Comment by Animats
3 days ago
There are press releases which link to other press releases. Found the technical paper from 2021.[1]
The ammonia plant is built for intermittent operation, so it can shut down or reduce output when there's no wind. No need to store much electrical energy. Storage tanks hold the ammonia. It's a reasonable idea, but is it cost-effective? No numbers are given. Still, fertilizer independence alone is worth something. You can do this anywhere with wind or sun.
The press release says they use the wind energy to produce hydrogen. Seems like you could store the hydrogen and always have the plant running at capacity as long as the average power produced by the wind turbine(s) was enough.
Built infrastructure for hydrogen storage and transport is always a challenge, it's a slippery little molecule that's expensive to contain in human built stuff.
That said, there's almost always a 'cheat' and for bulk hydrogen storage:
~ https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68aebcef3a052...
Currently there are a few geological structures in Australia being tested for suitability and pilot storage.
Its trying to complete with making ammonia from natural gas. So probably not. Natural gas is priced as a waste product and the industrial process we use there is about 120 years old. So its just about the hardest target on the board to beat on price.
It's providing an alternative to middle east sourced fertiliser from plants that can no longer ship or, in some cases, can no longer operate due to war damage.
US states aren't the only places on the globe building out renewable powered green hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, etc.
The US doesn't get oil from the ME anymore. And there isn't a single functioning plant that uses any of the processes you describe anywhere on the planet after 45 years of trying. There are only a couple of pilot plants and most of those have been abandon.
I mean, I guess the answer there would be to build the usual kind of Haber-Brosch process plants that run continuously, and feed them with hydrogen derived from natural gas. But just build them in the US.
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The catch is that the electrolyzer is most of the capex, so intermittency cuts both ways. Tanks are cheap, which makes flexibility nearly free on the storage side, but every hour the stack sits idle the hydrogen coming out of it gets more expensive. That is why these projects obsess over capacity factor and usually want a mix of wind and solar rather than wind alone. Agreed on wanting numbers, the whole question lives in how many hours per year the stack actually runs.