Startup Series: Unlocking Ammonia as Energy with Amogy

Energy

May 23

Dr. Seonghoon Woo is CEO and co-founder at Amogy. Amogy is building technology to unlock ammonia's potential as a clean energy fuel source for transportation and beyond. About a year ago, they raised a Series B of funding led by SK Innovations, with backers including Temasek, Aramco Ventures, Mitsubishi, DCVC, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, Mitsui OSK Lines, and others.

Ammonia is a workhorse chemical in modern society. It's one of the most produced chemicals in the world today, and it's used primarily as the foundation of the nitrogen fertilizer industry, as a transport vessel for nitrogen. Chemically, ammonia is NH3, so in addition to nitrogen, it contains hydrogen. And hydrogen as we know has a strong potential as a low to zero emissions fuel source, depending on how it's produced.

But hydrogen is challenging to transport. Ammonia, therefore, also has the potential to be a transport vessel for hydrogen as a power source, and ammonia supply chains are already mature today. Amogy's unique innovation lies in cracking ammonia into hydrogen at the point of power generation and then powering vehicles via hydrogen fuel cells. They are targeting ocean shipping as most major companies seek solutions to decarbonize their supply chains.

Episode recorded on May 9, 2024 (Published on May 23, 2024)

In this episode, we cover:

[02:21]: Dr. Woo’s background and journey to founding Amogy
[05:16]: Co-founder roles and decision-making at Amogy
[07:16]: The company’s impressive Series B funding round and key investors
[09:45]: Overview of Amogy and its technology: converting ammonia to energy
[11:14]: Importance of ammonia in global food production and fertilizer
[15:07]: Ammonia as a hydrogen carrier and its applications beyond fertilizer
[17:03]: Ammonia production processes, challenges of transportation and storage
[19:47]: Amogy’s innovation to use ammonia as a fuel without combustion
[24:35]: Ammonia compared with other renewable fuels like methanol and batteries
[29:21]: Process and efficiency of converting ammonia to hydrogen on ships
[31:32]: Safety considerations for storing and transporting ammonia on ships
[34:40]: Amogy’s current traction and building the world's first 100% ammonia-powered vessel, a tugboat
[38:57]: Where Amogy is looking for help today
[42:07]: Future expansion of ammonia adoption in East Asia and globally

Cody Simms (00:00):
Today on my Climate Journey's Startup series, our guest is Dr. Seonghoon Woo, CEO and co-founder at Amogy. Amogy is building technology that intends to unlock ammonia's potential as a clean energy fuel source for transportation and beyond. They raised a series B of funding about a year ago led by SK Innovations, with a who's who of backers from industry and venture capital, including Temasek, Aramco Ventures, Mitsubishi, Marunouchi Climate Tech Growth Fund, DCVC, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, Mitsui OSK Lines and others.
(00:38):
Ammonia is a workhorse chemical in modern society. It's one of the most produced chemicals in the world today, and it's used primarily as the foundation of the nitrogen fertilizer industry, as a transport vessel for nitrogen. Chemically, ammonia is NH3, so in addition to nitrogen, it contains hydrogen as well. And hydrogen as we know has a strong potential as a low to zero emissions fuel source, depending on how the hydrogen is produced.
(01:09):
But hydrogen is challenging to transport. Ammonia, therefore, also has the potential to be a transport vessel for hydrogen as a power source, and ammonia supply chains are already mature today. Amogy's unique innovation is in cracking ammonia into hydrogen at the point of power generation, and then powering vehicles via hydrogen fuel cells. They're going to market targeting ocean shipping as most major companies are seeking solutions to decarbonizing how they transport goods through their supply chains. Seonghoon and I discuss all of this and more in a good amount of detail, but before we start, I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu (01:51):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (01:53):
And I'm Jason Jacobs, and welcome to my Climate Journey.
Seonghoon Woo (01:59):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (02:04):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries and opinions, to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Dr. Seonghoon Woo, welcome to the show.
Seonghoon Woo (02:20):
Thank you for having me.
Cody Simms (02:21):
We're going to go all into chemistry today. It's going to be so much fun, nitrogen, hydrogen, ammonia, obviously, all this stuff. But before we do that, why don't we start out with a bit of an introduction of you. Tell us a little bit about where you got the idea for Amogy and what work you were doing that led to the insight to start the company.
Seonghoon Woo (02:42):
Thank you for having me, and thank you for this opportunity today. So my name is Seonghoon Woo. I'm the co-founder and CEO of company Amogy, and going back to the journey, before starting the company, I myself was trained as an engineer. I went to MIT for my PhD program. It was not about the hydrogen or ammonia. My PhD program was more about the physics and semiconductor physics in particular. So after graduating from the MIT PhD program, then I worked in the semiconductor industry essentially for roughly five to six years of the time. Then I worked for IBM before starting company.
