This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. For decades, the world’s commercial ships have depended on a fossil fuel so sticky and thick that it needs to be heated to around 150 °C just to get it to flow through a vessel’s innards. Heavy Fuel Oil is one of the dirtiest fuels out there.
And ammonia is also harder to burn than some of the alternatives. Designing more reliable, more efficient ammonia-burning engines is a huge challenge currently being tackled by companies like the Germany-based MAN Energy Solutions, which also built the methanol-burning engine on the Laura Maersk.