Shayle and his team at Energy Impact Partners (EIP) review a lot of climate-tech pitches. The best kind of pitch uses a solid techno-economic analysis (TEA) to model how a technology would compete in the real world. In a previous episode, we covered some of the ways startups get TEAs wrong — bad assumptions, false precision, focusing on parts instead of the system, etc.
So what does a good TEA look like?
In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleagues, Dr. Melissa Ball, EIP’s associate director of technology, and Dr. Greg Thiel, director of technology. They apply their TEA chops to two technology pathways — green ammonia and synthetic methane. EIP hasn’t invested in either area yet because both struggle with challenging economics. Shayle, Greg, and Melissa talk about what would have to change to make those economics work, covering topics like:
- The basics of ammonia and methane production
- The cost stack of ammonia production and the surprisingly large role transportation plays
- The challenges of integrating ammonia production with renewables, like buffering hydrogen
- Novel approaches to ammonia synthesis, including scaling down the existing process, lower temperature, and pressure
Recommended resources
- U.S. Department of Energy: Clean Hydrogen Commercial Liftoff
- Catalyst: Ammonia: The beer of decarbonization
- Catalyst: Climate tech startups need strong techno-economic analysis
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.
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Transcript
Shayle Kann: I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst.
Melissa Ball: We look at a TEA and we assume there’s 50 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen that goes into that electrolyzer and we assume even 2 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity. You’re looking somewhere at the energy cost of about 26 a kilo of ammonia.
And so, that’s already a pretty large allocation to your final budget. And so, that really highlights why capital costs then would be incredibly important.
Shayle Kann: This week we dive deep into the techno-economic analysis that underpins how to produce green ammonia and synthetic methane. I am Shayle Kann, I invest in revolutionary climate technologies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. So, a while back we did an episode which we actually recently replayed, so you might’ve heard it recently, where I brought on two of my colleagues from EIP Dr. Greg Theil and Dr. Melissa Ball.
And we were talking about techno-economic analysis. And in that one it was sort of a broad, here’s how to do TEA right and wrong for new climate technologies. It was a big hit. We’ve heard from many of you about it and continue to. So, we thought we would do a follow-on.
And in this case doing a deep dive techno-economic breakdown of a couple of technologies or technology pathways, I should say, that we’ve been hearing about a lot. In this case, talking about how to produce ammonia without emissions. And particularly we have what people call green ammonia.
And then how to produce methane without emissions, or in this case synthetic methane, e-methane, people call it different things. Both of these have lots of different shots on goal right now. They’re start-ups and incumbents who are working on different ways to do each of these things.
But they’re both challenging from a techno-economic perspective. We at EIP have not made an investment yet in neither of these categories directly. You’ll hear a little bit more about why. It’s challenging from a techno-economic standpoint, but never say never.
Something revolutionary could come along. And so, part of what we want it to do here is talk about what drives the techno-economics in both cases. And then what would have to be true for something to truly revolutionize the cost of production of either green ammonia or e-methane?
What would a revolutionary technology have to look like? So, this is an area where we and Greg and Mel in particular have gone quite deep. So, we thought we would share it with you. So, with no further ado, back on the pod Dr. Greg Thiel, Dr. Melissa Ball. Greg, Mel, welcome back.
Melissa Ball: Thank you, Shayle. Good to be back.
Gregory Thiel: Glad to be here.
Shayle Kann: All right, excited to do a deep dive techno-economic breakdown of a couple of technologies that we hear about a fair bit these days. One being green ammonia or e-ammonia, depending on what you want to call it. And the other being e-methane. We flipped a coin ahead of time and picked ammonia to start.
So, we’re going to start there. I think listeners to this podcast probably understand what ammonia is. But just to recap, we use it for fertilizer production and explosives actually. Today it’s a huge source of global greenhouse gas emissions already. And so, decarbonizing it in and of itself has its own value.
But also then people are excited to use it for a bunch of other things. Probably most notably is a potential shipping fuel sort of in battle between ammonia and methanol there. But also in some parts of Asia, people are talking about firing power plants with ammonia, using it as an energy carrier.
