spain. The plants were designed to produce 430 kt of ammonia per year . This size was selected because it represents a high-sized green ammonia production plant and can be representative for future implementation of green ammonia projects.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The water electrolysis process was considered to take place in a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolyzer . This typology of electrolyzer was selected since it can be operated under fluctuating energy supply from renewable energy sources. , The hydrogen produced through electrolysis was stored in a hydrogen storage system . Cryogenic distillation was used to separate the nitrogen from the air before the HB process .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sustainability Assessment of Green Ammonia Production To Promote Industrial Decarbonization in Spain

Vinardell,

Nicolas,

Sastre

et al. 2023

ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng.

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This article investigates the economic and environmental implications of implementing green ammonia production plants in Spain.To this end, one business-as-usual scenario for gray ammonia production was compared with three green ammonia scenarios powered with different renewable energy sources (i.e., solar photovoltaic (PV), wind, and a combination of solar PV and wind). The results illustrated that green ammonia scenarios reduced the environmental impacts in global warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, and fossil resource scarcity when compared with conventional gray ammonia scenario. Conversely, green ammonia implementation increased the environmental impacts in the categories of land use, mineral resource scarcity, freshwater eutrophication, and terrestrial acidification. The techno-economic analysis revealed that the conventional gray ammonia scenario featured lower costs than green ammonia scenarios when considering a moderate natural gas cost. However, green ammonia implementation became the most economically favorable option when the natural gas cost and carbon prices increased. Finally, the results showed that developing efficient ammonia-fueled systems is important to make green ammonia a relevant energy vector when considering the entire supply chain (production/transportation). Overall, the results of this research demonstrate that green ammonia could play an important role in future decarbonization scenarios.

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Section: Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sustainability Assessment of Green Ammonia Production To Promote Industrial Decarbonization in Spain

Vinardell,

Nicolas,

Sastre

et al. 2023

ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng.

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“…Examples where flexible hydrogen demand is possible in industry include ammonia production via the Haber-Bosch process or methane production via the Sabatier process. Both of these processes can be flexible with must-run part loads down to 30%-50% [17][18][19].…”

Section: Balancing Cost Emissions and Flexibility In Green Hydrogen P...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal regulation of renewable supply for electrolytic hydrogen

Zeyen,

Riepin,

Brown

2024

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Electrolytic hydrogen produced using renewable electricity can help lower carbon dioxide emissions in sectors where feedstocks, reducing agents, dense fuels or high temperatures are required. This study investigates the implications of various standards being proposed to certify that the grid electricity used is renewable. The standards vary in how strictly they match the renewable generation to the electrolyser demand in time and space. Using an energy system model, we compare electricity procurement strategies to meet a constant hydrogen demand for selected European countries in 2025 and 2030. We compare cases where no additional renewable generators are procured with cases where the electrolyser demand is matched to additional supply from local renewable generators on an annual, monthly or hourly basis. We show that local additionality is required to guarantee low emissions. For the annually and monthly matched case, we demonstrate that baseload operation of the electrolysis leads to using fossil-fuelled generation from the grid for some hours, resulting in higher emissions than the case without hydrogen demand. In the hourly matched case, hydrogenproduction does not increase system-level emissions, but baseload operation results in high costs for providing constant supply if only wind, solar and short-term battery storage are available. Flexible operation or buffering hydrogen with storage, either in steel tanks or underground caverns, reduces the cost penalty of hourly versus annual matching to 7–8%. Hydrogen production with monthly matching can reduce system emissions if the electrolysers operate flexibly or the renewable generation share is large. The largest emission reduction is achieved with hourly matching when surplus electricity generation can be sold to the grid. We conclude that flexible operation of the electrolysis should be supported to guarantee low emissions and low hydrogen production costs.

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“…However, Haber-Bosch plants typically require significant capital investment owing to the high pressure (100–200 bar) reactors employed in conventional NH 3 synthesis approaches. − As a result, NH 3 production has historically occurred in large, centralized facilities, and underdeveloped countries and remote communities have relied on NH 3 imports to sustain agricultural practices. A means of decentralized NH 3 production could reduce chemical import costs and promote self-sufficient agriculture in these regions. − …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying Influence of the Solid-Electrolyte Interphase in Ammonia Electrosynthesis

McShane,

Niemann,

Benedek

et al. 2023

ACS Energy Lett.

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The solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) is often invoked to rationalize trends observed during lithium-mediated electrochemical ammonia synthesis (LiMEAS), but quantitative analysis of the SEI constituents is lacking. In this work, we quantified lithium alkoxide SEI species (derived from proton donor reduction) under a variety of electrolyte compositions, using ethanol as the standard proton donor along with five alternative linear and branched alcohol proton donors. With ethanol, we showed that Faradaic efficiency linearly increased from ∼10 to ∼20% as the lithium ethoxide layer thickened. When comparing different proton donors, we found that FE exhibited a "volcano plot" dependence with lithium alkoxide SEI layer thickness, such that FE increased with increasing SEI thickness up to ∼4 μm and decreased with increasing SEI thickness thereafter. We concluded the lithium alkoxide SEI layer limited proton donor and solvated Li + transport, resulting in an optimal SEI thickness at which proton donor, solvated Li + , and N 2 transport were appropriately tuned to maximize NH 3 selectivity.

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Techno-economic assessment of green ammonia production with different wind and solar potentials

Cited by 65 publications

References 48 publications

Sustainability Assessment of Green Ammonia Production To Promote Industrial Decarbonization in Spain

Sustainability Assessment of Green Ammonia Production To Promote Industrial Decarbonization in Spain

Temporal regulation of renewable supply for electrolytic hydrogen

Quantifying Influence of the Solid-Electrolyte Interphase in Ammonia Electrosynthesis

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