A question that becomes particularly relevant for "the hydrogen economy" or in the event that IGCC coal baseload electric generation seeks off-peak markets for hydrogen.
I can't seem to locate a breakdown of the costs of Haber Bosch plants adequate to tell me about just the Haber Bosch reaction stage of the plant*.
In particular, I'm interested in the energy consumed to and the capital cost per capacity.
*I did find an IGCC conceptual design paper that proposes a Haber Bosch stage consuming 375MW producing 8731kg/hr implying NH3 would cost 43,000kWh/tonne but that seems quite exorbitant. By contrast, there is another proposal that says 6MW is adequate to produce 1000tonne/day implying a cost of 144kWh/tonne. An additional dataum is capital cost of 3000€/kgh ammonia capacity I located from a slide presentation pdf but it isn't clear whether this includes the air separation unit capital.
