NH3 Truck – today
NH3 fueled truck
The truck uses a special fuel, something widely available throughout the country, but until now, not widely considered as a fuel for transportation: the truck is carrying three tanks of ammonia in its bed.
In addition to being an economical alternative to petroleum fuels, the ammonia fueled vehicle has much cleaner emissions and almost no greenhouse gasses.
The NH3 car (NH3 is the chemical formula for ammonia) is a demonstration project of a University of Michigan graduate student in physics who is studying the use of ammonia as an alternative fuel.
The test vehicle can be run either on 100% gasoline or on an 80% ammonia/20% gasoline mixture, and can be switched from one to the other at any time.
According to a news story, the test vehicle gets 27 miles per gallon whether it is running on gasoline or the gas/ammonia mix.
When gasoline is higher that $2.10/gallon, it becomes more economical to use the fuel mix.
More importantly, however, the vehicle produces much cleaner emissions than a fossil fuel burning vehicle. Moving to an ammonia fuel system would drastically cut transportation CO2 emissions.
Because there is no carbon in ammonia (molecularly, ammonia is one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms), there is no carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide in the emissions from the ammonia combustion. According to the vehicle team, the only by-products are water vapor and nitrogen gas.
“Onthe basis of either weight or volume, ammonia’s the next best thing when liquid petroleum fuels can’t be used,” said Grannell, a University of Michigan doctoral student of applied physics. “I believe this is the only economically viable … replacement for liquid petroleum fuels, especially for transportation use.”
One drawback to the ammonia fueled vehicle is that commercial ammonia needs to be manufactured. Unlike fossil fuels, it is not a resource that can simply be mined or pumped from the ground. And most commercial processes for manufacturing ammonia rely on natural gas as a feedstock.
An interesting synergy might be in place here. Presently, ammonia is used extensively as a farm fertilizer.
Using ammonia as a fuel, when its principal use is as fertilizer, would be a cause for concern about the food versus fuel dilemma this causes, much the same as people have concerns about food versus fuel regarding E85 ethanol being derrived from corn, and about food cropland being taken away to be used instead for fuel cropland. However, as more farms move to organic production, the need for ammonia fertilizer should decline, and rather than having to worry about a slumping market, the excess production could be diverted to direct fuel use instead.
Ammonia fueled transportation may be a viable possibility.
- The NH3car team has also stated that the conversion from gasoline to ammonia could cost consumers less than $1,000.
- Since Green NH3 can be created close to the point of fillup transportation becomes less of a problem. Unlike Brown NH3 which comes from dirty centralized sources like coal. Green NH3 is created from clean decentralized sources like windelectric.
- This also removes the fossil fuel component which plays with consumer pricing and has left the public wide open to overcharging.