To this plastic bottle I'm gonna add  15 milliliters of a clear liquid.

Then I'm gonna cap the bottle and give it a  shake.

I want all that liquid to evaporate,   not all of it, but as much as possible,  grab a match and light this on fire.

Now,   you might have seen this demo before.

In fact, I did it on this very channel,   and yes, it is beautiful.

In fact, I think it  may be my favorite demo that I've ever done,   but it's much more than just beautiful.

In fact,  this demo can tell us a lot about the chemistry   of a very old, but also maybe revolutionary fuel  that one particular car maker seems to be really   into these days, and that fuel is ammonia.

I was caught with my proverbial pants down,   but I would never do that on this channel  because I know that you don't like my body.

Toyota has a joint venture with a Chinese  state-owned car company called GAC, and in   June of 2023, GAC announced that it had developed  an internal combustion engine based on ammonia,   NH3 that cut carbon emissions by 90%.

Now, I have  to admit that when I read that press release,   I was, I mean, I was just caught off  guard.

There's no other way to say   it.

I had zero clue that you could burn  ammonia in an engine.

I just didn't know.

Now, to be honest, I had a real moment  with this one because it got me wondering,   is ammonia some sort of EV killer?

Is it an  internal combustion miracle?

Like what does   Toyota know here that we don't?

Are we gonna go  back to burning liquid fuels?

The first thing I   did to wrap my head around these questions  was actually just take a look at gas versus   ammonia.

Chemically, modern gasoline is a  mixture of anywhere between 150 and 1,000   chemicals.

Most of those are hydrocarbons, and  it was designed to be burned in car engines.

On the other hand, ammonia, wow, that  was very loud.

Ammonia is one chemical,   NH3, and to be specific, this is actually  ammonia dissolved in water.

So two chemicals,   but who's counting?

Regardless, it was  not designed to be burned in engines.

The only reason the world started producing  millions and millions of tons of this stuff   is because we needed fertilizer.

But  it turns out that ammonia can burn,   and this is its combustion reaction.

Now,  this reaction puts out 2/3 less energy   than gasoline per liter.

So that's maybe not  great.

But on the plus side, look over here,   notice anything?

There is no carbon in this fuel,  which means there is no carbon in the exhaust.

So   we've solved climate change and we can all go  home.

No, obviously not.

Just because something   will burn doesn't tell you much about how it  burns.

And so for me, that was the next important   thing is to figure out the difference between  how ammonia burns versus how gasoline burns.

Now, I could have done that by showing you a table  like this one, which compares ammonia to gasoline   to a couple other fuels across a whole range  of chemical characteristics.

And I could have   picked one of those characteristics, let's say  flame speed, and told you that it was important,   but I didn't wanna do that.

What I actually wanted  to do was burn some stuff.

So let's go do that.

I'm basically doing the same demo as  before, except instead of a bottle,   I'm doing it in this long plastic tube for a  very important reason.

I wanna measure how fast   the flame travels from this white ring of tape to  this white ring of tape.

Now, I measured these,   and these are exactly 70 centimeters apart, 70,  because I wanna make the math as annoying as   possible later.

Now, I'm not using actual ammonia  here for a very good reason.

That's also relevant   to Toyota.

And we'll talk about that later.

Instead I'm using 91% isopropanol as a stand-in   for ammonia and 100% isopropanol as a stand-in for  gasoline.

This first test is with the 91%.

Okay,   here we go.

What you're watching here is a  combustion reaction travel through this cylinder   of fuel and air.

The unreacted fuel is here in  front of the flame.

The combustion products are   here behind the flame, and the combustion reaction  itself is happening here in the flame itself.

The speed that this flame travels is called the  flame speed.

After doing some annoying math,   I can tell you that this flame is traveling at  about 42 centimeters per second.

This is 100%   isopropanol, and its flame is traveling at 99  centimeters per second.

The difference in the   flame speed between these two concentrations  is a factor of two.

One is double the other.

Now the difference between gasoline and  ammonia is a factor of six.

In other words,   gasoline's flame speed is six times  as fast as ammonia's.

Six times.

Look,   I know that the demos in the bottles are  more impressive, so I deeply apologize   for that.

I don't know what else to say.

We're  trying to get a flame speed measurement here,   okay?

We can't just burn things for the sake of  burning them.

We're sort of doing science.

We're   not really doing science but for the purposes  of a YouTube channel, we're doing science.

Now, let's look at where these reactions happen  in your car.

And yes, I do have a switchblade box   cutter.

Yes, it's alive.

Alright, so this is one  cylinder in an internal combustion engine.

Here's   what happens.

The fuel and air enter through  here.

Then the piston compresses the mixture,   then the spark plug fires, which  starts the combustion reaction,   which releases a ton of heat, which  increases the pressure and temperature,   which pushes the piston back down, which turns  the crankshaft, which eventually turns the wheels.

Now let's go back here to this crucial  point.

So imagine the combustion reactions   we saw downstairs, but happening right  here in this cylinder.

You can see that   flame speed is absolutely critical for  how the chemical energy released by the   combustion reaction gets transferred to the  piston.

If your flame speed is too slow,   it just won't push the piston fast  enough, and your engine will end up   being low powered.

But if your flame speed is  too high, you could end up with a detonation   instead of a combustion reaction, and  that might actually damage your engine.

