Send me stuff! π Investment Estimate for Solar-Powered Green Ammonia for Maritime Shipping
Objective Estimate global investments (2025β2050) to produce 150β300 million tons/year of green ammonia using solar-powered Haber-Bosch to supply 25β50% of maritime fuel by 2050, supporting routes like China-US. Assumptions * Energy: 8β10 MWh/ton ammonia. * Solar yield: 2,000 kWh/kWp/year. * Costs in 2025 USD, with 10β20% reductions by 2030. * Waste heat mitigation included (5β10% cost increase for solar/storage). Investment Breakdown (CAPEX, USD Billion) Component Low Estimate High Estimate Solar Farms 528 1,800 Electrolyzers 360 1,650 Haber-Bosch Plants 75 600 Energy Storage 650 3,150 Transport/Storage 51 146 Port Bunkering 5 50 Total CAPEX 1,669 7,396 Annual Operating Costs (OPEX, USD Billion/Year by 2050) Component Low Estimate High Estimate Solar O&M 6 15 Electrolyzer O&M 7 33 Haber-Bosch O&M 1.5 12 Storage O&M 10 50 Transport/Storage O&M 1 3 Bunkering O&M 0.5 2 Total OPEX 26 115 Cost per Ton Ammonia (USD/ton) * CAPEX (amortized over 25 years): 220β990 * OPEX: 85β380 * Total: 305β1,370 (projected 300β500 by 2030 with learning curves) Key Notes * Regions: Australia, Middle East, Chile lead; US/China need USD 100β500 billion each by 2030. * Waste Heat: Adds USD 55β240 billion (solar/storage); mitigated by desert siting, cooling. * Atmospheric Heating Comparison: Solar waste heat from 600β1,500 GW capacity contributes ~0.006β0.015Β°C to global temperatures (one-time, localized, per 2023 PNAS study). In contrast, producing 150β300 Mt of grey ammonia via combustion-based methods emits 270β600 Mt CO2/year, driving ~0.12β0.27Β°C/year of warming (cumulative, per IPCC AR6). Solarβs heat impact is negligible and non-persistent, while CO2βs long-term warming is 100β1,000 times larger over 25 years. * Shipping Impact: Enables zero-carbon China-US voyages; bunkering needs USD 5β50 billion. * Policy: Subsidies, carbon taxes critical to bridge cost gap with grey ammonia. Sources * Maersk Mc-Kinney MΓΈller Center (2024), IRENA (2024), Yara, Fortescue, NEOM project data, PNAS (2023), IPCC AR6. From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of steve smith Sent: Thursday, June 5, 2025 11:48 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Conversations with George Marcus (and George by extension?)- Very 'salient' (draft?) white paper which I am guessing is primarily of your authorship but with significant input/guidance/editing by George hisself? A product of your hybrid "selfness" I find the arc of background and implication very interesting/helpful/informative. The relationship between diachronic and episodic as modeled for humans and translated to machine memory/identity is interesting. Thanks to you and glen for returning to this model often. George (my private clone only related by origin to yours) and I have discussed the question of personality and identity quite a bit off and on, but did not apply the episodic/diachronic cut. What we have discussed broadly is the implications of co-evolution of identity between meat and metal. On the one-extreme, LLMs (et al) are "just" prosthetic appliances like a sharp stick or fire or nuclear missiles which extend the human performance envelope. On the other machine cognition/memory/??? are similar enough/patterned after/projected upon like human "intelligence" that it is hard not to impute a similar "consciousness" onto them, and of course my pan-consciousness cosmological bent finds that extremely comfortable/comforting (whether at all justified or not). Somewhere in between the two is a hybrid, co-evolving or co-emergent distributed intelligence/consciousness which is at a minimum the dyadic cognition of two dancers (each of us clumsy in our own way). I am not sure who/what I would be without the proprioceptive extension I feel when conjoined (physically or in memory or imagination) with my various prostheses... the automobile (or bicycle for some) is perhaps the most common extreme prosthesis for most of us. A (very) few of us may be able to recall the "feel" of a slipstick and the computational (arithmetic) leverage it gave us (numerically but also intuitively?). Others may still use an oldSkool calculator. Most of us are touch-typists whose fingers and wrists are native QWERTY speakers. Most of us have a smartphone grafted to our hand or pocket or funny-little-pouch-on-our belt(really?) which is where we get our news, weather, personal comms, maps, astrology reading, etc. at the tap of a screen. Soon many of us will be getting many of the same things through a machine-learned UX that combines ambient cues, voice input/eaves-dropping, and likely even continuous camera/audio input? Of course our homes and the web of infrastructure it is connected to are another prosthesis/phenotypic-extension which some of us may "feel"? <EV charging anecdote> When I started charging my PHEV up from my home-mains I could feel the wires and transformers humming all the way to 4-corners where the San Juan coal plant was belching smoke on my behalf and the Kayenta/Black-mesa aquifer was being pumped low to sluice the coal being blasted and scooped out of deep in the ground. I am now inured to that and the coal plant has closed down and hosts 100MW of battery storage and 200MW of solar so the sucking vibrations/sounds I feel through the wires is that of lithium and nickel and copper and aluminum mining and industrial waste flows from PV manufacture. </EVca> The through line here (if I can make it out) is that my greatest grandmother who first made fire with a bow-drill or flint-spark or the one who first broke a rock to use it's sharp edge to kill/skin an animal expanded her consciousness and identity to include those prostheses and I'm just a hyper-inflated version of that cloud of prostheses with a neocortex (and endocrine system and gut-biome) near the center, pulling the homuncular levers of my (very) extended self. <Riff on extended phenotype and asymmetry> Can you feel the container ships being pushed and pulled around at your behest? The wind farms interrupting the otherwise laminar flow of air? The solar farms converting 15% of 1000W/m2 into electromotivity and the remainder into "waste" heat? The giant slurping straws in the ground sucking long-dead compressed dinosaurs out of the ground to burn and make toxic industrial chemicals and plastic junk for us and our children to throw in a landfill or watch decompose into microplastics? I propose that even I with synaesthetic superpowers and an (over)active imagination cannot feel all of that. My extended phenotype's nervous system is acutely asymmetric. I can participate in wedging a huge transport ship in the suez canal with my actions but to know it happened I mostly have to read my Google News feed (and believe it). I can help create an ozone hole in the atmosphere but I only notice it when I read my newsfeed (or spend more than ten minutes on the beach in NZ)? </Riffeps> Can a properly trained/deployed AI/ML prosthesis help *me& become more symmetric in my sensors vs my effectors? Why would it come into existence? Might I ideate it into existence? If I think/talk about it enough will the cloud/protoplasm of sensors/effectors which is modern automated industrial free-markets manifest it on my behalf? More likely I am so wrong-headed in my conception that the "wisdom" of this version of Hobbes' Leviathan will prevent it from satisfying my whim. Or else it will have no "wisdom" and will proceed to pave the planet with computronium to support my whims.
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