So, there’s been lots of activity in ammonia world. I also think probably listeners here are at least familiar with the term Haber-Bosch and the fact that it’s a Nobel Prize-winning century-old technology to produce ammonia. But let’s start by describing in a little bit more detail what the Haber-Bosch process actually is.
And then we could talk about what would change if you’re going to make green ammonia. So, Mel, I’ll hand it to you to kick us off here. Just walk us through the incumbent process today to produce ammonia.
Melissa Ball: Yeah, sure. As you said, it’s a century-old process. It really fundamentally needs two inputs. So, it needs a hydrogen source and a nitrogen source that are then fed into the, we would call the ammonia synthesis reactor. This reactor operates at pretty high temperature today, 400 to 500 C, and at high pressure around 100 to 200 bar.
And so, where we get that nitrogen and hydrogen is really important. So, nitrogen, we get that from the air. So, an air separation unit essentially can separate out the nitrogen from mainly oxygen. And then crucially, the hydrogen is, I would say where this is an important part, is that today about 75% of the hydrogen that feeds the ammonia loop comes from a process called steam methane reforming.
And so, this takes methane and steam, reacts it at high temperature, moderate pressure to produce carbon monoxide in hydrogen, which then can be followed by a, sorry, a water gas shift reaction that can take that carbon monoxide. And then essentially convert it to more hydrogen and also produce some CO₂. And so, that’s really the motivation for these other pathways is that the steam methane reforming and the hydrogen production is responsible for around 80% of the GHG emissions that come from ammonia because of this process.
Shayle Kann: Right. So, the way you produce ammonia today is first of all, you get the nitrogen from the air using an air separation unit, then you get the hydrogen generally from natural gas today using steam methane reforming. You combine those two, an ammonia synthesis reactor that gets you your ammonia at the end of the day.
So, maybe Greg will hand it to you. In a world where we want to decarbonize ammonia production but not fundamentally change the process, what does green ammonia look like?
Gregory Thiel: Yeah, well, I think Mel alluded to it pretty clearly in the last few minutes here. The basic thing you have to do is replace that hydrogen input that goes into your ammonia synthesis from something that is carbon intensive to something that really doesn’t use or create any carbon emissions.
And so, green ammonia typically refers to ammonia where the hydrogen comes from green hydrogen or electrolysis. You can imagine other ways of getting hydrogen without CO₂ emissions as well, including if you sequestered the CO₂ from the steam methane reforming process, in which case sometimes that’s called blue ammonia.
Shayle Kann: Right. So, I guess the first point in ammonia world is there’s this simple theoretical solution which is just replace the hydrogen with clean hydrogen. Is there anything else that you would need to do to change the ammonia production process? If you are, I mean the hydrogen is hydrogen.
So, you’re not changing anything there. But it does potentially introduce some other changes, particularly if you’re using green hydrogen, hydrogen produced via electrolysis, and you don’t want to be operating that thing 24/7. Because as it stands right now, Haber-Bosch systems are operating 24/7.
That means steam methane reformers are operating 24/7, which means you don’t have to buffer the hydrogen very much. So, I guess one question is in the world where you just wanted to replace the hydrogen source and say you were going to be operating an electrolyzer at something less than 100% capacity, and so you did need to buffer that hydrogen.
From a techno-economic standpoint, how big a deal is that? How expensive would that be? Is it enough of a problem that it necessitates introducing entirely new technologies to replace Haber-Bosch?
Melissa Ball: Yeah, that’s a good question, Shayle. High level, I think it would be pretty impactful to the levelized cost of ammonia if we need to account for hydrogen storage on site in order to feed the ammonia synthesis loop continuously. So, if we take data from a couple sources, the levelized cost of hydrogen storage ranges from somewhere between 30 cents a kilo hydrogen to about a buck 20 a kilo hydrogen for compressed gas.
So, we put this in an ammonia basis, this is about five to 20 cents a kilo ammonia in hydrogen storage cost alone that accrues to the LCOA. And this is a pretty big chunk of your cost stack. And if we keep that same high level target, the long-term selling price of ammonia in the US between five to $600 a ton, you can see that this quickly can make a big impact.