(03:19):
But of course, even if the area was different from what I'm doing right now, I've always been interested in the energy problem, so essentially, in the semiconductor industry, I was looking at the energy problem at the nanoscale. And then at the same time, I wanted to start something new where I can contribute my technical expertise to make the differences in the world, to drive the world positively in the immediate future.
(03:44):
That really got me to thinking about really starting a company and startups, and even if I didn't have any idea what that would actually mean, so I started being more interested, especially during the COVID in 2020 because I had more time, I really wanted to start doing something else. That's how I started thinking about starting a company, but I didn't have any specific topics myself because my expertise, again, was so different from what I'm doing, and also, my very particular specialties in the semiconductor area was essentially looking at the 20, 30 years of the development timeline.
(04:17):
From that point, probably mid 2020, I started reaching out to the people that I knew, especially from the MIT PhD program. So I got connected to our co-founder, so Amogy has four co-founders, so I got connected to three co-founders that had been here for a while, and a couple of them, especially our CTO, was working on the ammonia and hydrogen spaces directly.
(04:40):
And so I learned about hydrogen and hydrogen economy. Ammonia in particular was fascinating to me in the way that ammonia could be the solution to really solve the big problems we have in types of the economy. But of course, I didn't know deeply enough about this, ammonia, what we are doing today, but still, the idea or the technology itself was very interesting, intriguing to me. So that's how we essentially got together and got together to the point where we really were committing to starting a company. That was probably the end of 2020, and then, yeah, that was the beginning of Amogy essentially.
Cody Simms (05:16):
You all have been on a rapid pace since then. I'm really interested to hear, I love hearing from founders on how they ultimately decided, especially with four of you as co-founders, how you ultimately decided what roles to each take in the company. Looking at your background, you haven't built five or six companies in the past. You took the role of CEO of this thing. You didn't even have necessarily sector expertise in this space. How did you all divvy that up and figure that out?
Seonghoon Woo (05:46):
All of us, the four co-founders got the PhD from MIT, so we were all doctors and working at large organizations, myself for IBM, the other people for a company like Samsung or Shell, for example. And when we got together, you essentially have to divide roles so you can start a company, and to be honest, from the technical standpoint, even if I had PhDs and such but I really didn't know anything about ammonia, but the other people probably knew more about the ammonia and energy and how we can actually make this work. So probably the least amount of technical knowledge that I had on this particular field drove me to be taking this commercial or the fundraising side of the role.
(06:24):
But at the same time, for the founding period, I was the only one living in the US and the other three were actually living in Korea, so I was the one essentially going out to find a location, going out to really find investors in the beginning, and I think I was still really putting people together so that we can drive the momentum towards actually making the company. So we had a couple of discussions of course within all four of us, but discussions were natural to bring me to the CEO, really spending more than a hundred percent of time really finding the investors and the other people fully focusing on the technology and the development of technology so that we can really scale up quickly.
Cody Simms (07:04):
Well, you must be a quick learn because you all have raised a significant amount of money in a very short amount of time. Maybe share a little bit about the series B round that you raised, I guess about a year ago now.
Seonghoon Woo (07:16):
That's right. So the company today is roughly three and a half years old. During that three and a half years of the lifetime, we've raised $220 million of funding. Especially last year, roughly about a year ago, we raised a $150 million series B, which has really helped the company to start commercializing this technology. But yeah, among itself, we have raised substantial amount of the funding. We always appreciate the support from the investor and partners to really make that happen, but at the same time, we also realized that to truly develop technology like the technology that we're developing and also change the industry like the heavy industry or the shipping, you really, really need a large amount of capital to really make that happen. So this is also a good learning for us that we're going through as well.
Cody Simms (08:01):
Obviously, you can't measure a company's success by how much money it raises. You have to measure it by the business it builds, but in 2023, I think unless you've been living under a rock, everyone listening to the show knows that it was really hard to raise money in 2023. So congrats to you for pulling that together, and with a really impressive roster of investors who can contribute, I believe, not just capital, but also industry and sector awareness and support to your business. You've got SK Innovations out of Korea I believe. You've got Temasek out of Singapore. You've got Aramco. You've got the Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, DCVC, Mitsui OSK Lines, Marunouchi Climate Tech Growth Fund, Mitsubishi. You've got some heavy hitters around the table with you.
Seonghoon Woo (08:46):
Certainly, we are very fortunate to have amazing investors at the cap table. We also realized that truly make the meaningful impact in this heavy industry, you really have to collaborate. Without the collaboration, there's no way that a single startup, no matter what technology you have and how fast you can grow, you can never make the decolonization of the heavy to solve that. I mean, the big problem that we have to solve collectively, so that's why we are excited to have these shareholders of the cap table.
