And is _tremendously_ poisonous. Fuel leaks or even unburned vapors would be hugely problematic.
The other problem is that you need energy to form ammonia in the first place. Turns out you can use chemical bonds for storage in other compounds as well, including simple hydrocarbon chains forming either gases or liquids. Sabatier process and Fischer-Tropsch process will both create fuels (gas and liquid, respectively), given a hydrogen and carbon feedstock, and input energy.
Turns out the ocean contains a great deal of hydrogen (combined with oxygen as water) and carbon (dissolved as carbonate/bicarbonate and as CO2 gas dissolved in water). And the stuff is really safe to handle and we've been burning it for well over a century.
The US Navy has been researching developing this to industrial scales, and it strikes me as among the better bets I've seen for providing a liquid transportation / mobile use fuel we've got: http://redd.it/22k71x
The other problem is that you need energy to form ammonia in the first place. Turns out you can use chemical bonds for storage in other compounds as well, including simple hydrocarbon chains forming either gases or liquids. Sabatier process and Fischer-Tropsch process will both create fuels (gas and liquid, respectively), given a hydrogen and carbon feedstock, and input energy.
Turns out the ocean contains a great deal of hydrogen (combined with oxygen as water) and carbon (dissolved as carbonate/bicarbonate and as CO2 gas dissolved in water). And the stuff is really safe to handle and we've been burning it for well over a century.
The US Navy has been researching developing this to industrial scales, and it strikes me as among the better bets I've seen for providing a liquid transportation / mobile use fuel we've got: http://redd.it/22k71x