Don Gillespie

He's a tool for the natural gas industry.

All right, so in the August 1 2007 issue of the Ann Arbor News, there was a front page story on ammonia fuel for transportation. Shawn Grannell, a doctoral student in applied physics, and Don Gillespie of El Don Engineering, are going to drive from Detroit to San Francisco on an 80 / 20 ammonia gasoline mix in their converted Chevy S-10 pickup.

They have 930 pounds of ammonia, and that, along with the gasoline they will buy along the way, will get them to Wyoming, where they will pick up more ammonia.

Now, ammonia has no carbon. Indeed, you can run a vehicle on 100 percent ammonia. It's only exhaust would be water vapor and nitrogen.

Or rather, its only exhaust from the tailpipe will be water vapor and nitrogen. Do you know where ammonia comes from? It comes from natural gas.

Now, not all ammonia comes from natural gas. I suppose with all of the agricultural waste produced in America, some 6 billion tons of it, could be converted into ammonia. Indeed, most of the ammonia in Alberta comes from agricultural waste.

However, There is no such thing as a free lunch. Most of that agricultural waste was created because of cheap and plentiful nitrogen fertilizer... made from petroleum products.

Yeah... don't think about it too hard, you might cry.

I know I have been harping on this for the longest time, but it bears repeating. Solar, nuclear, and wind power is the way forward. We can use the electricity to extract the nitrogen from the air and salt water from the oceans to create all of the nitrogen fertilizer and ammonia we would ever need.

However, right now, all an ammonia powered truck is just a secondhand natural gas powered truck. Don Gillespie is a smart man, but in the end, his truck is less fuel efficient and more harmful to the environment than a regular Chevy S-10.