(220a) Decarbonizing Ammonia with Advanced Reactions and Separations for Decentralized Manufacturing

The large-scale production of ammonia from the Haber-Bosch process has become one of the most important discoveries of the 20^th century. Ammonia is integral to crop fertilization and the production of food because of its use as a derivative of synthetic fertilizers like nitric acid, ammonium nitrate, and urea. It is recently being considered as a hydrogen carrier or energy storage medium. Hence, it is expected that the demand for ammonia grows faster in the next 3 decades. To meet the emission reductions for the 2050 net zero, ammonia is one of the key chemicals that should be prioritized for decarbonization.

Decarbonizing ammonia required simplification of the production process that enables modularization for decentralized manufacturing and numbering up the production units to reduce the costs. In this presentation, I will elaborate on our recent efforts to design a more viable pathway to produce ammonia through advanced reactions and separation. Some of our results with ammonia synthesis under milder conditions with two selected catalysts will be presented, and the major bottlenecks to use advanced catalysis will be discussed. I will also report on some of our recent efforts to design advanced functional absorbent materials for facile separation and storage of ammonia from the reaction products. Various categories of metal halide absorbents that have the potential for scale up will be disclosed and reported.

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Nowrin, F. H., Warzywoda, J., & Malmali, M. (2024). Unraveling the deactivation mechanism of Co-LiH composite catalyst for ammonia synthesis at milder conditions. Applied Catalysis A: General, 119677.

Mahdi, M., Yongming, W., & Alon, M. (2016). Ammonia Synthesis at Reduced Pressure via Reactive Separation.

Malmali, M., Le, G., Hendrickson, J., Prince, J., McCormick, A. V., & Cussler, E. L. (2018). Better absorbents for ammonia separation. ACS sustainable chemistry & engineering, 6(5), 6536-6546.