Techno-Economic Challenges of Green Ammonia as Energy Vector

Agustin Valera-Medina is a Reader/Associate Professor in Cardiff School of Engineering. He has participated as PI/Co-I on 23 industrial projects with multinationals including PEMEX, Rolls-Royce, Siemens, Ricardo, Airbus and EON, attracting approximately GBP8.5M. He has published 133 papers (h-index 19), 24 of these specifically concerning ammonia power. He has supervised 22 PhD students, 5 on ammonia-related topics. Dr Valera-Medina led Cardiff's contribution to the Innovate-UK 'Decoupled Green Energy' Project (2015-2018) led by Siemens and in partnership with STFC and the University of Oxford, which aimed to demonstrate the use of green ammonia produced from wind energy. He is currently PI of the project SAFE-AGT (EP/T009314/1) to demonstrate the use of ammonia as an efficient gas turbine fuel. He leads the combustion work package of the H2020 project FLEXnCONFU (884157), a EURO12.7M project conceived to demonstrate ammonia power in large turbine engines. He is also PI of the project 'Ammonia Propulsion' (Endeavr, Welsh Government and Airbus). He has been part of various scientific boards, chairing sessions in international conferences and moderating large industrial panels on the topic of 'Ammonia for Direct Use'. He supported the preparation of the Royal Society Policy Briefings 'Green Ammonia' on the use of ammonia as energy vector. Rene Banares-Alcantara is a Reader at the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, and a Fellow and Senior Engineering Tutor in New College. He has a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and obtained his MSc and PhD degrees in the field of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He has worked at the Instituto de Investigaciones Electricas, Facultad de Quimica (UNAM) and the University of Edinburgh. He has been a principal grant holder and/or participated as co-investigator in projects funded by the European Union, EPSRC, DURSI, MCYT, SERC, Siemens and the ECOSSE industrial consortium (Air Products, Aspen Tech, BP, BNFL, DuPont, ICI, QuantiSci, KBC, Mitsubishi, Chemicals, Norsk Hydro, Simon Carves, SimSci and Zeneca). His research interests are in the area of Process Systems Engineering and the development of decision support tools. Since 2014, he has been involved in projects related to long-term (chemical) storage of renewable energy, the production of 'green' ammonia and its role in decarbonizing the electricity sector.