Economic optimisation of local Australian ammonia production using plasma technologies with green/turquoise hydrogen

Growing concern about the supply of goods under the COVID pandemic due to border restrictions and community lockdown has made us aware of the limitations of the global supply chain. Fertilisers are pivotal for the growth and welfare of humankind and there is more than a century history in industrial technology. Ammonia is the key platform chemical here which can be chemically diversified to all kinds of fertilisers. This paper puts a perspective on production technologies that can enable a supply of ammonia locally and on-demand in Australia, for the farmers to produce resilient and self-sustained fertilisers. To assess the validity of such a new business model, multi-objective optimisation has to be undergone, and computing is the solution to rank the millions of possible solutions. In this lieu, an economic optimisation framework for the Australian ammonia supply chain is presented. The model seeks to address the economic potential of distributed ammonia plants across Australia. Different techniques for hydrogen and related ammonia production such as thermal plasma, non-thermal plasma, and electrolysis (all typifying technology-disruption), and mini Haber-Bosch (typifying scale-disruption) are benchmarked to the central mega plant on a world-scale using conventional technology; verifying that ‘Moore’s Law’1 of growing bigger and bigger is not the only path to sustainable agriculture. Results show that ammonia can be produced at $317/ton at a regional scale using thermal plasma hydrogen generation which could be competitive to the conventional production model, if credit in terms of lead time and carbon footprint could be taken into account