Debunking The Myth: Ammonia Is A Bad Way to Transport Hydrogen For Energy

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Last Updated on: 18th March 2025, 08:24 pm

Ammonia’s hydrogen promise is like trying to use a funnel as a soup bowl — a lot of it will end up on your clothes. Enthusiasts tout ammonia (NH₃) as a magic hydrogen carrier, conveniently sidestepping the small problem that converting it back into useful hydrogen is inefficient, expensive, and wasteful. This isn’t a small hiccup, it’s an energy hemorrhage.

Yes, ammonia is a well-known industrial chemical with an existing supply chain, and yes, it contains a lot of hydrogen. But unless you plan on running engines directly on ammonia (which has its own set of problems), you need to crack it back into hydrogen for fuel cells or other applications. And that’s where the entire premise collapses.

Cracking ammonia to extract hydrogen is a costly, energy-intensive, and loss-heavy process. The U.S. Department of Energy (2023) finds that ammonia cracking loses 30-40% of its energy, making it an absurdly inefficient hydrogen carrier compared to alternatives. Adochiei et al. (2023) confirm this, showing ammonia’s round-trip efficiency is as low as 20–30%, significantly worse than liquid hydrogen or even some liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). If you’re planning a future based on ammonia, you’re baking in huge energy losses right from the start.

That means that at realistic costs of $6 per kg for hydrogen at the beginning of the process, hydrogen would cost $20 to $30 per kg. That’s 10 or more times the cost per gigajoule of LNG imports. Getting ammonia imports to be merely a lot more expensive than LNG requires $1 per kg hydrogen, which is clearly not happening except with dirt cheap natural gas and unabated steam reformation on conventional natural gas fields. That’s not a climate solution.

Using ammonia as a fuel directly (rather than cracking it) is another nonstarter. Burning ammonia produces nitrogen oxides (NOx), which are major air pollutants. According to Valera-Medina et al. (2018), NOx emissions from ammonia combustion are not trivial and would require expensive after-treatment systems. Unlike hydrogen combustion, which mainly produces water vapor, ammonia burning throws in some air pollution for good measure.

The European Commission (2022) evaluated ammonia’s economics and found cracking ammonia adds significant costs to the hydrogen supply chain. Hydrogen made from ammonia is simply more expensive than producing hydrogen locally. The push to make ammonia a global hydrogen carrier assumes cheap green ammonia production, low-cost transport, and efficient cracking, all of which are far from reality today.

Bloomberg Green (Khan, 2023) also highlights ammonia’s safety risks — leakage concerns, toxicity, and handling complexity — issues that further drive up costs. If hydrogen’s economic viability is already questionable, ammonia makes it worse.

The push for ammonia as a hydrogen carrier often comes with a false dilemma: either we use ammonia, or we have no viable hydrogen transport solution. This ignores the reality that transporting hydrogen for energy is just  a bad idea compared to building lots of wind, solar, storage and transmission, with HVDC bringing what energy is needed from outside of countries and providing geographical hedging for energy generation.

Ammonia as a hydrogen carrier is a bad idea wrapped in infrastructure hype. It loses energy at every step, adds unnecessary costs, and introduces new safety and environmental risks. There are better clean energy solutions than hydrogen. If you’re investing in ammonia-to-hydrogen schemes except for making fertilizer, be prepared to spill a lot of your soup on your pants.

References

• Adochiei, F. C., Stroe, D. I., & Christensen, A. B. (2023). Challenges in ammonia as a hydrogen carrier: Energy efficiency and conversion losses. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 48(12), 5897–5913.
• Valera-Medina, A., Xiao, H., Owen-Jones, M., David, W. I., & Bowen, P. J. (2018). Ammonia for power: A review on its prospects, technologies, and challenges. Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, 69, 63–102.
• Qiu, Y., Wang, L., Zhang, X., & Ding, Y. (2021). Comparative life-cycle analysis of hydrogen carriers: Ammonia, liquid hydrogen, and LOHCs. Energy Reports, 7, 3950–3962.
• European Commission. (2022). Ammonia as a Hydrogen Carrier: Technical and Economic Barriers. Brussels: European Union.
• U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). (2023). Hydrogen Storage and Transportation: Evaluating Ammonia’s Role. Washington, DC: DOE.
• Khan, B. (2023, July 15). Ammonia’s hydrogen potential faces serious efficiency and safety challenges. Bloomberg Green.