In order to implement a functioning hydrogen economy in Germany, a suitable storage and transport infrastructure is needed. This is precisely where one of the three hydrogen lead projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) comes in: TransHyDE. The lead project is developing several hydrogen transport technologies, evaluating, upscaling and demonstrating them. TransHyDE includes the AmmoRef research project, coordinated at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion (MPI CEC), which addresses the question of how to recover pure hydrogen from ammonia. Jens Geier, chairman of the European SPD in the European Parliament, emphasized during his visit to the MPI CEC that the hydrogen issue is of particular importance for the current energy mix in order to secure the supply. Decisions are currently being made at the European level on the regulatory framework conditions for a hydrogen economy.
During his visit to MPI CEC on September 16, 2022, Geier was greeted by Prof. Serena DeBeer, director at MPI CEC, and educated about the nitrogen-hydrogen compound ammonia. Ammonia is used in the chemical industry as a starting material for the synthesis of various compounds and is largely processed into fertilizers. Dorothea Müschenborn and Hauke Hinners of the TransHyDE office at MPI CEC introduced Geier to the TransHyDE hydrogen lead project, which, among other things, researches and demonstrates the application diversity of ammonia as an energy carrier for hydrogen. For this, efficient and intelligently controlled ammonia reforming is crucial, i.e. splitting it back into its components nitrogen and hydrogen, which is the focus of the TransHyDE project AmmoRef coordinated by MPI CEC. During a subsequent laboratory tour, Dr. Michael Poschmann, deputy project coordinator of AmmoRef and postdoctoral researcher at MPI CEC, discussed how newly developed, highly active catalysts are being synthesized and researched for this purpose in order to split ammonia efficiently on a large scale and with a high degree of purity of the resulting hydrogen. A visit was also made to the test rig currently in operation in the experimental hall, which allows parallel testing of eight different catalyst types for their efficiency and suitability for ammonia reforming. Finally, Prof. Walter Leitner, Managing Director at MPI CEC and co-spokesperson of the BMBF-funded Kopernikus project "Power-to-X", explained how "Power-to-X" converts renewable electricity into plastics, fuels, gases and heat. The technologies could already reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the synthesis of chemicals with a high carbon footprint.