Fuel your car from home with Ammonia

   Ammonia (NH3) can be used to fuel your car.   A video on youtube shows how it has been done.
 Ammonia car youtube video 
The ammonia is burned in the engine and generates exhaust that consists of nitrogen gas, water and some amount of nitrous oxide that can be removed by the catalytic converter of the car.   No new or exotic technology is required.   And the technology scales well.  There is no scarce mineral such as lithium or platinum required.
 
My thought is that it would be possible in this day and age to make your own ammonia at home to fuel your car.   The essential parts to making ammonia are first to separate out the nitrogen in the atmosphere from the oxygen in the air (80% nitrogen/ 20% oxygen).   The technology for doing this is found in portable home units that are used by people on oxygen that used what is called Pressure Swing Adsorption technology to separate the oxygen from the air.   In this case, you would simply use the exhaust gas (nitrogen) from an
oxygen generating unit to provide the nitrogen.   The second step is to generate hydrogen gas.   There are many ways to do this, the easiest being to use electricity to run a hydrolysis unit that splits ordinary water into hydrogen and oxygen.   Another way is to oxidize aluminum under water.  Here is a link to this technology.
  Making hydrogen using aluminum
The next step is to compress the mixture of nitrogen and ammonia to a very high pressure (3000 psi).  This is not very different from the pressure used to compress gas for scuba diving.    Then the high pressure mixture is heated in the presence of a catalyst ( a very inexpensive iron based catalyst) for a brief amount of time until the exothermic (heat generating) reaction of the nitrogen and hydrogen starts.   Then a mixture of these of
gases plus an amount of ammonia is formed.    The ammonia is separated from the gas using a -60 degree C refrigeration unit.  None of this technology is exotic and could be done now.   The inputs would be air, electricity and possibly a supply of aluminum that you could pick up at your local "aluminum station". 

The Iron Mine that Feeds the World

  In the early 1900's an agricultural crises was brewing.   The world was running out of cheap nitrate fertilizer.   There were mines in Chile that produced nitrates, but they were charging OPEC like prices for their output.  In Germany, Fritz Haber working for the BASF company developed the chemistry necessary to prove that nitrate fertilizer could be made using anhydrous ammonia produced from nitrogen extracted from the air.  The process was not very efficient, so the task of making the process economically viable was given to Karl Bosch.   Bosch tried several hundred different catalyst for the nitrogen - hydrogen reaction that was key to making ammonia (NH3).   Many different metals and ores were tried (over 6000) before a special kind of magnetite ore (Fe3O4) was found in a sample from the Gallavare mine in northern Sweden.   This ore had just the right crystaline structure (111 orientation) so that 7 iron molecules were in proxcimity to each other, plus it had minute traces of aluminum and phosphorus that gave it unique catalyst properties.  So in 1913 it was possible for BASF to commercially produce nitrates from the air, freeing the world from dependence on Chile for nitrate fertilizer.  Today, 500 million tons of nitrate fertilizer is produced each year.  This has led to a doubling of food production,  a greener planet where more plants take up CO2, leading to less global warming.   But this is all due to the fortunate existance of the Gallivare iron mine.   A mine that was started in 1892 and is still producing today, 120 years later.    You can trace the knee of the world population curve that goes upward soon after 1920 to the fact that we did not run out of nitrates.   Half the population of the planet may now be alive and well fed because of the Gallavare mine.

Answer To Michael Moore

A lot has been written lately about the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Micheal Moore has gone on to declare war on the fat cats and rich of Wall Street. But first we must find out who the rich are. After driving around all day, I could not find a single rich person. So I decided to return and narrow my search. I looked around the house and could hardly find one. So then I looked straight ahead, then a few feet in front of me, and finally tipped my head and saw a pair of shoes. I had finally found that rich guy. It was me! Why do I say this? In 1937, John D Rockefeller died. He was the richest man alive. Yet he could not have ever flown on a jet plane, could not have ever watched a color television, and could not have gotten a shot to prevent Polio. I have done all of these. In 1977, John D's grandson Nelson Rockefeller died. No doubt due to his inheritance he was incredibly rich. Yet he may not of ever made one cell phone call or logged onto a personal computer (not to mention the internet). He did not own a GPS and may not have ever gotten a CAT scan or an MRI to diagnose an illness. The internet gives anyone with a few pennies a month to spare a library of millions of volumes, a shopping center at the the tip of their fingers that can take them to the emporiums of Shanghai and Dubai. They can have at their beck and call thousands of computers to help them find information. All these things were unavailable to even the richest a mere 20 years ago. The reason that the gap in nominal income is so wide today is that we have made huge progress in the last two decades and the gap is a small price to pay for the masses who have benefitted HUGELY.