In 2021, Australian mining and cleantech company Fortescue announced a plan to float the world's first ammonia-powered ship by 2022. It's a bit late, and not quite as ammonia-powered as we hoped, but the Green Pioneer now appears ready to roll.
The Fortescue Green Pioneer was loaded with three metric tonnes of liquid ammonia at a terminal on Jurong Island, off the southwest coast of Singapore, earlier this week. That's the news here, it doesn't appear to have started actually using the fuel – and that's perhaps emblematic of the challenges this machine has faced.
According to Fortescue, one of the Pioneer's four-stroke marine engines was successfully converted to run on ammonia, in combination with diesel, as early as 2022. The ship was fitted out with two ammonia engines, as well as fuel delivery systems, safety systems and other infrastructure as early as July 2023, and sailed to Dubai for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and COP28 in December 2023 – although it appears to have made this trip using its other two engines, which still run diesel.
Before it could actually take on a fuel load of ammonia, there was all sorts of red tape to get through; safety training for the crew, research studies to investigate the risks that might arise during fuel transfer, HAZMAT response plans... A multi-national research team brought several universities together to create a model showing how an ammonia spill might spread and disperse in an accident – and a whole bunch of government departments took their time picking over the plans before approving the fueling test.
This is all fair and reasonable. Ammonia is one of the more promising pathways to decarbonized shipping, but it's by no means a simple proposition. It stores hydrogen better than hydrogen itself, by many measures, but it's also highly caustic at high concentrations, "extremely hazardous" to humans, and a potential environmental nightmare if a fuel tank full of it were to pour into the ocean.
Fortescue Chairman Dr. Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest is seldom one to mince words, and it was interesting to see him demanding more stringent regulations in a press release. “Fortescue has seen firsthand the willingness of Singapore to lead the world in taking brave, innovative action to build green ammonia shipping," he wrote. "My message to the Singaporean Government is only green is green. Anything else is made from fossil fuels. The Fortescue Green Pioneer is proof that safe, technical solutions for ammonia power engines exist.
"But as I did at COP 28 in Dubai, I am once again calling on the world’s ports to get on with setting fair, safe and stringent fuel standards for green ammonia and not shy away from their responsibilities simply because of a lack of character. We must push to see global emitters paying fair carbon prices for heavy fuels used in traditional shipping. These prices must provide clear investment signals to drive green investment.”
The Fortescue Green Pioneer has two diesel engines and two ammonia/diesel engines – ammonia requires high temperatures before it'll burn properly, so an ammonia combustion solution may never get to the point of being totally clean.
There is another option – get that ammonia through one kind of fuel cell or another, turn it into water, electricity and harmless nitrogen, and use the power to drive electric motors instead. That's what Brooklyn company Amogy is doing with an ammonia-fueled tug it was hoping to have up and running by 2023.
It's unclear to us exactly how far the Amogy project has come since then, despite the video below, published a few months ago and focused on the ammonia tug.
Either way, Amogy and Fortescue are both leading the adoption of ammonia and hydrogen in a range of projects, from Fortescue's mining trucks and trains to Amogy's semi trucks. There might be some competition here for who exactly is first to do what, but both are surely wishing the other great success.
Source: Fortescue
