Ammonia is easier to liquify than hydrogen, and is in many respects easier to handle. However, it's definitely not something you want to have a spill of at a gas station or in your garage, and for that reason, it probably won't have "consumer" uses.
As far as industrial gasses go, it's certainly nowhere near the worst, and there's plenty of ammonia tankers on the roads today, but large spills do kill people every now and then.
Being near either one as it explodes would be bad, but I wonder which one looks more impressive movie-effects-wise? :)
If there were an oxidizer in the mix somehow, it would be rather more explosive.
I once got to watch some moderately crazy students fill an ordinary party balloon with a stoichiometric mix of hydrogen and oxygen at ambient temperature and pressure. When it was ignited, the result was extremely impressive. No one was injured (because we were all warned to protect our ears and open our mouths and balloons don’t produce significant shrapnel), but the shock wave was not at all subtle.
We ran into two problems. First, a number of the flames blew out on their way up. No fireball.
Second, we ran out of balloons pretty fast. So he cast around for ideas, and decided to fall back on a box of condoms. They held a lot more hydrogen than the balloons.
They were also equally likely to go out before blowing up. I always imagined them coming down on someone's lawn, causing no end of confusion.
[DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! And if you're tempted, there's one thing I left out that's necessary for it to work properly, and the only thing I'll say about it is this warning: https://sciencenotes.org/add-acid-to-water-or-water-to-acid/ ]
The stoichiometric premixed balloon is only 2/3 H2 by volume, so it releases 1/3 less energy, but it’s a whole different experience when the energy is released essentially all at once. Interestingly, there was no noticeable fireball from the premixed balloon.
A premixed H2+air balloon probably makes a fine explosion, too :)
Oh, I'm quite aware. The other fun game we played was with his acetylene welding torch and balloons. It has separately controlled tanks of acetylene and oxygen. Acetylene only = nice big fireball. Acetylene + oxygen = no fireball at all, instead a very loud boom + a bit of a shockwave.
But H2 takes up most of the space in the balloon, and acetylene is nice and compact, so considerably more total energy should be available with acetylene!
I don’t know whether oxyacetylene will detonate nicely, though, or whether a balloon-sized oxyacetylene mix will merely combust subsonically.
As for the idea itself. Ammonia as fuel fails the first principle of safe design. It’s a poisonous gas. Using it as a fuel is a willingness to trade the safety of people for a cheaper fuel.
“willingness to trade the safety of people for a cheaper X” is exactly what we should expect car companies (and companies in general) to do, because that’s what they’ve done so often though history.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo “These stupid trucks are literally killing us” -NotJustBikes
I was once in a presentation which claimed formic acid to be a better alternative, but I'm not an expert in that field, so I can't comment on its merits.
Enough hydrogen to power humanity by fusion is readily available anywhere :)
Or maybe a regional factory with short pipelines.
Add the issues with hydrogen embrittlement and Ammonia starts to look trivial by comparison. People deal with industrial quantities of Ammonia on a regular basis without significant issues. Hell even gasoline and diesel are toxic and can be quite dangerous
No, they have significant issues on a regular basis still.
And plenty of more recent examples: https://www.fox29.com/news/tanker-truck-fire-closes-stretch-...
Ammonia is one of the most common chemicals manufactured and transported around the world and has plenty of accidents but hydrocarbon accidents get into the hundreds of deaths: 150 dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoa_disaster 500-600 dead 5000–7000 suffering severe burns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juanico_disaster etc.
I suppose it's worth noting in your second link, the fatalities were from the kinetics of the impact, which is a hazard that belongs to "things with velocity" rather than "things containing fuels".
We can assume that uncontained fire and explosion are categorical hazards with fuels.
Ammonia has significant risks that few other proposed fuels present and I believe it's worth considering whether this is something we want moving outside of hazmat routes between industrial zones.
Major spills of either are dangerous but rare compared to how much is being created and transported. We’re only ~5x as much gasoline vs Ammonia today. Considering most cars would be EV’s I suspect the total amount of Ammonia produced even with widespread adoption isn’t going to change by that much. Say Long haul trucks, heavy equipment, aircraft etc.
PS: Which isn’t to say Ammonia is actually a good fuel, the only thing I can think that actually used the stuff was the X-15. So it would need significant economic advantages to end up adopted.
Ammonia is probably too unsafe for cars and boats. But anything filled by professionals like trains or ships would work. But might work to have tank exchange system like with propane.
Well its not like you can put any petrochemical fuels in you coffee
Result, reduces carbon footprint of travel - land shipping - ability to build out modern towns - etc
Toss in a bill to require all train lines to also install national fiber. You now have enabled the revitalization of large swaths of the county.
This is not to mention everything else. The immense death toll directly (crashes) and indirectly (pollution, particulates, etc). The waste of space in cities. The waste of time in traffic that is unfixable if everyone is driving in an individual car. Etc etc. I wish people would stop trying to save the auto industry and start looking at the root of the problem.
They're trying to avoid using the stuff in industrial refrigeration it's so nasty, and yet here we are gleefully considering rolling down the highway with it in the cheapest vessel industry can lobby for strapped to our bum.
I guess the notion has passed so quickly we haven't had time for the media to program us with corporate agendas...