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.

For Amogy, the key to using ammonia in transportation is pulling it apart. One of the core technologies in the startup’s ammonia-to-power system is a chemical reactor called a cracker. This reactor breaks ammonia down into nitrogen, which can be safely released into the atmosphere, and hydrogen. That hydrogen can then be used in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Ammonia cracking isn’t a new process, but Jo and his co-inventors developed a chemical catalyst that can help the reaction run at a lower temperature, allowing the process to be done onboard vehicles. The team also developed a reactor that can run more efficiently than the current standard, turning roughly 40% of the energy in the ammonia into electricity.