Port masterplanning for ammonia integration

Globally, vessels and ports have experience of handling and shipping ammonia for industries like fertilizer – however this is at a much smaller scale than would be needed to facilitate the renewable energy market.

The challenge with using ammonia as an energy carrier is its toxicity and the threat it may pose to the environment in the unlikely event should something go wrong. Of course, the probability of something going wrong is very low, but ports must still be ready to mitigate and carefully manage this risk.

Facilitating the higher ammonia capacities needed to progress the renewable energy market in ports and supply chains can feel daunting. You need to consider the opportunity for your port’s specific location and special capacity, and the role you could play in the wider supply chain.

Plus, as with all port developments, you need to consider the environment around your port, and ensure any impact on the local communities and natural environment is kept to a minimum.

All of this requires careful and thorough port masterplanning.

Creating a port masterplan for ammonia

There are six steps to establishing a feasible masterplan to facilitate ammonia in your port:

1. Determine energy requirements: For example, understanding the energy market outlook and weighing the pros and cons of long-term goals like becoming a transport hub, an alternative fuels hub, a production hub, or a combination.
2. Define required elements to support energy requirements: This could be establishing what space and infrastructure is needed to generate and produce, transport, store, distribute, or use renewable energy in line with your long-term goal. Together, these first two steps result in an overview of the hydrogen supply chain.
3. Identify the size of each element: Establishing the space needed for hydrogen and ammonia activities is complex, as there aren’t many pre-existing examples to follow. But careful understanding of each element and how they interact can help create spatially efficient designs.
4. Identify the safety distances for each element: As a hazardous substance, you need to ensure a safety area around ammonia and adhere to guidelines and recommendations. But due to a lack of formal policy, it’s often ultimately up to you to decide your risk acceptance.
5. Identify dependencies with a zoning plan: Your facilities depend on each other, access to utilities within your port, and location-bound items. All of these dependencies need to be established in a zoning plan.
6. Combine the zoning plan with your existing masterplan: This will be entirely site specific. You may find there isn’t space for everything needed to handle ammonia in your masterplan. In this instance, look at opportunities to safely move more low-risk equipment outside your port.

Next, we’ll look at some key considerations for including ammonia facilities in your port masterplan.

Scaling up ammonia capacity in ports

When adapting your port’s masterplan to facilitate ammonia, it’s helpful to first look for any opportunities to augment your existing structures. One potential opportunity to adapt ports to safely handle large amounts of ammonia is to adapt existing liquified petroleum gas and liquid natural gas infrastructure. 

While this can be cost effective, it does require specific materials, safety measures and protocols to mitigate ammonia’s toxicity and corrosiveness. This means modifying storage tanks, pipelines, and loading systems to make them suitable for ammonia.

The feasibility of adapting existing infrastructure to handle ammonia varies greatly from port to port. To assess whether this is an appropriate development for your port you need to first understand your available infrastructure, its surroundings, and what can be re-used.

Spatial requirements to adhere to control zones

As a hazardous substance, ammonia requires well-enforced control zones to ensure it is properly handled. This includes a hazardous zone, only accessed by trained personnel with PPE. For ammonia, this will be the same area as with liquified natural gas, mostly surrounding loading, unloading, or bunker connections.

The safety zone is the area around the hazardous substance, which is defined by the results of gas dispersion studies or quantitative risk assessment. Only authorised personnel are allowed in this zone, and they should be properly trained on what to do in the case of an alarm or a spill.

For ammonia, people in the safety zone should be able to escape to a safe area or should have readily available emergency masks.

This impacts other vessels using your port, as they’ll need to keep a safe distance from any vessel handling ammonia while at berth to limit the probability of collision and resulting spill, while at the same time protecting the operators on these ships. 

You can calculate the acceptable distance for passing vessels or other berthed vessels by a quantitative risk assessment that accounts for the probability of a spill and by nautical collision probability assessment to limit the probability of collision. 

The safe area around an ammonia vessel at berth could be around 50 metres based on the very low probability that a spill will occur at the same time as another vessel is passing. 

Work is still being done to define required safety distance for vessels on a berth that’s in neighbourhood of ammonia bunkering – including comparing of the usual threshold limits for safety distances for LNG and ammonia.

However, if vessels are near the safety zone they should have complete awareness about how to act in case of an incident. And during bunkering, vessels have to wear appropriate signage.

An energy carrier, and a potential fuel

Due to its toxicity, the time in which energy is carried by ammonia is often limited. Ammonia is most commonly converted back to hydrogen for bunkering and distribution as many locations, including the Netherlands, prefer to confine ammonia within port areas to limit public exposure to the toxic hazards. 

However, in the future ammonia itself may be a potential fuel. Efficient ammonia-powered engines are being developed and organisations are looking at the possibilities of ammonia bunkering. 

For example, Port of Rotterdam's goal is to have a safety framework and bunkering regulations ready by the end of 2025, and it expects to receive the first ammonia-powered ships in 2026.

As the renewable energy market develops, the role of ammonia and other hydrogen carriers will continue to grow.

Learn more about the safe handling of ammonia

This article was inspired by participant questions in our webinar, handling ammonia in ports – from masterplan to berth design. Watch the full discussion to hear expert insight and real-world examples of how ammonia can be incorporated into the maritime supply chain.