Alaska’s 720,000 people live in over 200 “energy islands” with no
electricity grid connection to each other nor to North America. Smaller
communities have no road connection to each other, the rest of Alaska,
or the continent. Most energy is imported: diesel for electricity
generation and heat; gasoline for transportation. All Alaskans might
obtain an annually-firm supply of most of their energy, for all
purposes, by converting Alaska’s diverse, stranded, renewable energy
(RE) resources to liquid anhydrous ammonia (NH3) fuel, transporting and
storing it at low cost in common steel propane tanks, recovering the RE
via stationary combined-heat-and-power (CHP) plants, in internal
combustion engine (ICE) and combustion turbine (CT) gensets, and via
fuel cells, and as transportation fuel. Alaskans could achieve a
significant degree of community energy independence, and perhaps export
their abundant, stranded renewables as “green” liquid NH3 fuel. Solid
state ammonia synthesis (SSAS) appears promising.
The State of Alaska, via the new Emerging Energy Technology
Fund, intends to grant to Alaska Applied Sciences, Inc. ~ $750,000 for a
two-year project for design, build, and Alaska deployment of a
transportable, proof-of-concept, kW-scale, pilot plant to demonstrate a
novel anhydrous ammonia (NH3) fuel synthesis process for low-cost,
annual-scale storage of renewable energy (RE) electricity. Energy is
recovered from the stored NH3 fuel via CHP gensets with ICE or CT prime
movers, or via direct ammonia fuel cells (DAFC), and via space heating
appliances and transportation fuel. NH3 fuel may provide an alternative
to electricity for transmission, annual-scale firming storage, and
energy supply integration. For example, the Southeast Intertie
(electricity transmission via land lines and submarine cables) long
desired throughout Southeast, was declared “uneconomic” in the 2012
Southeast Alaska Integrated Resource Plan.
Converting stranded, curtailed, or spilled RE-source electricity, at
the sources, to NH3 fuel, allows harvest, transmission, and storage of
this stranded RE, for a degree of community energy independence. All
energy supplies may be thus conserved; costs may be thus stabilized, not
necessarily reduced. A kW-scale SSAS-PP must be designed, built, and
tested to discover and demonstrate at multi-SSAS-element-reactor pilot
scale whether SSAS has the potential to more efficiently, reliably, and
economically synthesize NH3 from electric energy, water vapor, and N2
than conventional NH3 synthesis via water electrolysis and Haber-Bosch
(H-B) synthesis. This small-scale project of < 1 kWe input will
discover and demonstrate whether SSAS may be technically and
economically superior to EHB, and offers a path to partial energy
independence for isolated Alaska communities — many of which enjoy
multiple indigenous RE resources.
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