And I’m sure we’re going to talk about this later, but one of the key drivers of decentralized ammonia production is to eliminate or reduce the transportation cost between where you produce ammonia and where you use ammonia. But if we need to buffer hydrogen, the value in reducing this transportation cost is perhaps eclipsed somewhat by hydrogen storage cost and really points to either trying to develop ammonia synthesis reactors that can ramp with renewables or looking at other technologies like batteries, but those will also have their own cost drivers.
Shayle Kann: Well, that’s a good segue to the other key point here, which is let’s break down the cost stack of ammonia production. Because I think the question here ultimately is can you produce ammonia without emissions cost competitively?
So, as it stands today, and then if you were to just swap out the hydrogen source, how much of the total levelized cost of ammonia comes from the CapEx? And within the CapEx, what are the big drivers there? And how much of it comes from the OpEx, which is predominantly energy cost, I presume?
Melissa Ball: Right. Let’s actually start on the OpEx part because I think that essentially gives a floor to the cost. And I think keeping in mind that five to $600 a ton target if that’s we’re trying to produce at the same, well we want to produce much lower in order to be able to sell at that cost target.
And so, if we think about the hydrogen piece and think about the OpEx, and you’re right, it is predominantly from the energy cost, then we have to think about what it would take in order to achieve a electricity consumption and cost that would feed into the ammonia price that would make it relatively cost competitive. And really that comes down to electricity cost.
And so, we see this a lot in TEAs, and there’s good reason. The thermodynamics of water electrolysis are what they are. We can’t do better than the thermodynamics. And so, in order to achieve an OpEx cost from energy, that doesn’t consume too much of your budget.
So, if we think again of that budget being much less than the five to $600 a ton, if you want to be cost competitive, we really need to be operating our electrolyzers with energy consumption that is nearing the thermodynamic potential or thermodynamic limit for hydrogen. And so, if we do that, and we just have an assumption of where those costs are today.
So, if we look at a TEA and we assume there’s 50 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen that goes into that electrolyzer, and we assume something of even 2 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity, you’re already from the hydrogen piece alone, you’re looking somewhere at the energy cost of about 26 a kilo of ammonia. And so, that’s already a pretty large allocation to your final budget. And so, that really highlights why capital cost then would be incredibly important.
Shayle Kann: Wait, that doesn’t sound that high to me. All things equal. $26 per kilo where you’re going to have a total selling cost of ammonia of four to $500. Oh, per ton. There it is. So, it’s actually 25, $2,600 per ton of hydrogen energy cost alone
Melissa Ball: So, in the example I just gave, so if you were saying 2 cents for energy cost and we were saying it was 50 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen input, that’s about 20 cents a kilo of ammonia or $210 per ton. So, almost half your budget, if we are just saying that budget is the selling cost of ammonia.
Shayle Kann: Right, so under those conditions, which is cheap electricity, now 50 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen, there are electrolyzers that can beat that, but not by a ton, but with cheap electricity. So, fairly aggressive assumptions there. You’re spending half of your total budget including all CapEx that’s amortized and all the rest of the OpEx on just the electricity going to producing the hydrogen.
Which speaks to why it’s such a challenge to get cost-competitive green hydrogen with a traditional Haber-Bosch system. I guess the other question then is there are a bunch of companies we’ve talked to and many others out there I’m sure that are introducing novel ammonia synthesis processes to replace Haber-Bosch.
And generally they’re doing so saying, okay, this is a better solution for green ammonia production for one reason or another. I guess the first question is why. What’s the premise on which you could imagine doing better than this century-old technology that seems to work very well? And is it just generally that we could do better or is it that we could do better specifically if we want to pair with electrolysis to produce the hydrogen?
Melissa Ball: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think on the new technical pathways that we’re seeing, the one that we are talking a lot about is if you think about air or nitrogen in your hydrogen as the input into these new reactors, we’ve seen a lot of different reactor types. So, electrochemical, photochemical, thermochemical.
And while they’re all early, probably the most advanced we’ve seen is the thermochemical approach of this decentralized thermochemical processes to produce ammonia. Some are actually just scaling down typical Haber-Bosch i.e just still having high temperature, high pressure. And then others on the new novel reactor design, what they’re working is having lower temperature, lower pressure, Haber-Bosch or ammonia synthesis loop reactors.
