Pee-powered vehicles are finally making a splash
Ammonia offers hugely way to decarbonize transport
A future of cars powered by electric batteries is inevitable. But what about trucks, ships, and planes? Hydrogen? Possibly.
But there’s another chemical that could be used — and it’s abundant in your pee.
What is ammonia, and why use it to power vehicles?
Ammonia is a combination of Hydrogen and Nitrogen (NH3), and is one of the few liquid chemical compounds. It rapidly releases energy in combustion and has a high energy density by volume.
It also comes with substantial environmental advantages. No carbon (C) in NH3 means that when burnt, ammonia cannot release carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, or other greenhouse pollutants.
How does ammonia stack up compared to other energy sources?
While electric batteries and hydrogen fuel cells are compelling, ammonia offers higher energy density. This is particularly important for transport that is heavily constrained by weight and volume, such as heavy-duty ground and air transport.
Furthermore, compared with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, ammonia-powered vehicles are lighter and eschew the problem of disposal that lithium-ion batteries suffer from.
The other advantage of ammonia is that the chemical has been used industrially for over a century.
Therefore, storage, handling, and delivery infrastructure are already in place globally, making ammonia an optimal fuel for long-haul trucking, locomotives, aviation, and shipping.
Hang on, ammonia, aren’t you talking about pee?
Yeah, basically, urine turns into ammonia, which can then be used to produce energy. Up until now though, it’s been strictly academic.
In 2009, research by Dr. Gerardine Botte showed how to use electrolysis to produce hydrogen from human urine at a far cheaper cost than producing hydrogen from water.
In 2017, UK researchers at the University of West England, developed Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC), electrical circuits driven by microbes such as bacteria that feed off urine, creating the potential for robots to refuel themselves.
They’ve since extended the cells to powering home appliances.
Researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground are also looking at how they could use urine to power devices in remote locations, as well as in large-scale fuel cells powering vehicles and — theoretically — even entire bases.
If you’re feeling like a bit of citizen science, there are videos on turning urine into garden fertilizer, and even microbial fuel cells.
However, while scientists are onboard, we’re yet to see full adoption of ammonia in energy production.
Why haven’t we seen wider adoption of ammonia?
A lack of technology capable of efficiently extracting ammonia in a constrained space has left it underexplored as an energy carrier..
But now technological advancements are reinforcing its viability in larger-scale capabilities.
Research and industry are making ammonia power a reality
Last year, Hong Kong’s University of Technology showcased the world’s first ammonia-powered fuel cell electric vehicle, a golf cart jointly developed with Oxford University.
Ammonia is stored inside a cylinder in its liquid form. It goes through a ‘cracker’, breaking down into nitrogen and hydrogen by catalysts developed by the University of Oxford.
The hydrogen generates electricity to power and propel the vehicle.
The researchers are also planning to develop an ammonia-powered minibus and aircraft.
Industry players are also high on ammonium
In Denmark, MAN Energy Solutions is developing a fuel-flexible, two-stroke ammonia engine — and aims to deliver the first unit in 2024.
Another player is the company Amogy, founded in the US in 2020. The company is a pioneer of emission-free, energy-dense ammonia power solutions. It developed a compact, high-efficiency reactor that cracks ammonia and uses the hydrogen to generate power through a fuel cell.
Earlier this month, an Amogy reactor powered a mid-sized John Deere tractor with ammonia. The company integrated a standard liquid-storage tank and highly efficient ammonia-cracking modules into a hybrid fuel cell system, providing power for several hours.
This week, Amogy announced a raise of $46 million in additional funds to bring its funding to $68 million. It plans to apply its systems to an 18-wheel tractor-trailer and an ocean cargo ship. This is a big deal in getting ammonium from outside the lab into tangible, industrial use cases.
We’re a while from mass commercial adoption. But right now seems like a perfect time to accelerate our efforts to advance less underrepresented forms of alternative energy.
And considering urine is the largest waste product on earth, it’s not like we’ll run out anytime soon.
Power Your Car With Pee
A scientist at Ohio University has developed a catalyst capable of extracting hydrogen from urine. That’s right. Urine. Now you can fill one tank while draining another.
Gerardine Botte claims the device uses significantly less energy than is needed to extract hydrogen from water and says it could power hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the near future. Her electrolyzer uses a nickel-based electrode to extract hydrogen from urea (NH2)2CO, the main component in urine. Hydrogen is less tightly bound to the nitrogen in urea than to the oxygen in water, so the electrolyzer needs just 0.37 volts across the cell to oxidize the urea, according to Botte. That’s less than half the amount of energy in an AA battery and considerably less than the 1.23 volts needed to split water.
One of hydrogen’s biggest stumbling blocks to use as an alternative fuel is the amount of energy needed to produce it. And then there’s the matter of distributing it. Botte says her gadget eliminates such problems because it’s small enough to integrate into an automobile. Urine is also readily available — your body produces two to three liters of it each day, and it is the most abundant form of waste on the planet. We could treat waste water while fueling our cars.
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“Urea is the same stuff we use to fertilize our flower beds. It’s a solid that dissolves in water and is therefore easy to move,” Botte told Wired.com. “An electrolyzer built into a car would eliminate the need for a hydrogen storage tank, and with the right partnership, I believe we could have pee-powered cars capable of 60 miles per gallon on the road within a year.”
Botte’s current electrolyzer prototype is about the size of a pair of CD jewel cases and can produce up to 500 milliwatts of power. That’s pretty small, but Ohio University has patented the technology and Botte says it could be scaled up to power hybrid and electric vehicles or anything else running on electricity.
“We are currently working on the chemistry of the electrolyzer,” she said. “The next step is the engineering, which should flow just fine. It would involve increasing the size of the electrolyzer, making it more efficient and testing its long-term stability.”
She says the cost of developing the technology for conventional cars would all depend on what’s powering the car. The electrolyzer would have to pull energy from a power source like a battery in order to produce hydrogen for a fuel cell. Botte also is examining how the electrolyzer could draw the power it needs from a solar panel. Hooking it up to a rooftop solar panel — like the one on the 2010 Toyota Prius — could increase efficiency as much as 40 percent, she said.
Botte hasn’t gotten much in the way of federal funding for the project, though she is working with the Department of Defense to develop electrolyzer technology for military use.
“Years ago, the army pushed to develop hydrogen technology in order to eliminate the use of noisy generators when out in the field or in order to deal with what’s called the ‘silent camp problem,'” Botte said. “The problem they were running into out in the desert was access to large amounts of clean water. The electrolyzer, however, eliminates the need for clean water other than drinking water and to transport fuel to remote areas.”