A Roadmap to the Ammonia Economy

Summary

Ammonia is increasingly recognized as an important, sustainable fuel for global use in the future. Applications of ammonia in heavy transport, power generation, and distributed energy storage are being actively developed. Produced at scale, ammonia could replace a substantial fraction of current-day liquid fuel consumption. This ammonia-based economy will emerge through multiple generations of technology development and scale-up. The pathways forward in regard to current-day technology (generation 1) and immediate future approaches (generation 2) that rely on Haber-Bosch process are discussed. Generation 3 technology breaks this nexus with the Haber-Bosch process and enables direct reduction of dinitrogen to ammonia electrochemically. However, the roadmap toward scale in this technology has become obscured by recent research missteps. Nevertheless, alternative generation 3 approaches are becoming viable. We conclude with perspectives on the broader scale sustainability of an ammonia economy and the need for further understanding of the planetary nitrogen cycles of which ammonia is an important part.