Nitrogen energy economy?13 Nov 2021 17:40
'Chemists discover new way to harness energy from ammonia'
"A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels.
The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases—rather than requires—energy, was reported Nov. 8 in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
"The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy," explains Christian Wallen, an author of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UW-Madison chemist John Berry. "It's not a great economy because we burn hydrocarbons, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We don't have a way to close the loop for a true carbon cycle, where we could transform carbon dioxide back into a useful fuel."
To move toward the United Nations' goal for the world to become carbon-neutral by 2050, scientists must consider environmentally responsible ways to create energy from elements other than carbon, and the UW-Madison team is proposing a nitrogen energy economy based on interconversions of nitrogen and ammonia."
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-chemists-harness-energy-ammonia.html