(09:12):
But as you mentioned in the beginning, I always think that Amogy is really at the beginning of its journey. We've grown to this size and to this scale for the last three and a half years, but the problem that we are targeting to solve, we have to solve like decolonization of the heavy industry have to be solved over several decades of time like 25 years ideally, until we reach 2050. So I always try to look at really the next five years and 10 years because that's the real timeline that we have to start achieving the goals that we have set in the beginning.
Cody Simms (09:43):
What is Amogy?
Seonghoon Woo (09:45):
Amogy first of all is a technology startup company, but we develop technology which is essentially converting ammonia to energy, so ammonia to electron. So that's how we got the name Amogy, Ammonia plus Energy. And just to give you a little bit of context of the ammonia, ammonia may be new to many people listening to this podcast. So ammonia is the second most produced chemical in the world today, so we use most of them as a fertilizer, so essentially, the fertilizer until 2024, but ammonia actually has very high energy density.
(10:21):
Ammonia, being NH3, not having the carbon, has high standard density among the non-carbon chemicals, even higher than the liquid hydrogen. While ammonia can be liquid at room temperature, hydrogen has to be cooled down to probably negative 250 Celsius. So because of the ease of the transportation and also the storage, ammonia also gives you the lowest price point at the point of use. So ammonia is really zero carbon high center density, and the most affordable fuel we could possibly use. However, there has not been technology converting this chemical to energy effectively and efficiently. So that's the technology Amogy is developing, Amogy is provided to the market for the first time.
Cody Simms (11:03):
For my own knowledge, what is the most produced chemical on Earth?
Seonghoon Woo (11:07):
I think that is also one of the fertilizers. I forgot. Sulfur derivative fertilizer, if I remember correctly.
Cody Simms (11:14):
Interesting. So potentially, if your answer there was correct, the two most produced chemicals on Earth are both for food production, are both used primarily for food production. Because I believe 80% of ammonia use today is to create nitrogen fertilizers. Is that true?
Seonghoon Woo (11:31):
A hundred percent. That is right. Probably more than 80% because ammonia essentially has been the backbone of the population growth over the last probably about a century. So the discovery of the mass production of the ammonia, which happened in the 1920s, really helped the population growth because now we can produce the food as much as needed.
Cody Simms (11:48):
Now, you described ammonia obviously by its chemical compound, NH3. As I understand it, when ammonia is produced, the nitrogen is just used atmospherically, you're just pulling nitrogen out of the air. The hydrogen is currently the challenge and subject today to a huge amount of investment to try to "green" hydrogen production. So the ability for ammonia to be a low emissions fuel, I believe would be dependent on ultimately the emissionality of the hydrogen that is used in that ammonia production. Is that correct?
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:12:04]
Seonghoon Woo (12:25):
Yeah, that is correct. As you said, ammonia is made out of feedstock, hydrogen and nitrogen. Nitrogen, we have 80% of nitrogen out of the air as you can accumulate really to provide the nitrogen to the ammonia production. But the hydrogen is probably the most important feedstock for the ammonia production. So as you noted now, I mean the green hydrogen or blue hydrogen, that is essentially what's making green ammonia and blue ammonia. But if you look at the hydrogen industry and the hydrogen production, so essentially hydrogen today is used for probably only two reasons. One is the ammonia production, the other is the petrochemical use case. Probably more than half of the hydrogen is now used in ammonia, which will I believe likely be the case moving forward as well as we become to use ammonia as a fuel. Ammonia is essentially from our standpoint, helping the hydrogen economy to really offer the opportunity to store that energy at the longer term and much more efficiently.
Cody Simms (13:28):
Most of hydrogen today is produced using natural gas, using steam methane reformation, but obviously with the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, there are now huge incentives for both electric hydrogen with the 45V tax credit I believe, and you called it blue hydrogen, which I believe really is natural gas produced hydrogen, but that has also carbon capture and sequestration attached to it, which also had an expansion of 45Q in the Inflation Reduction Act to allow for tax credits to go toward that method of producing hydrogen. So in both cases, trying to produce hydrogen that is essentially low emissions. Yes.
Seonghoon Woo (14:10):
100%. That is correct. But also at the same time, interestingly, if you look at the gigawatt or more than gigawatt scale, green or blue hydrogen project globally, which has been initiated, facilitated by the IRAs and other incentives and subsidy structures coming to the industry, probably more than half of these hydrogen projects buying products are ammonia instead of the hydrogen. Because ammonia, we today have the, I mean, off take market essentially as a fertilizer and also ammonia is offered as the fuel for power generation and also the shipping, so much bigger interest coming to ammonia for the fuel use cases, which is driving those green or blue hydrogen project towards the ammonia production. Essentially, ammonia is also taking the same advantage of the IRA and other 45V, 45Q incentives and subsidies because that's making the green and blue ammonia more economical and much cheaper so they can deploy to the market much more attractively.
Cody Simms (15:07):
I think of today, ammonia as largely being a transport vehicle for hydrogen and nitrogen. Is that the right way to think about it today?
