The global shipping industry is a behemoth. Environment journalist Maria Gallucci says container ships alone carry about US$4 trillion worth of goods each year, the equivalent of the GDP of Germany.

It’s also a massive source of carbon emissions.

In this TED Talk from August 2021, Maria offers us green ammonia as a sustainable alternative to diesel, the fuel which has powered the world’s shipping for over a century.

The traditional view of ammonia is that it’s smelly, toxic and potentially explosive. It’s used mostly to make chemicals and fertilisers.

But ammonia as a fuel has ONE BIG ADVANTAGE – it has zero carbon emissions. Even better, green ammonia can be manufactured using 100% renewable energy.

Maria says she first encountered green ammonia in 2017 at the COP 23 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany.

At COP 23, the discussion about green ammonia was an aside, but now the first cargo ship powered by ammonia fuel cells is being built in Norway, while officials and investors are beginning to plan the infrastructure that will make the global adoption of green ammonia a reality.

Maria draws a parallel between the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and the switch to green ammonia for shipping. A decade ago, there were about 17,000 EVs globally on the road, today the number is over 10 million.

Although Maria doesn’t explain why green ammonia is so well suited to shipping, her presentation helps us to appreciate that solutions are possible for even the most intractable environmental problems.

The Switched ON community loves good news stories, and if the promise of green ammonia becomes fulfilled, that will be a HUGE WIN we all can celebrate.