Green Ammonia Supply Chain Design for Maritime Transportation

Recently, there has been increased discussion about the potential of green ammonia as a carbon-free fuel for maritime transportation. If deployed at scale, the demand for ammonia from the shipping industry would be immense such that significant new investments had to be made in green ammonia infrastructure, including entire supply chains of new production sites and ammonia refueling ports. In this work, we develop an optimization model for the design of such a green ammonia supply chain. The proposed model integrates a large set of decisions, including the location of production plants and refueling ports, operational decisions related to green ammonia production using renewable energy, and ship routing decisions. This results in a complex mixed-integer linear programming formulation, which we apply to an illustrative case study to demonstrate its potential to address the given supply chain design problem.