And so, there’s a couple reasons why. And one is really the pairing with renewables. So, we mentioned earlier that you need to be able to, if you want to have a green ammonia, you need to have green electrons. And so, in order to pair with renewables, if you’re a lower temperature pressure reactor when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, you could potentially ramp down your reactor and so you could follow the renewable cycle.
And then the other more TEA reason why people are working on this type of technology, this lower temperature pressure reactor is really from a just first principles perspective. You potentially can have capital and operating costs advantages by not operating at such high pressures and temperatures.
Shayle Kann: So, you mentioned decentralization, which is the other thread we should pull here a little bit. Greg, you’re our scaling guru. I mean, so the reason why it’s interesting in principle to scale down. Haber-Bosch reactors are huge, I should say today, right? There’s like 300 some of them in the world.
Which is crazy because they produce all the ammonia for all the fertilizer in the entire universe. They’re massive, massive plants. The trend has not been to scale down. The result of that, of course, is that then we ship ammonia all over the world and there’s a pretty big supply chain and it’s not cheap.
And so, the difference between the produced factory gate cost of ammonia and the delivered price to the farmer is large because of all the supply chain in between, all the transportation costs and the fact that ammonia is not easy to transport. It’s corrosive and dangerous, and so it requires special handling.
So, a lot I think of what we’ve seen is people are saying, “Okay, well if you could decentralize it, if you could economically produce it at small scale, then you can cut out a lot of that supply chain.” And importantly, the concept of economically producing at small scale, the argument that these companies make is that you don’t need to compete with the levelized cost of ammonia coming off of a traditional Haber-Bosch reactor.
You need to compete a little bit closer to the delivered price that a farmer is seeing. Now, we could debate whether that’s real or not, but it relaxes the cost constraint a little bit. So, the idea is make these things small.
But the question is can you make them small in any reasonable economic fashion? So, Greg, as we talk about the different components of the ammonia synthesis process, what do you think has the potential to scale down and what is really challenging to scale down?
Gregory Thiel: So, the classic chemical engineering way to think about this is something called the six-tenths rule. And the six-tenths rule is essentially a rule that reflects economies of scale that are inherent to many different types of chemical processes and related. And basically what it says is the bigger you make your plant, the bigger the capacity of the plant or piece of equipment is, the cheaper it becomes on a unit basis.
Mathematically the rule has stated something like this, the ratio of the cost of some equipment or process at two different scales or two different capacities is equal to the ratio of those capacities, some measure of capacity raised to the 0.6 power. The size of your equipment, the capacity of your equipment doubles or 10xs, the cost doesn’t double or 10x, it goes up by two to the 0.6 or 10 to the 0.6.
And sometimes that value is in 0.6, sometimes it’s a little bit less, sometimes it’s a little bit more. But this is an effect that is seen across many, many types of processes and pieces of equipment for various reasons. And there’s really just an enormous amount of historical data and examples showing this type of relationship again, again and again.
And so, if you’re trying to scale down, you are working against this six tenths rule. You’re getting this six tenths rule in reverse. Half the capacity isn’t half the cost, and 10th of the capacity isn’t a 10th the cost, it’s worse than that. But a lot of people will point to something like electrolysis that’s a little bit more modular, at least the core cells and stacks and so forth.
It’s something that maybe shouldn’t have so much of that economies of scale effect. So, at the end of the day, if you’re trying to scale down a green Haber-Bosch plant, maybe you’ll be able to do okay on the core parts of the electrolysis side of the equation here, the cells and stacks and so forth. But the ammonia synthesis loop and the other kind of more conventional chemical engineering type pieces of equipment, those bits will be tougher.
Shayle Kann: What about the air separation unit? That’s often it’s like the forgotten part of this system. Often I find people, it’s sort of assumed, so you got to get the nitrogen, so you’re going to do an ASU. But as we’ve talked about before in a bunch of different contexts, ASUs are not things that scale down super economically either, right?
Gregory Thiel: Yep, great point. You can get them at many, many different scales from small to world scale. And you see some big economies of scale effects there, so hard to scale down.
Shayle Kann: So, I want to move on to e-Methane in a second. But before we do, I guess here’s the question at the end of the day. What would a new production process of one kind or another have to look like in order to change the world here?