Seonghoon Woo (15:17):
Ammonia, yeah, should be viewed as a hydrogen carrier today. I mean, this use case of ammonia is simply to transport ammonia to be used as a fertilizer, but as we think about the ammonia in the traditional landscape, ammonia is really the way to transport hydrogen to the longer distance and store it for the long duration so that you can effectively and cost-technologically use it.
Cody Simms (15:39):
What are the challenges of transporting hydrogen by itself?
Seonghoon Woo (15:43):
The biggest probably issue around hydrogen as a field is really transportation and storage because if you want to transport hydrogen at scale and also at high density, for example, if we want to liquefy the hydrogen to make it liquid so that you have so much of the hydrogen within the volume, but the liquefaction itself is energy intensive, so roughly 70% of the energy efficiency, so 30% of the energy is lowest there. And also even if you want to keep it cool, as cold as the negative 250 Celsius, there's always the boil of gas coming out it, so you will start losing hydrogen.
(16:20):
So because of all these complexities and also very expensive process you have to go through, you can actually see the numbers reflecting these complexities. For example, hydrogen phase produced at $3 or $2 per kilowatt gram basis at natural gas-based hydrogen. But if you look at the hydrogen price at the refueling station in California or Canada, you have to pay roughly around $20. So the gap between $3 production versus $20 retail price of the hydrogen at the refueling station really tells you how inefficient and expensive it is to store and transport hydrogen.
Cody Simms (16:55):
And is most ammonia produced on site at hydrogen production facilities so that you're not having to transport it at all?
Seonghoon Woo (17:03):
That's right, and that's essentially the benefit of producing ammonia on site to hydrogen because you don't have to go through the liquefaction, you don't have to deal with the hydrogen storage and transportation, but ammonia production is very efficient process, has been very well optimized over the last decade, so you can produce ammonia very quickly and efficiently from hydrogen.
Cody Simms (17:22):
And who are the primary ammonia suppliers and producers today?
Seonghoon Woo (17:26):
So essentially the biggest fertilizer companies are the primary producer, suppliers of the ammonia today. So in the United States here, the biggest one is probably the CF industry, the fertilizer producing company, and there are other companies such as LSB Industries and many others, probably manly based in Gulf Coast to Arabia where they have refineries because they have access to natural gas.
Cody Simms (17:48):
So they're setting up shop right next to a steam methane reformation plant that is breaking down natural gas into hydrogen.
Seonghoon Woo (17:56):
Exactly. Because of the IRA that is the first coming to the market. They are also setting up these blue and green ammonia facilities along the Gulf Coast area as well. But internationally, there are other companies like Yara based in Norway who is the largest ammonia produced [inaudible 00:18:12] I believe.
Cody Simms (18:12):
This I think is really showcasing hopefully for all listeners why there's so much investment going on into green hydrogen and blue hydrogen in the first place, which is if it's this huge of a factor in food production, everybody's got to eat. So how do we produce food that is lower emissions obviously is a huge use case and a huge driver of this investment into producing hydrogen in different ways. But what I'm hearing from you is if all this investment is already going into the hydrogen economy and this hydrogen is being turned into ammonia to create fertilizer and it's being done increasingly in lower emissions ways to create lower emissions ammonia, hey, can this low emission ammonia now be used for things in addition to fertilizer production? Is that the insight I guess that we should have as a takeaway here?
Seonghoon Woo (19:03):
100%. Yeah, that's really good summary of what we discussed for the last five to 10 minutes [inaudible 00:19:07] because as you said, I mean we have to use the existing use case of hydrogen, existing use case of ammonia, which is fertilizer where I mean more than half of the hydrogen is now used ammonia for the fertilizer, which is big area that we have to solve. But at the same time, if you want to think about using this chemical as a fuel, ammonia also offers the opportunity to use that as a fuel because the transportation and storage issue is not there like hydrogen for example. But the big question here is then how can you use ammonia as a fuel? Because if you look at the industry like heavy industry shipping or the heavy industry power generation, the primary method that we are generating power out of the fuel like the hydrocarbon is combustion.
(19:47):
You just burn the fuel, like heavy fuel in the shipping engines or the gasoline or diesel and the power generation or even coal. But ammonia unfortunately is not combustible, so there's no way that you can burn ammonia itself. The combustibility is very, very low, but of course you could burn ammonia together with the diesel, together with gasoline. Then you start generating greenhouse gas again. So here comes our novel technology, which really enables the use of the ammonia as a fuel while not combusting. So we developed that technology so that our customers in the heavy industry can start using ammonia as a fuel vitally while not generating the necessary greenhouse gases.
Cody Simms (20:28):
What your technology does is it essentially on site, on the ship, converts ammonia to hydrogen and then runs the hydrogen through a hydrogen fuel cell to power the ship. Am I understanding correctly?
