Hideyuki Matsumoto*, Javaid Rahat, Yuichi Manaka, Mika Ishii, Tetsuya Nanba, Renewable Energy Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan
15th Annual NH3 Fuel Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, October 31, 2018
NH3 Energy+ Topical Conference at the AIChE Annual Meeting
ABSTRACT
Process technologies on energy conversion of renewable electricity into hydrogen energy carrier are significant to deploy long-term storage and long-distance transport of much more renewable inside and outside Japan. Ammonia is a potential hydrogen carrier that contains 17.6 wt% of hydrogen. Moreover, as an energy carrier, ammonia is thought to be a clean fuel as only water and nitrogen are produced on direct combustion.
Many researchers and engineers consider that ammonia plants using hydrogen produced by solar electricity or wind electricity will be much smaller than those currently used [1]. There is an issue of low pressure condition for feed of raw material gas, since hydrogen and nitrogen are produced by water electrolysis and pressure swing adsorption (or cryogenic air separation) respectively. Ammonia synthesis under the conventional pressure conditions needs increase in power for compression of the feed gas. Moreover, low temperature operation has advantage in getting higher ammonia concentration of equilibrium limitation. In order to promote the reaction under the lower pressure conditions, lower reaction temperature condition is desirable due to a limitation of equilibrium.
In Japan, the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) supports the research and development of catalyst with high catalytic activities in the low-temperature region, and our research group investigates performance of developed ruthenium catalysts by small-scale ammonia plant that is built in Fukushima Renewable Energy Institute, AIST (FREA). Continue reading