What would be revolutionary enough that you can imagine getting green ammonia, clean ammonia at commodity gray ammonia prices? Is it as simple as really, really cheap clean hydrogen? It may be just that simple. But is there anything else that you can imagine would be a game changer here?
Melissa Ball: No, I’ve thought a lot about this question and really trying to think about one miracle that would make this happen. And I think where I am at is that yes, I think the hydrogen is certainly a huge part of the levelized cost, I think from a CapEx and also from an energy perspective. So, I think you need both cheap energy and you need cheap CapEx.
I think also what we were just saying about the nitrogen generation unit, if we’re going to have these decentralized smaller productions, the nitrogen generation is a sensitivity at small scale. And so, if you said, what’s one big miracle?
One thing I was thinking about was if you could have a air as your input as opposed to actually eliminating the nitrogen generation completely. That coupled with the cheap electrons and also the cheap CapEx for the hydrogen electrolyzer could be game changer for ammonia.
Shayle Kann: Let’s move on to e-methane. So, sort of a different context here, but I think people can appreciate why. So, the idea here is to produce synthetic methane. And that has obvious massive benefits if you could do it economically and with low embodied emissions.
Because we’ve got all of this infrastructure in the world that we have built up for natural gas. If you could just use that infrastructure without making any changes whatsoever, you produce the same molecule, you ship it around, you use it in all the same end uses, like you’ve solved so many of the problems that all zero carbon alternatives and low carbon alternatives to things like natural gas face.
So, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could do that? And in principle, we can do that. Methane is CH four, it’s a carbon in four hydrogens. All we need is a source of carbon that is not dug up from underground, and then we need a source of clean hydrogen. We put them together somehow, which you’re about to tell me how, and we get our methane.
So, feels really attractive. And indeed there’s a bunch of folks working on it. I think our question is what would that production process really have to look like? And this is where the TEA comes into play in a significant fashion. So, first, Greg, walk me through how do you get synthetic methane?
Gregory Thiel: Right. So, kind Haber-Bosch, the reactions here, the core reaction, the core chemistry has been known for over a century. And the basic way that it works is if you want to make it from CO₂ at least, you start with CO₂ and you add about four molecules of hydrogen for one molecule of CO₂. And you make one molecule of methane, a bunch of water, which is say two molecules of water and a bunch of heat.
And so, from a whole of process perspective here, you need to get a source of CO₂, which might come from some industrial source, it might come from a biogenic source, it might come from the air. And you have to go through some CO₂ capture process to get that to be pure CO₂.
And then you want to get your hydrogen, which in this e-methane case would be coming from electrolysis. And so, you’d take water and split that into hydrogen and oxygen. Again, combine those two in that kind of four to one ratio, and you get your methane, your water and a lot of heat.
And I mean, like you said, the upside is really attractive if you could get all this to work out because you’ve got that huge transportation distribution network and storage too. I mean, the largest source by far of energy storage that we have today is in the form of gas storage.
Shayle Kann: So, super attractive. And if you could do it economically, of course. And actually from a technical standpoint, my understanding is the synthesis process is known and commercial already, basically, right?
Gregory Thiel: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, you get pretty good conversion, which is to say you can convert pretty much all of your CO₂ into methane. You get great selectivity, which is to say all of your carbon from your CO₂ goes to methane, not to some other thing that you don’t necessarily want.
And the reactor conditions are pretty mild, hundreds of sea and reasonable pressures. And in fact, this kind of methanation process, as you said, is used today albeit with slightly different feedstocks in coal to gas processes where you may be in areas of the world that don’t have natural gas but need it, but have large coal supplies.
Shayle Kann: Sounds great. What’s the catch?
Gregory Thiel: The catch is the economics. And the biggest catch of all of the catches in the economics is the hydrogen. And so, if you stack up the costs for making methane according to the reactions that we just talked through. In the best case, you need something like half a kilo of hydrogen per kilo of methane.
And so, if we looked to a wonderful version of the future where we get to the kind of magic $1 per kilogram hydrogen mark that is on the DOE’s roadmap and many others, just that hydrogen cost alone would be equal to $10 per MMBtu of gas. And so, compare that at least again in the US context to something like the Henry Hub price, which in the last 10 years has been as low as the buck and a half per MMBtu and has spiked higher and gotten close to $10 per MMBtu. But still, nominally in this kind of two to four or $5 per MMBtu range, just the hydrogen alone is doubling to five X in that benchmark.