Seonghoon Woo (20:40):
That's right. Our technology and the products includes the conventional hydrogen fuel cell. So from ship owner and operator perspective, you just fill ammonia to our essentially the engine, but we don't call it engine because we are not combusting. We call it just power pack, but you just fill ammonia into our power pack. Then we convert that to hydrogen and then directly to electricity, but essentially you see the electricity coming out of the product, so we call ammonia to power product. That's what we are building.
Cody Simms (21:09):
Before we get to specifically the conversion steps that you all do, just for our listeners and my own knowledge in a basic hydrogen fuel cell, this is an electrochemical transition. It's not combustion. You're not actually burning the hydrogen. You are separating H2 into individual hydrogen molecules and creating electromagnetic charges as a result of that. Is that correct?
Seonghoon Woo (21:31):
Yeah, electrochemical first, as you said, hydrogen fuel cell, conventional hydrogen fuel cell that we have in like Toyota Mirai or Hyundai Nexo that uses electrochemical process breaking the hydrogen and getting that combined with oxygen. So we generate the electricity, but that process is still part of the Amogy product as well. Amogy product we have ammonia to hydrogen conversion process before the fuel cell and the produce hydrogen goes to the fuel cells to generate power.
Cody Simms (21:58):
The ship themselves are then running off of electricity generated by the hydrogen fuel cell.
Seonghoon Woo (22:02):
That's right. That's right. Ship themselves. I mean, there are already a number of ships that, especially the European power shipping industry, where there are a number of electrified vessels using the digital electric generator essentially. So we can replace that or in the large vessels, we can replace the auxiliary generator, which is all these electron generator using [inaudible 00:22:22] today.
Yin Lu (22:23):
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ Collective here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(22:50):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (23:22):
And so it sounds like the problem you're solving for shipping is one, they don't have to buy incredibly giant lithium ion batteries to have electric shipping. They can use this hydrogen fuel cell methodology, but two, they don't have to deal with the complicated transportation of hydrogen itself to power their ships. They can use ammonia, which is a much more common commodity fuel source for them to pull into the ships, and then you'll convert it into hydrogen on-prem.
Seonghoon Woo (23:55):
That's right. Especially the second point that you mentioned. That's really the value that we are offering using our technology. I mean, hydrogen economy has been...
(24:03):
... our technology. The hydrogen economy has been tapped into probably longer than five years, especially in the country like Japan, Korea, East Asian countries, mainly they've looked into the hydrogen economy using the fuel cell plus hydrogen approach probably longer than five years. But that has really taken off mainly because from our standpoint, the difficulties around transportation and storage of hydrogen. But we are offering a solution where we can transport and store the hydrogen not as a hydrogen but as ammonia, but our technology converts that all the way back to the electricity.
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Cody Simms (24:35):
Today shipping mostly uses this really nasty heavy fuels that are heavily emittive. We talked about batteries as a potential option. We talked about pure hydrogen as a potential option. I guess methanol is another option that I hear thrown around as a way to decarbonize shipping. Is that a viable pathway for ships to take as well?
Seonghoon Woo (24:54):
That's right. From our standpoint, of course, ammonia is a very, very high potential and we believe ammonia is going to be the dominant fuel in the shipping industry in the next two to three decades. But still, we really need all the different energy needs to truly make the transition happening in the 25 years. So battery should be an option. So there are good vessels or ships which may be better to take battery like the short distance like ferries, high-speed ferries where battery may be able to provide enough energy and also recharging is possible. And also, same for hydrogen and also methanol ammonia. But ammonia really has the high simply because ammonia can be produced at large scale very cheaply.
(25:33):
But speaking of the methanol, methanol is a great option as well because if you can make the green methanol, then there are existing methanol engines which have been available longer than 10 years in the maritime industry because if you look at the methanol-carrying vessels, which we call methanol carrier, they have been using methanol engine longer than 10 years because it's better for them to use the cargo as a fuel so that they don't have to have the separate cargo for heavy fuel oil. Technology is there and the way to store is there and as long as green methanol is available should be able to provide essentially the net-zero solution for the shipping. So there are already companies such as Merck, which is one of the largest shipping company in the world, have built and have ordered a sizeable scale of the methanol-powered vessel, which we are excited about as well.
Cody Simms (26:24):
So methanol like hydrogen and therefore like ammonia obviously can be produced in green ways or in fossil fuel-derived ways. And we as a society are hoping and helping both of those supply chains are able to move to a green methodology obviously as quickly as possible. What are the different use cases or reasons why ammonia would be favored over methanol, or I guess what are the reasons you think that the ammonia-based solution might mature more quickly or ultimately scale better?
Seonghoon Woo (26:57):
So if you look at the shipping industry today, we use roughly 200 billion ton of the fuel every year. But if you want to change the fuel to renewable fuel, because the renewable fuel has at the very best half of the energy density of the heavy fuel oil, you essentially need 400 million ton of the fuel or more than that every year. Then what is the field which can be produced at that scale while maintaining the low cost?