This cylinder and the engine that it's part of was  designed around gasoline's chemical properties,   one of which is a flame speed of about 40  centimeters per second.

So if you just take   ammonia and you throw it in an engine like  this, it will not combust like gasoline does,   and your engine will run inefficiently, which  could produce nitrogen oxides and lots of other   stuff that's bad for the environment, which is not  good because remember, the whole reason that we're   doing this in the first place is to try and cut  down on carbon emissions, not replace them with   other ones.

There is a solution though.

Instead  of using pure ammonia, you can add a promoter,   which is a chemical that increases ammonia's flame  speed.

Interesting fact, the speed record for   a crude aircraft, which means an aircraft flown  by people, is held by something called the X-15,   which is a plane developed by NASA in the 1950s,  and basically it consists of a rocket engine with   two wings and a cockpit.

Now that rocket engine  was powered by ammonia and a promoter, in this   case, oxygen.

Now oxygen is a little aggressive  for a car engine.

So instead you can use hydrogen,   adding just 2% hydrogen by mass can turn ammonia  into a perfectly combustible fuel with a flame   speed roughly on par with gasoline.

And the  best part is you don't even need to carry a   separate hydrogen tank.

You can just crack the  ammonia to get your hydrogen, very convenient.

Ammonia has some downsides that are unrelated to  its combustion chemistry.

First, it's corrosive to   copper, brass, zinc alloys, and some plastics,  which can be found in many a gasoline engine.

Also, it boils at -33C, thank you, which means  that it needs to be stored under that temperature,   under pressure, or in a solid matrix.

Now, none of  those things are showstoppers, just means that an   ammonia engine and fuel system would need to be  designed from the ground up, but we can do that.

We did it for other fuels and we've been producing  ammonia industrially for over a century.

So what   happened?

Like why aren't we driving around in  ammonia cars right now?

Why didn't ammonia as a   fuel take off?

I'm waiting for the, you know,  boom, which I'm sure Elaine will add in post.

Okay, so picture this, you are driving  around in your ammonia powered car,   and by the way, I am actually driving a Toyota,   and all of a sudden the fuel system springs a  leak and ammonia starts building up in the cabin.

You would start to notice a very pungent  aroma at around five parts per million.

This is the part of the video where I  smell the ammonia.

Here we go.

Of course,   every bottle these days.

Woo.

Oh my God.

It burns.

I was told to expect like,   a rotten egg smell.

That is not that,  I'm getting, I'm getting like a,   it's more like a punch in the nose.

Oh God,  yeah.

Oh, that is awful.

Okay, we're done.

Ammonia loves water.

It will dissolve in  any even remotely watery part of your body,   and that means mucus.

Mucus of your eyes,  your nose, your throat, and when it dissolves,   it forms ammonium hydroxide, and the hydroxide  wreaks absolute havoc on your cells.

It can   destroy cell membranes, spilling cell  guts everywhere.

It denatures proteins   turning them into mush, and given enough  time and at high enough concentrations,   it could destroy almost every type  of chemical bond that your body has.

Remember, about a year ago on this channel,  I took a chicken drumstick and I threw it in   sodium hydroxide and stuck it on the stove  for an hour?

The sodium hydroxide dissolved   every gram of flesh off that bone, and  there were not chunks floating around,   okay?

It was dissolved.

Now, ammonium hydroxide  is not quite that caustic, but it's not far off.

So remember, you could smell  ammonia at five parts per million,   and we crank it up a notch to 30  parts per million.

Then it would   start to irritate your mucus membranes.

You  would notice it.

At 140 parts per million,   that irritation would become unbearable.

At 500  parts per million, it's basically like you're   being tear gassed at that point, and at 1,000  parts per million it can blister your skin,   cause permanent lung damage, and even kill you.

And by the way, these amounts are not that high.

30 parts per million is the equivalent of  120 tiny paint dots in this giant painting.

Now, worst case scenario, you're driving along,   the ammonia tank ruptures and releases  all its ammonia.

There is enough ammonia   in there to kill an adult in minutes.

We  made a whole video about this.

You should   definitely check it out after getting to the  end of this one.

Okay?

Don't jump the gun.

Okay, so my opinion on this having smelled ammonia  for the first time in this video is that as a   consumer fuel, as something that you would go to a  ammonia station and fill your car with every week,   it's kind of a pain in the butt.

Now, let me  just say that it's not like gasoline here is   innocent and cute and cuddly.

Gasoline has been  known to kill via inhalation, and it's also way   more flammable than ammonia, but we just don't  think of gasoline as being that dangerous because   we are so used to dealing with it every single  week.

But there are places and environments where   the toxicity of ammonia matters a lot less  than it would in your car.

And conveniently,   those places and environments are also much more  difficult and expensive to switch over from fossil   fuels to electricity.

We have been producing,  transporting, and using hundreds of millions of   tons of ammonia since Haber and Bosch invented  Haber Bosch.

We made a whole video about that.

You can check it out.

Point is, I think if you  have good regulations and good safety practices,   ammonia is perfectly handleable.

So does Toyota  know something we don't?

I don't think so,   but I also think ammonia combustion is  not vaporware.

I think it's real tech,   and I think it could have a significant impact  on climate change, just not in your car.