Transportation is one of the world's most polluting industries, accounting for roughly 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Electric vehicles will make a dent in those emissions in the coming decades, but batteries can't hold enough energy to power vehicles used in other forms of global transit, like long-range trucks and transoceanic ships.
Young Suk Jo, 34, came up with a possible solution in an unlikely chemical: ammonia. Amogy, a startup Jo cofounded in 2020, is building systems that can use ammonia, typically a component of fertilizer, as a fuel to power trucks and ships.
One of ammonia's most attractive attributes is its energy density, meaning it can pack a lot of energy into a relatively small space. Liquid ammonia can carry about three times more energy than compressed hydrogen, a leading clean fuel today.