(27:22):
So that's the primary challenge when I see the methanol and industry sees the methanol because if you think about the green methanol, you need the carbon source essentially, which could be coming from technology like direct air capture or the biogenics resources, but using that resource of the carbon and producing the green methanol at hundreds of the million ton of the skill is going to be very, very expensive.
(27:48):
And can we achieve that within the next two to three decades? That's the primary challenge when it comes to fuel. I mean, producing green ammonia or blue ammonia at the scale of the hundreds of the million ton is not as challenging because if you look at the green methanol and green ammonia project already, I mean, post-feed we have probably more than 10 MTA, 10 million tons by 27 and more than hundred million ton pre-feed and feed stage, meaning it's much more economical to produce ammonia scale. That also gives the industry the help that this skill can be available at the scale that the industry needs while the economics is making sense.
Cody Simms (28:27):
I suppose a little bit unspoken in what you just articulated as well is there's already a ton of incentive to produce green ammonia for food production. If you can piggyback off of that, you can benefit from that scaled production that is already likely to happen.
Seonghoon Woo (28:45):
That is something that has to happen. But I'm not sure how much incentive from the agriculture industry, which drives them to decarbonize the fertilizer itself. But there is existing off-take market, which is the agriculture industry and the fertilizer market as I mentioned. Certainly, there are drivers in that industry and also there is probably more drivers in heavy transportation heavy industry such as maritime shipping or even power generation. So they have the common ground around the ammonia as a fuel. So that really is getting even more highlighted in both the industry, therefore, there's more momentum coming to the fuel side as well.
Cody Simms (29:21):
Super helpful background. Let's go back to the ship. So you've got a ship, you've got tanks of ammonia. Ammonia is not as energy-dense by volume, so you actually need a pretty significant amount of it. I don't know if that's correct or not. And then you have this converter on the ship that then converts to hydrogen and runs to a fuel cell. What is the energy requirement of that conversion process?
Seonghoon Woo (29:44):
First of all, the fuel space point, yes, ammonia is not as energy-dense as the conventional shipping fuel probably about 30 to 40%. However, ammonia still has the high standard density among the renewables even than the liquid hydrogen. So I don't think the ship owners and operator will occupy the more spaces for fuel. Instead, they'll likely be doing more of the refueling. So the bunkering activity is going to be twice or three times more frequent. That's why the bunkering is also important.
(30:11):
But going to the efficiency front, so our technology takes ammonia and first converts to hydrogen, but produces the hydrogen goes to the fuel cell directly without having the hydrogen storage. So the overall process from ammonia-in electricity-out is roughly 40% efficient, but that includes the 50% efficient hydrogen fuel cell. So the pre-process as well as all the balance of plants gives you roughly 80% efficiency, which is very high.
Cody Simms (30:40):
What are you using to power that conversion process?
Seonghoon Woo (30:43):
Ammonia conversion to hydrogen, which is called "ammonia cracking" or "ammonia reforming" is the endothermic reaction. So you need the heat source to make that happen. So in our case, we use the combustion of the hydrogen, meaning you take 100 ammonia and produce roughly 100% of hydrogen. Then roughly 20 out of 100 hydrogen goes back to the combustor. So you do the combustion of the hydrogen to generate the heat necessary for the ammonia cracking.
Cody Simms (31:13):
Do you have some catalyst to get it started?
Seonghoon Woo (31:16):
So our ammonia cracking technology is a thermocatalytic chemical process. So within the catalyst bed, the multiple beds, we have catalyst material, which is essentially the core technology, innovative technology that we developed is cracking ammonia hydrogen very efficiently at a low temperature.
Cody Simms (31:32):
I want to understand some of the challenges you have in potentially scaling it. Ammonia can be toxic though, so can heavy shipping fuel, I'm sure. Are there any concerns with the storage of the ammonia on the ship? We've all accidentally breathed in ammonia in science class, you can feel it coming through your nose. What are the requirements around being around it that are important for the folks on the ships to be aware of?
Seonghoon Woo (31:56):
Ammonia is a toxic substance. The waste shouldn't be underestimated so to speak because ammonia, I mean, at the certain concentration or higher can really kill the people and kill I mean, really the living elements are out there. However, ammonia from the storage and transportation perspective has been stored and transported over the course of the last essentially a hundred years. And there are roughly 20 dedicated ammonia carriers globally. There are roughly 500 carriers vessels capable of carrying ammonia as well. It's relevant to all these new discussion about ammonia as a fuel. So storage and transportation from the safety management perspective and the regulatory perspective has been very well-established and developed over the course of that timeline. So we can essentially piggyback on these existing knowledge of using and storing, transporting ammonia.
Cody Simms (32:46):
Another question I have on challenges is we talked about obviously the chemical makeup of ammonia is NH3, you're using the hydrogen to power the fuel cell of the ship, but you have this byproduct of nitrogen. How do you avoid the creation of nitrous oxide coming out of your process, which, of course, is by itself a different very powerful greenhouse gas?
