Ammonia cracking
Hydrogen is hard to ship. Ammonia is not. The catch is getting the hydrogen back out.
Early packs get chosen by who asks for them. If your laboratory would use this, saying so genuinely moves it up the list — and costs you nothing.
The problem
Shipping hydrogen as a liquid is expensive and lossy. Shipping it as ammonia is routine — the infrastructure already exists. The difficulty moves to the destination: cracking ammonia back into hydrogen efficiently, at scale, without precious metals that make the economics impossible.
The search is over supported metal catalysts and operating conditions, and the decision metric is cost per kilogram of hydrogen actually delivered — which includes the energy spent cracking, not just the catalyst performance.
How the pack would work
- Interatomic potentials for surface energetics, combined with reaction-network models, because cracking is a multi-step process where the rate-limiting step can move.
- Operating-condition sweeps as first-class inputs — temperature and pressure change the answer as much as composition does.
- Closure to delivered cost, accounting for the energy consumed in cracking.
- Candidate space
- Supported metal catalysts and operating conditions
- What one experiment costs
- Catalyst synthesis and reactor testing
- Predictor
- Interatomic potentials plus reaction-network models
- Decides on
- Cost per kilogram of delivered hydrogen
What it would take to build
Stated plainly, because these are the things we do not have yet.
A benchmark set of cracking catalysts with consistent reported conditions.
Validation partners with reactor testing capability.
A delivered-cost model agreed with people who actually move ammonia.
Questions
When would this ship?
It is the next pack after PEM electrolysis, and the timing depends on demand. Early access requests for this specific pack move it up.
Why not build it at the same time as hydrogen?
Because depth is what makes a screening result trustworthy, and depth does not parallelise. One pack that works beats two that are approximately right.