This article is specifically talking about the use of hydrogen blended into natural gas pipelines as a way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels for heating and cooking. Ammonia as a transport mechanism has no place here.

The current consensus in the industry is that you can replace up to 20% of the natural gas with hydrogen in a pipeline with no adverse affects. This article is indicating that there may in fact be some adverse affects.

Edited to fix some stupid autocorrects. At least it was mainly verb tense this time.

Ammonia is nasty stuff. From a safety perspective I'm sure we'd be better off building new nuclear plants than increasing the usage and transportation of fry your lungs sauce.

Youtube videos often gloss over the details for the sake of uninhibited futurism.

Large-scale hydrogen electrolysis has a cost of around 55kWh/kg, and when you combust the H2 directly you get about 39kWh/kg back. Without compression/transport, using H2 as a heating fuel is 71% efficient.

H2 is usually compressed for transport. Compression of 1 kg of H2 to 700 bar costs about 5kWh of additional electricity. I'll spare you the calcs, but truck transport is under 1kWh/kg H2. This reduces our efficiency to 39kWh/61kWh or 64%.

Converting H2 to ammonia takes the place of the compressor and truck. 2 mols of ammonia burn for 162kcal, less than the 204kcal you'd get from 3 mols of H2. The Haber-Bosch process reduces output to 31kWh per kg of H2 put in. This reduces out efficiency to 31kWh/55kWh or 56%.

With currently-proven cracking technology, it costs around 23kcal/mol of ammonia, reducing overall efficiency to about 55%. It is more effective to burn ammonia directly than to convert it into H2 and burn the H2.

Using ammonia as a transport medium removes a bunch of technical problems, but it introduces new ones. It's corrosive, it's toxic, it burns eyes/lungs/skin, and it wastes more energy than you'd think.

Ammonia is an environmental hazard, in addition, the chemical processes, however green they may be, need extra energy compared to production of hydrogen. And that is already a very lossy process, energy-wise. You also need infrastructure for it. Afaik, only Japan is really interested in building such infrastructure.

One possible reason is that ammonia is a fairly dangerous substance with both acute and chronic exposure risks.

The study hasn't been peer reviewed, so shame on the authors for talking about it like it's already decided, but the skeptical part of me can't rule out that this whole thing was destined to fail on purpose.

Big Oil: "See? Hydrogen doesn't work ~~in unmodified systems~~! Shucks, guess we'll have to keep using natural gas..."

And maybe it's less nefarious, like additional proof that we can't just retrofit existing systems by changing the gas mixture, but it's at least suspicious that it benefits fossil fuel producers so neatly.

In terms of chemically bonding hydrogen to something else for easier storage and transport, I think the best plan is to add carbon so it becomes convenient synthetic methane or gasoline that we can use in our existing distribution infrastructure and machinery.

...of course, that just goes to show how absurd the entire concept of hydrogen is, considering that it's almost exclusively made from those things in the first place!

If we really want a sustainable portable energy storage medium that isn't electricity, my vote would be for cracking water into hydrogen with electrolysis and then immediately (in the same facility) converting that + CO2 to synthetic hydrocarbon fuel using the Fischer-Tropsch process.