Seonghoon Woo (33:10):
Our process within the ammonia to hydrogen cracking process, one thing that I have to emphasize is we're not burning ammonia. So if you burn ammonia, combust ammonia, then you may be able to avoid the CO2 because there's no CO2 there. But there's going to be massive amount of NOx, N-O-X, N2O coming out of the system. Then you generate even worse I mean, [inaudible 00:33:32] because NOx is probably 20, 30 times more harmful compared to CO2. But again, within our process we are not combusting ammonia, so there's no NOx coming out of it. It's only the nitrogen, which is essentially the air, 80% of the air, nitrogen coming out of the system, which is not making any impact the environment.
Cody Simms (33:51):
Tell us about your current traction. Where are you in terms of ships on the water, in terms of commercial partnerships. Any of the milestones that you think our listeners should know about?
Seonghoon Woo (34:01):
As I said, the company is three and a half years old, but in the very first two years of the company, we really focused on the demonstrating scalability and viability of technology field because from the beginning, we always knew that ammonia is best suited for heavy industry like the shipping. So we wanted to demonstrate that our technology is suitable for those heavy industries. In the first two years, we demonstrated really the world first ammonia power zero-emission drone, tractor, truck like the John Deere truck powered by ammonia in 2022 and Freightliner Cascadia, the semi-truck class, a truck powered by ammonia in 2023, which we demonstrated successfully. It's really demonstrate the scalability.
(34:40):
Speaking of shipping in the real heavy industry, after closing series B last year in 2023, we've been actively working on building really the world's first 100% ammonia-powered vessel, which we're actively working on today. And we are now getting close to the final commissioning phase of this vessel, which is the tugboat that we are going to demonstrate probably in the summer 2024. So we will demonstrate the first 100% ammonia-powered zero-carbon vessel ourselves in summer. But that's really the beginning of our introduction of technology into the commercial shipping.
(35:15):
For example, we recently announced a couple of partnership then also commercial deals with our all customers, one of the customers called Hanwha Ocean. Hanwha Ocean used to be DSME, world's third, the largest shipyard based in Korea, where they're building probably the first ammonia-powered ammonia carrier where we are going to provide our technology as a primary propulsion system.
(35:37):
Looking at the next couple of years, the company is really transitioning from the R&D and demo phase to commercial pilot phase, which we're very much excited about.
Cody Simms (35:47):
And do you view the business as being that of IP licensing or are you producing powertrains for these ships?
Seonghoon Woo (35:55):
We envision Amogy will likely be doing both of these different strategies in the beginning, probably for the first four to five years because first of all, we are ...
(36:03):
... the beginning probably for the first four to five years. Because first of all, we ourselves want to of course demonstrate the technologies working for the vessel, but also wants to demonstrate that this technology is very much manufacturable. So that's what we are essentially going through in our very first manufacturing site, which we started building in Houston. So our first manufacturing in Houston to be available towards the end of this year, we'll be manufacturing the first few units, probably first 10s of units, 100 of units so that we can demonstrate the manufacturability. But in the longer term we have really great manufacturing resources, especially in the shipping such as Global Shipyard that we already started working together. So the technology licensing is certainly an option that we are actively discussing with our partners.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:36:04]
Cody Simms (36:43):
And do you see the company playing a role in the green ammonia value chain in the future as well, helping to incentivize more production of green ammonia somehow?
Seonghoon Woo (36:54):
100%. So people talk a lot about the chicken and egg problems in heavy industries. Even if you have large scale of the green hydrogen or green ammonia versus the use case, so that's the question that people want to have the answer on. So we are providing that answer to the industry, that once we have the large scale green or blue ammonia, our technology can easily take those ammonias as a fuel and generate the power at the larger scale. So we will be accelerating the production and also adoption of the green and blue ammonia in the heavy industry like the shipping.
(37:25):
We already have partnerships with ammonia production companies as well, such as Yara, one of the largest ammonia producers based in Norway. They are actually providing green ammonia, having their first green ammonia to our tugboat project so that we can demonstrate the green ammonia power tugboat in the summer where we are using those partnerships so that we can work together for our customers so that they can enable well to build the conversation from the beginning.
Cody Simms (37:52):
I mean, to some extent your adoption of your technology from Amagi's perspective, it doesn't really matter if it's green ammonia or it's ammonia produced using steam methane reformation. Your hope, and it sounds like you're banking on the fact that the customers adopting your ships are doing so because they want a low carbon fuel source powering their ships anyway, and thus are likely to do it if they see a pathway to using green ammonia to fuel these ships.
