Aussie Firm To Launch World's 1st Ammonia-Powered Ship In 2022

Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest has announced that his team is ready to deploy the world's first ammonia-powered ship into service by 2022 after developing hydrogen mining trucks and ammonia-powered locomotives, Loz Blain reported for New Atlas.

Photo Insert: Green in the blue. The MMA Leveque will run on green fuel and is a part of Fortescue Metal Group’s broader fleet of ships and other machinery already running on ammonia.

Forrest is hoping to beat a number of other ammonia shipping projects to the punch. Finland's Wartsila, for example – which famously makes some of the biggest combustion engines in the world – is working with a Norwegian company to retrofit a ship with a combustion engine that will run on 70 percent ammonia.

The modification is slated to be finished in 2023, after which the company plans to ramp up the ammonia percentage.

Greece's Avin International has commissioned an "ammonia-ready" 900-ft (274-m) tanker, although it will initially launch running on fossil fuels, as presumably will a series of "ammonia-ready" car carriers that China Merchants Heavy Industries of Jiangsu is delivering to Renaissance Shipping in 2024.

On the electric rather than combustion side, Norway's Eidesvik is working with a Fraunhofer team on the Viking Energy, a supply vessel that will use ammonia to fuel an electric drive system through a fission reactor, a fuel cell, and a catalytic converter.

This too is expected to launch in 2023. So the race is open, and Forrest is in with a shot.

His clean-tech business, Fortescue Future Industries (FFI, a subsidiary of his mining company, Fortescue Metals Group, FMG) is working on an array of projects related to green hydrogen – both as part of FMG's efforts to decarbonize its own mining operations, and to get as many fingers as possible into the emerging hydrogen pie.

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