Abstract

The production of nitrogen fertilizers are almost exclusively based on fossil feedstocks such as natural gas and coal. Nitrogen fertilizers are a necessity to maintain the high agricultural production that the world's population currently demands. Ammonia produced from nonfossil-based feedstocks would enable renewable production of ammonia. Renewable feedstocks are one thing, but perhaps even more important in the future are the security of supply that decentralized production enables. In this study, the techno-economic evaluation of production of ammonia from various renewable feedstocks and for several plant sizes was investigated. The feedstocks included in this study are grid-based electricity produced from wind power, biogas, and woody biomass. The feedstocks differed in exergy, and to make a fair comparison, the electric equivalence ratios method was used. The results showed that the energy consumption for biogas and electricity is the same at 42 GJ/tonne ammonia. When using the electric equivalence comparison for the same cases, the results are 26 and 42 GJ/tonne, respectively. Biomass-based production has an energy consumption of 58 GJ/tonne and 31 GJ/tonne when using the electric equivalence comparison, which should be compared with the industrial average of 37 GJ (or 21 GJ electric equivalence) per tonne of ammonia. Monte Carlo simulations were used to vary the inputs to the process to evaluate the production cost. The ammonia production cost ranged from $680 to 2300/tonne ammonia for the various cases studied.

Keywords

ammonia production; nonfossil based; exergy evaluation; production cost

Published in

Environmental Progress and Sustainable Energy
2014, Volume: 33, number: 4, pages: 1290-1297

SLU Authors

• Ahlgren, Serina

  • Department of Energy and Technology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Other Chemistry Topics
Chemical Process Engineering


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ep.11886

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/53049