Seonghoon Woo (38:21):
Exactly right. Our customers care because the primary reason of using ammonia as a fuel is truly reduce the emission and truly reach the net-zero. It's not just our customer. We also care about that a lot as well. That's why from early days, companies started partnering with a company like Yara or Saudi Aramco, which already produced blue ammonia in Japan and other companies in the US such as LSB Industries. Because, we also believe our technology has to be run by green ammonia or the blue ammonia to give the benefit that we're intending to achieve together.
Cody Simms (38:57):
Where do you need help for those listening who are excited by what you're doing? Are you looking for partnerships with other shipping lines? Are you looking for help from ports? Are you looking for help on the supply chain? On the hydrogen side? Where are the areas where you're looking for the most support right now?
Seonghoon Woo (39:14):
We are looking for every one of them you just mentioned. As we are building this industry, using ammonia as a fuel, we are also realizing that it needs a lot more collaboration. It needs a lot more initiative between many different stakeholders in the industry of across the value chain, from the regulator and fuel producers, and also technology company like ours and infrastructure builders, of course financing support from the project financiers and things like that. What we want to achieve over the course of next really two years, three years as we really start commercially using our technology and the commercial shipping and commercial power generation is to having more partners, more committed and interested partners working together so that we can truly make the transition in this heavy industry in the very short period of the time in the next 25 years.
Cody Simms (40:01):
One of the reasons I was excited to have you on today is there's obviously so much discussion about the green hydrogen economy. And the big question everyone asks is where's the demand? What's the use case for it? And I think having you on here and able to describe how you envision the ammonia revolution from a fuel source perspective, powering ships, ultimately depends on the green hydrogen transition taking place. I appreciate you coming on here and helping me learn more about it and helping our audience also understand what one of the potential pathways could be for being a large scale consumer of this green hydrogen that's getting so much attention right now.
Seonghoon Woo (40:40):
Appreciate that, appreciate the opportunity as well. From our perspective or my perspective, shipping is really the beginning of the use case of the ammonia scale. And a lot of countries like Japan and Korea, as I mentioned briefly, they started using ammonia to generate the power at the utility scale. Japan Jira, local companies started producing power using ammonia, coal, combustion, and eventually the ammonia combustion with the necessary emission reduction measures so that they can produce the power of the gigawatt scale. So once we start deploying ammonia for that power generation to really power those countries, the demand and deployment of the ammonia piggybacking on the green hydrogen is going to be even much more skilled very quickly. So it will be coming, it'll be coming very quickly and we are excited to be part of that transition and turning,
Cody Simms (41:28):
You just got my gears really turning on that. Obviously in general, we all want every country to move off of fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. But in particular countries who don't have an endemic natural gas industry, if they can stop importing natural gas and can figure out how to use local fuel sources that they can produce on their own that are low emissions, that could rapidly change the energy makeup in those countries. Thinking of green hydrogen feeding ammonia as a potential power plant fuel source is a really good insight that I hadn't considered before.
Seonghoon Woo (42:07):
That's right. But that actually started happening already from 2024 in some countries, again, like East Asia countries mainly, but we see that to be rapidly expanded and deployed to global scale as well. That is why our view on ammonia adoption to the multi heavy industries even more bullies.
Cody Simms (42:24):
And in those use cases, in your opinion, it still would not be combusting the ammonia, it would be cracking the ammonia into hydrogen and running those as large hydrogen fuel cell power plants. Is that what you envision?
Seonghoon Woo (42:37):
So we envision both combustion and the fuel cell. Of course, fuel cell is exciting because it's zero emission, and also you can deploy the fuel cell using the commercial fuel cells. But producing the gigawatt scale of the power will likely require the combustion. However, you can also think about in the way that if you want to combust hydrogen, the hydrogen turbine, hydrogen combustion, which is already existing, but if you think about the required hydrogen quantity to reach gigawatt scaled energy production, then storing, transporting that much of hydrogen is going to be very challenging.
(43:09):
So we already started working, especially with our East Asian shareholders such as Mitsubishi innovation in the projects where we only deploy this cracking piece, forget about the fuel cell. But this cracking piece enables them to use low cost fuel, which is ammonia, but still run this power plant using hydrogen combustion engine or hydrogen turbine. So that's another huge opportunity where our technology provides true technical and also the commercial benefits.
Cody Simms (43:36):
Thank you so much for sharing all this with us. Anything else I should have asked you today?
Seonghoon Woo (43:40):
No. I mean, thank you for asking those questions to me, and hopefully the conversation was not too technical or too specific on certain areas for the broader audiences. But still, I mean our website and our company and the resources like LinkedIn has a lot of information. Because we also published a few white papers about the role of the ammonia, how we see that. So hopefully people can visit our website as well to find them out.
Cody Simms (44:03):
Seonghoon, thanks so much for joining us today.
Seonghoon Woo (44:06):
Thank you for having me today.
Jason Jacobs (44:07):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (44:11):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about power and collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (44:21):
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Yin Lu (44:34):
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Jason Jacobs (44:43):
Thanks, and see you next episode.