ZEM Awarded Scottish Enterprise Funding

ZEM have been granted funding for a research and development study into the use of Ammonia as an energy vector in the marine sector. The funding is part of the Innovation challenge: Zero Emissions Heavy Duty Vehicles call designed to help Scottish businesses develop innovative solutions that can support the decarbonisation of Heavy Duty Vehicles and Scotland’s green recovery.

Ammonia is a highly attractive energy vector. It acts as a dense and transportable store of hydrogen that offers an excellent route to enabling heavier duty transport applications to utilise renewable electricity. Fuel Cells can convert Ammonia into electrical energy without generating the nitrogen oxides that pollute our cities and ports. Additionally, utilising high temperature fuel cell technology to directly convert Ammonia offers simpler and more efficient systems. In our project, we seek to implement a novel fuel cell system that has been demonstrated for direct conversion of Ammonia directly into water and nitrogen, yielding electric power. We seek to exploit anticipated advantages in terms of cost and lifetime, allowing the development of a robust and highly competitive product.

Our R&D feasibility study looks to maximize the cell performance optimising cell geometry. The core activity will be to develop advanced cell geometries for direct ammonia fuel cells. The results of this project will help to develop an operational stack targeting kW operation on ammonia fuel in maritime trials in a further project. Our partnership with the University of St Andrews seeks to establish pathways to early markets and demonstrators and so establish an important new supply chain for clean Maritime Transport.

This project is expected to run until the end of March 2023