Shayle Kann: And that’s with dollar per kilogram hydrogen, which is a long-term goal, but we’re nowhere near that today in terms of clean hydrogen. So, what would it look like if it was even $2 per kilogram hydrogen then it’s $20 for MMBtu. I assume is linear in that way.
And again, that’s just the input cost of the hydrogen, not to mention the input cost of the CO₂, the CapEx that you have to amortize. I mean, speaking of which though, input cost of CO₂, how much does that matter? Because you can imagine a wide range of costs there. You could do, as you said, you could get it from point source.
So, say you’re doing point source capture from an industrial facility or something and maybe you cite it there and you get your CO₂ input for, I don’t know, $50 a ton or something like that. Or on the other end of the spectrum, you could imagine you’re doing direct air capture at today’s direct air capture costs and you’re paying $1,000 a ton or at least high hundreds of dollars a ton. Do those move the needle as much as the hydrogen or not as much?
Gregory Thiel: Not as much. But like you say, there’s a wide array of sources that you could get this CO₂ from. And of course from a carbon accounting perspective, where you get your CO₂ matters. But back to the kind of economic picture here, again, best case from the chemistry is something like 2.75 kilograms of CO₂ per kilogram of methane.
So, thinking back on an MMBtu to you basis, if you want to get the good CO₂ from the air and we hit all our hopes and targets of getting to that magic $100 per ton of CO₂ number, best case scenario, perfect yields $100 a ton, CO₂, that’s six bucks in MMBtu. So, again, even the CO₂ by itself is blowing your budget, so it’s tough.
Shayle Kann: So, I guess the question again here then. So, you can imagine how with any reasonable set of assumptions with today’s costs of hydrogen, in today’s cost of CO₂ or even the next few years costs of both, it’s hard to picture producing synthetic methane. Again, we haven’t even talked about the CapEx here. But it’s hard to imagine producing synthetic methane below something in the twenties of dollars per MMBtu, perhaps thirties of dollars per MMBtu.
That’s obviously way higher than Henry hub prices for natural gas generally. It’s not necessarily that much higher than RNG prices though, which is an interesting thing. Renewable natural gas is, we’ve talked about it before on this podcast a while ago, but it’s a weird market. It’s not a tiny market. It’s actually been pretty attractive.
There’s been a bunch of M&A in that space and so on. There’s some incentives that drive that. But you do see selling prices for RNG, least some types of RNG, really low CO₂ embedded RNG that are in those $20 per MMBtu type of range. So, I think you can squint and find a market for synthetic methane in that price range.
But obviously the promised land of making a big difference on a global basis, I think requires something substantially better. And so, the question is, what if anything, can you do to drive better economics for synthetic methane production? And again, does it come down to, in this case, super-duper cheap hydrogen, super-duper cheap CO₂?
Gregory Thiel: Well, I think one thing we haven’t talked about a little bit here is the efficiency of this process. I mentioned that the core reaction produces a lot of heat. And so, if you were to make one of these plants today with a good electrolyzer, we mentioned this kind of 50, excuse me, 50 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen type energy consumption for the electrolyzer. If you used something like that and did this kind of fairly standard methanation process, the total efficiency of the process kind of comes in around 50% ballpark.
And about half of those losses of the 50% of the energy that you lose are in the electrolysis and about half is in the methanation step because that methanation reaction, like I said, makes a lot of heat. And so, there’s a hint in that thermodynamics that tells you, well, maybe there’s something we can do here. And so, to get back to your question, how do you get around this?
Yeah, the first thing, first and foremost is truly, truly low cost CO₂ and hydrogen/electricity. Maybe that’s geologic hydrogen, maybe it’s high purity point source biogenic CO₂. Maybe it’s doing biogas upgrading where you have the CO₂ and the methane right there in a mix for you. But the other thing you can do here is go hard after the efficiency.
And so, can you find ways to do it? And folks are arguing this. Really, really tight heat recovery, use high temperature electrolyzers that maybe can use some of the heat that you give off in that methanation step. Push the efficiency of the electrolyzers higher and really find a way to integrate those processes very, very tightly, so you can use all of the heat inside the system.
