Seonghoon Woo, CEO of Amogy, discusses how they are using ammonia as a fuel source to decarbonize the heavy-duty transportation industry

Cheddar Innovates

Using Ammonia as an Emission-Free Fuel Source

cheddar innovates everyone brought to you by curiosity stream. The commercial transportation industry accounts for almost 10% of today's global C. 02 emissions and with the race against climate change innovators are taking note, Emoji is an amazon backed startup that uses ammonia as a fuel source and is on a mission to decarbonization, heavy duty transportation industry joining us now is Ceo of Himeji song Hyun woo, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on. So this is so interesting to me because when we hear ammonia we think of a household cleaning products. So how does this work? Yeah, thank you for having me first. So how does it work? So you might have heard about the hydrogen technology called hydrogen fuel cell and there are hydrogen fuel cell vehicles out there made by Honda and Toyota like Next or be right, but hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are not as common as popular as battery vehicles because there is a big challenge with the storage and transportation of the hydrogen. So essentially using our technology, we solve the challenge of the hydrogen. So we use still the same hydrogen fuel cell technology but we use ammonia as a fuel. So, to enable the combination of these two, we have a technology basically converting ammonia to hydrogen, which we call chemical reactor cracker. So those combination enables the use of the ammonia as a field but still use the hydrogen yourself reporting technology. So what makes this a clean solution and why is it so affordable and accessible. So first of all, ammonia doesn't have a carbon inside. So it's a clean solution not generating any C. 02 out of it and it's very affordable and also accessible because ammonia is so easy to handle. For example ammonia is a liquid material and ammonia is already used in industrial use cases and also as a fertilizer. This is actually the second most produced chemical in the world. And ammonia has the infrastructure built as well. So which makes the use of the ammonia so costly back there? I had no idea that pneumonia had this many uses. What other benefits are there to using ammonia especially as energy. How does it compare to the other fuels out there? Yeah that is very good questions. The biggest advantage of using Ammonia is a fuel is really the high energy density of Ammonia. So Ammonia has so much higher energy density for example, compared to the battery is roughly five times higher. And compared to the compressed gas of the hydrogen wealthy 2-3 times higher energy density. So because of the higher energy density it enables the high performance of those commercial vehicles for either kind of example to understand it better is if you think about the transpacific delivery of cargo ships then it's never possible using battery because energy density cannot accommodate it. But it is possible using ammonia because ammonia has higher energy density. Why is it so important to decarbonization, agriculture, trucking and of course that shipping transport industries that so many people in countries are struggling with. Yes, I mean, I think you mentioned in the beginning that commercial transportation alone takes account for roughly 10% of the global emissions and shipping itself is 3% of the global emissions. It is only increasing. And some of the market reports even started suggesting that shipping itself can take potentially take 10% or 15% of the emissions in the future if we don't make the action right now. So this is really immediately immediate problem that we have to solve for reaching the next zero unless you're 2040 and 2050 so that we can make this world and humanity sustainable. I have to ask what are the plans for rolling this out to such a huge industry. So yeah, cos 1.5 years old and we are still developing and perfecting our technology. So we demonstrated to the palace one drone and the other is tractor. So we are planning to scale it further so that we can demonstrate much larger trucks as well as the shipping vessels within next 6 to 12 months. And after piloting after demonstrating such a large vessels, we will start commercializing our technology for these industries. I'm sure you know what my next question is going to be? What is your ideal timeline when this will all become a reality? So, yeah, we are really trying our best to accelerate the growth of the technology and also the company. So our ideal timeline is really scaling the technology to the scale of the maritime vessels within about 12 months from now 2023, so that we can start commercializing our technology In the, in the real world setting. Starting from 2024 and 2025 have supply chain shortages or inflation been an obstacle at all for this project. Of course, I mean, we are making hardware so hard as a hardware. Thought of the supply chain is becoming has been a big issue and it's becoming a bigger issue because the problem is getting worse. But of course, we are trying our best to overcome those issues and to keep the momentum of the girls and scaling of technology. Well, we hope you come back on this show again. Thank you so much Song Hyun Woo ceo.