Two things should spring to mind the moment someone utters “ammonia.”
First: you don’t want to store it. Not for long. Not unless you enjoy playing chicken with corrosive, toxic gas. Ammonia is spectacularly unfriendly to biological life—ours included. A leak isn’t just inconvenient; it’s a full-scale disaster. The kind that makes headlines and environmental remediation budgets evaporate simultaneously.
Second: you don’t want to transport it. For all the same reasons, with one added bonus—when you’re hauling it around, the likelihood of catastrophic failure increases exponentially. Pipes rupture. Valves fail. Drivers blink. Now picture a tanker leak in a busy port—an entire harbor flash-sterilized down to the last amoeba. Not a great look.
So, the industry did the only sane thing left in a world still tethered to cause and effect: they kept it local. They brought in benign, easy-going natural gas—nobody’s idea of a saint, but a far more stable traveling companion—and produced ammonia on-site, right where it was needed, right when it was needed. No vast tanks. No ticking time-bomb transports. Just steady throughput and minimized risk.
Elegant in its simplicity. And vastly safer.
And now we’re apparently toying with scrapping that approach—outsourcing safety in exchange for what, exactly? Bureaucratic satisfaction? ESG compliance? PR points?
We’re talking about abandoning a proven system that avoids storing and shipping a known hazardous material, in favor of… doing exactly that. On a global scale.What could possibly go wrong?