Shayle Kann: But at the end of the day, I mean, is all that stuff kind of marginal compared to just the thermodynamics you were describing before of look, your input cost of hydrogen and CO₂ is going to make it such that unless you have a market that can stomach a price of synthetic methane in the tight teens or twenties of dollars per MMBtu, you just can’t beat that basically.
Gregory Thiel: It’s really hard. If you’re going to try to do kind of run-of-the-mill, methanation power to gas, high capacity factor, no special scenarios, no special markets, no edge cases, yeah, it’s really hard. And so, I think again, that challenge kind of comes down to finding these cases where you can push the envelope a little bit.
I mean, one other thing that comes to mind here is flexible or really, really cheap CapEx that allows you to kind of minimize the penalty of intermittent operation. So, if we know that a dollar a kilogram hydrogen doesn’t work and 2 cent electricity is not enough, can we find scenarios where we have, and folks are doing this as well.
Machines that can do more than one thing and take advantage of short periods of very low zero negatively priced electricity and make some methane out of it and get something out of that, but the rest of the time do something else with a CapEx. So, you’re looking for those kinds of scenarios, but again, like you say, if you’re doing these really run-of-the-mill methanation, high uptime, just make power to gas? Boy, does thermodynamics make it tough.
Shayle Kann: All right, so having spent all of this time on the techno-economics of both ammonia production and synthetic methane production, I guess I’m curious for each of you what your key takeaways are at this point and general outlook on both of these spaces. Mel, maybe I’ll go to you first.
Melissa Ball: Yeah, sure. I think when we started looking at ammonia and doing our own research, our own techno-economic modeling, I think one of the surprises was really how much transportation was a part of the levelized cost and the contribution from transportation. So, I know we talked about earlier the different modes of transport of ammonia.
We do it today. Whether it’s the United States has a very large 2,000-mile pipeline that runs straight from Louisiana all the way to the Corn Belt. And I think from our analysis, what we realize is that again, that five to $600 a ton selling price, about maybe 20, 25% of that is transportation.
So, there is some budget even within the US for these decentralized approaches. I would say that’s essentially whatever technology that they are developing, that would be your allowed budget for if sizing down your CapEx in terms of, again, those economies of scale losses. And then thinking about that in the context of that 25% of potentially eliminated transportation costs.
I think that was a really big takeaway for myself. And then also outside the United States, a lot of what we said for ammonia certainly can be different. Because for Haber-Bosch, the main sensitivity is natural gas prices. So, where natural gas prices are expensive, that will have effect on the ammonia price.
And then also it’s not distribution across the world can also be much more expensive. And so, I think that transportation cost is certainly one that I, as a value prop for decentralization, it makes sense. But still with what we’ve talked about earlier, the hydrogen piece, it is really, and then I think cheap electrons, those two really are going to be part of the solution or part of the unlock for green ammonia.
And then we also mentioned also, I think if you could design a reactor that potentially could handle oxygen from either catalytic perspective, this is where oxygen can be a concern. So, catalyst styling or corrosion in your sin loop. I think that that could also potentially have an effect or a positive effect on these more decentralized alternative approaches to Haber-Bosch.
Shayle Kann: All right, Greg, your key takeaways?
Gregory Thiel: If you want to make a synthetic fuel, if it’s going to be a hydrocarbon, you do need a source of carbon and the source of that CO₂ carbon, CO₂ matters from a carbon economic perspective. But from a cost perspective, the thing that matters is number one, the hydrogen, number two, the hydrogen, and number three, the hydrogen.
Shayle Kann: All right, that’s a good takeaway. Let’s find a way to make super cheap, super clean hydrogen. Some other things may fall into place, may be insufficient in other places, but it sure would be a good unlock for some of this stuff. Greg and Mel, thank you so much for coming back on and doing this deep dive with me. Thanks for having us.
Gregory Thiel: Thanks for having us.
Melissa Ball: Thanks for having us.
Shayle Kann: Greg Thiel is the managing Director of technology, and Melissa Ball is the associate director of technology, both at EIP with me. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to Latitudemedia.com for links to today’s topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures.
Prelude backs visionaries, accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at preludeventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Woldorff, mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Marquand, theme song by Sean Marquand. I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst.
