Caleb James DeLisle on Nostr: After reviewing many different forms of energy storage, I think the one that is most ...

After reviewing many different forms of energy storage, I think the one that is most likely to catch on will be lithium based ammonia electrolysis such as https://jupiterionics.com/our-technology/

Sure the lithium is prone to degradation over time, but if it has a similar lifecycle to a lithium battery then you figure 5000 cycles of 1kWh battery equals about 5MWh of ammonia production. And a 1kWh lithium battery is less than $100.

Ammonia is NH3 so all of its components come from air and water. You don't need to buy coal in order to produce it. Energy density is 4 kWh per kg which is a little under half that of gasoline, but better than any battery. Furthermore, you can burn it in an internal combustion engine, OR, in a fuel cell, so it has a lot of flexibility.

Ammonia is also used for nitrogen fertilizer, so it has significant industrial application outside of fuel. So even if ammonia production is significantly more expensive than other energy carriers like methanol or gasoline, there's still an important reason to make it anyway. An early use case is huge because it will drive economy of scale to push down the price.

Ammonia is a gas (not a liquid) which is a mixed story. On the one hand, it's a little bit harder to handle than liquid fuels like gasoline and diesel, but it compresses at a pressure similar to propane gas so it's not a "difficult" gas like hydrogen. And its gaseous nature can be seen as an advantage because leaks and spills - while bad and toxic - are not long term environmental disasters the way diesel spills are.

The Hard Problem for ammonia electrolysis is designing a cell which lasts long enough to be economical. Lithium metal is desperate to attach itself to anything it can find, particularly oxygen or water, and this is not easily reversible so it turns the cell to junk.

The runners up (IMO) are:

1. Sodium metal. Sodium is obviously extremely abundant and it is fairly easy to convert it from hydroxide to metallic form. Energy density is around 2 kWh per kg, and sodium is almost exactly 1kg per liter. Sodium can be used in a sodium-air fuel cell which (in current research) is about 50% efficient. Sodium is a lot less flexible than ammonia, and the energy-to-weight is worse, but there are no Hard Problems that need to be solved here - so we might see sodium show up in some grid energy storage projects.

2. Liquid hydrogen (if we can improve cryogenic cooling technology). At 33kWh per kg, LH2 has a much better energy to weight, but even in liquid form it is still bulky with only 2.3 kWh per liter, compared to ammonia's 3.53 kWh/liter. As it needs to be stored in very special vacuum insulated dewars, bulk is an issue. Liquid hydrogen is particularly interesting for the aviation industry because it's power to weight is undefeated, and planes have very predictable fuel consumption over time. The Hard Problem for LH2 is the cooling technology.

I excluded anything that requires special geography such as compressed H2 in a salt cave - because you need the salt cave. And because it only works when you have the geography, most people can't deploy it, which means little R&D energy will go into it and therefore it's unlikely to go anywhere.

RT: https://pkteerium.xyz/objects/17fd8e81-3332-49a2-84ed-d9b846bdc7b4