Assessing the impact of climate change on the cost of production of green ammonia from offshore wind

Abstract

Green ammonia has received significant interest as a zero-carbon energy vector. However, current techno-economic models used to estimate the cost of producing green ammonia only use historical weather datasets as their inputs. Climate change is beginning to have an observable impact on global weather systems, so it is therefore important to examine how resilient locations for green ammonia production will be to the effects of climate change on renewable energy resources. This work examines how the cost of producing green ammonia from offshore wind farms at four locations in the UK could change due to climate change. It uses the 1981–2000, 2021–2040 and 2061–2080 2.2km projections under the RCP8.5 scenario from the Met Office's UK Climate Projections 2018 dataset, which were bias corrected with reference to the ERA5 reanalysis dataset. Using an islanded green ammonia production model, the achievable levelised cost of ammonia (LCOA) was evaluated at four sites taken from confirmed projects in the UK's Offshore Wind Licensing Round 4, with the achievable LCOAs found to range between 935 and 1696 USD/t. Results from the three time periods were compared to assess the impact of climate change and were benchmarked against LCOAs from conventional production pathways. At all sites, increases of between 6% and 8% of the average LCOAs were observed for the 2021–2040 and 2061–2080 scenarios respectively, with the changes found to be statistically significant through application of a two tailed T-test with a confidence level of 5%.