Nowhere is that more evident than at the nation’s largest coal-fired power plant in Hekinan, a small city in central Japan. Starting next spring, Jera, the company that owns the site, wants to demonstrate it can blend ammonia — which does not emit carbon dioxide when burned — with coal in its boilers. The company says the ammonia method can reduce dangerous emissions in the fight against global warming.
Japan draws nearly one-third of its electric power supply from coal, one of the world’s dirtiest sources of energy. But critics say the use of ammonia merely extends Japan’s reliance on fossil fuels and could potentially increase carbon emissions as the ammonia is produced. Burning ammonia can also produce nitrogen oxide, which is toxic to humans and is another emission to be managed.
Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, has few of its own natural resources and can produce only 11% of its energy needs without fuel imports. The power industry is also reluctant to abandon coal because it has spent so much recently to build new plants. Since 2011, Japanese power companies have constructed 40 coal plants — nearly one-quarter of Japan’s total coal-fired network — with a new Jera plant going online last month.
Even if the technology works, procuring a steady, affordable and clean supply of ammonia could significantly strain the world’s supply of the compound, which is needed to produce fertilizer. The government’s own Green Growth Strategy acknowledges that if all of Japan’s coal-fired plants used 20% ammonia, “they would need about 20 million tons of ammonia per year” — equivalent to the entire volume of ammonia currently traded on the world market.
Such supply constraints made the ammonia plan “almost impossible” to execute, said Hajime Takizawa, a climate and energy researcher at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, a government-funded, independent research group. The government, though, says that once it proves that the technology works, suppliers will meet demand.But producing ammonia itself requires electricity, which under current methods is typically generated from fossil fuels like coal or natural gas. So while burning ammonia in a power plant reduces carbon emissions in one place, making ammonia may generate more carbon emissions in another.
