Ammonia as a Green Fuel for Transportation

In this paper, the potential benefits and technical advantages of using ammonia as a green fuel for transportation are analyzed based on performance indicators including the system effectiveness, the driving range, fuel tank compactness, and the cost of driving per km. Similar to hydrogen, ammonia is a synthetic product that can be obtained thermally, physically, chemically or biologically either from fossil fuels, biomass, or other renewable sources and can be used as a clean fuel. The refrigeration effect of ammonia is another advantage of it and is included in the efficiency calculations. The cooling power represents about 7–10% from the engine power, being thus a valuable side benefit of ammonia’s presence on-board. If the cooling effect is taken into consideration, the system’s effectiveness can be improved by about 20%. It is shown that if a medium size hydrogen car converted to NH₃, it becomes more cost effective per driving range as low as CN$3.2/100 km.