BLOOMBERG - Key Persons
Anjani Trivedi is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Asia. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal.
But in 2014, Gordon - who's spent his career producing active pharmaceutical ingredients for sale around the world - secured a patent for his long-time side project: a refrigerator-sized machine that turns water and air into a reusable, renewable, ammonia-based NH3. The project began in the early 2000s, and took almost nine years before it produced a usable prototype. The patent application was submitted the following year, at a time when Gordon says he didn't even have transportation fuel on his radar. Today, he drives a converted Ford F-350 with a button on the dashboard that allows him to switch between traditional gasoline and one of the small tanks of colorless, strong-smelling NH3 gas sitting in back of the pickup truck.
"I didn't have the wherewithal to try it as a transportation fuel," Gordon explains in an interview at a shopping mall in Toronto. But researchers at the University of Iowa and the University of Michigan were driving on ammonia - and Gordon says they jumped at the idea of creating NH3 "with no heritage of oil or coal or anything that's carbon."
Anyone can retrofit a traditional combustion engine into one that runs on NH3 for about $1,000, and at least 100 others around the world have made the investment, but Gordon says the infrastructure required to change the global transportation industry is too overwhelming to even consider. Instead, Gordon sees opportunities in places that are spending significant resources on getting access to fuel, such as remote communities and industrial operations in Africa or northern Canada. "The lowest hanging fruit would be a mine in the far north that's now spending $105 million on diesel fuel a year, and they can now come to us for half the price," he says.
Though the price fluctuates, NH3 typically costs about $0.23 a liter ($0.85 per gallon) and has no byproducts other than harmless nitrogen and water. The lack of pollutants is especially appealing in places like Canada, which is now considering a tax on carbon. "There's actually no other zero-carbon fuel out there, so we really don't have any competition," Gordon says. "Once the oil and natural gas ones are taxed for carbon, I don't think there will be anything else."
Over the years Gordon has impressed a number of Canadian bigwigs including Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary and even Justin Trudeau before he became the country's prime minister, both of whom expressed enthusiasm for the project before getting further entangled in Canada's touchy energy politics. One politician who has remained by his side is the former environmental commissioner of Gordon's home province of Ontario, Gordon Miller, who says perhaps ammonia's biggest advantage is it can be produced anywhere.
"Our energy systems are centralized and distributed from central locations at great costs," he explains. "This is locally distributed generation, which is a huge opportunity, because we don't have to bring the stuff in from strange countries and refine it and haul it thousands of miles, nor do we have to string wires to get it where it needs to be used."