Convergence Watch: A NASCAR Engine Builder, an MIT Spin-Out, and Pratt & Whitney Are All Cracking the Same Molecule

On the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina, on a hot Friday last June,
a 1993 Chevy Silverado pulled out of a parking lot under its own power.
Nothing unusual about that, except for the smell and the fact that the
6.6-liter V8 under the hood had been rebuilt to burn anhydrous ammonia.
The men watching were James Wall and a small team from First Ammonia
Motors. Wall used to run the engine shop at Hendrick Motorsports, where
his program won 16 NASCAR Cup Series titles. He was now using the same
combustion know-how to feed a pickup truck on the chemistry of fertilizer.

Eight months earlier, in New York Harbor, a 1957 tugboat called the NH3
Kraken completed its maiden voyage on the same fuel, routed through fuel
cells instead of pistons. In September, in Akashi, Japan, Japan Engine
Corporation finished 700 hours of land trials on the first full-scale
commercial ammonia ship engine and shipped it to a JMU yard for one of
NYK’s new gas carriers. And buried in a 2024 USPTO grant to RTX
Corporation, US 12,006,865, sits a gas turbine in which liquid ammonia is
cracked into hydrogen and nitrogen, the hydrogen filtered through a
permeable membrane, and only the hydrogen reaches the combustor of what
reads, in every other way, like a turbofan.

Four very different propulsion systems. One molecule. One catalytic recipe.

The patent surge nobody is talking about

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued 30 grants in 2025 covering
ammonia fuel, ammonia combustion, ammonia cracking, ammonia decomposition,
and on-board ammonia reforming. In the entire decade from 2014 to 2022, the
average was three to six grants per year. The line started bending in 2023
(18 grants), accelerated in 2024 (25), and the first four months of 2026
have already produced nine more, annualizing to roughly the same level as
2025. That is a tenfold step change in three years, against a base of 9.3
million U.S. utility grants in the USPTO bulk grant feed.

Underneath the patents, the science is moving faster. OpenAlex indexes
691 papers on ammonia cracking, decomposition, combustion, or fuel use
published in 2025, up from 98 in 2020 and 50 in 2015. Papers and patents
are running on parallel tracks, which is what a real technology curve
looks like.

The question is who is filing.

Same problem, four propulsion formats

Read the claims and the engineering is the same machine in different
clothing. Every system has four parts: a tank of liquid ammonia, a
catalytic reactor that splits NH₃ into H₂ and N₂, a heat-integration path
that uses engine waste heat or an electric heater to drive the endothermic
cracking step, and a combustor that burns the hydrogen.

First Ammonia Motors’ US 11,981,562 (2024) couples a heat-exchange catalyst
unit fed by engine exhaust gas in series with an electric catalyst unit.
The electric unit fires during cold start; once the exhaust is hot enough,
the engine cracks its own fuel on its own waste heat. US 12,358,787 (July
2025) extends the trick: liquid ammonia replaces glycol as the engine
coolant, carrying heat from the block into the cracking reactor.

Amogy’s US 11,912,574 and US 12,421,893, granted in May 2024 and September
2025, claim modular reactor stacks with hydrogen-permeable membranes,
sized under ten cubic meters for mobile deployment. RTX’s gas turbine uses
the same membrane to separate hydrogen before the combustor. IHI and
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the two big Japanese gas-turbine builders,
filed multiple ammonia-fired turbine and boiler grants in the same window,
layering the catalysis onto stationary power kit.

Delete “ammonia” from each patent and the descriptions still describe the
same machine: liquid feedstock into a catalyst, hydrogen out, combustion
of the hydrogen, heat looped back. What is converging is not the label.
It is the hardware.

Why ammonia, why now

The why-now is regulatory. At MEPC 83 in London in April 2025, the
International Maritime Organization approved the first binding
emissions-pricing mechanism for shipping, requiring a 21 percent cut in
greenhouse-gas-fuel intensity by 2030 and 43 percent by 2035 against a
2008 baseline. Adoption followed in October; the rules bite in 2027. As
the Ammonia Energy Association wrote in its post-MEPC analysis, by the
mid-2030s the cost math flips against LNG and biofuels, and ammonia
becomes the cheapest compliant option. European maritime law (FuelEU) is
already pushing the same direction.

The why-it-works is physics. Ammonia is a hydrogen carrier dressed as a
commodity chemical. It liquefies at minus 33 degrees Celsius at ambient
pressure or at 10 bar at room temperature, against minus 253 degrees for
liquid hydrogen. It carries 17.6 percent hydrogen by mass and burns
without CO₂. Haber-Bosch produces roughly 200 million tonnes a year,
mostly for fertilizer, and the global ammonia shipping infrastructure —
terminals, pipelines, tanker fleets, trained crews — is a century old. No
other carbon-free fuel arrives with the supply chain pre-built.

The bottleneck has always been the cracking step. Splitting NH₃ at speed,
at low temperature, with low ruthenium content, in something small enough
to bolt onto a vehicle, has been the central engineering problem. That is
the problem this patent surge is solving.

The cast

First Ammonia Motors, Charlotte, founded May 2022. Six U.S. grants
since 2023, plus pending applications in Japan, Brazil, Europe, the U.K.,
and China. The June 2025 Silverado test was the public coming-out.

Amogy, Brooklyn, founded 2020 by four MIT Materials Science alumni:
Seonghoon Woo, Hyunho Kim, Jongwon Choi, and Young Suk Jo. Seven U.S.
grants since 2023. The company has raised $302 million across nine rounds,
backed by SK Innovations, Saudi Aramco Ventures, Mitsubishi, Temasek, and
Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. As TechCrunch reported in July 2025, the
$80 million latest round earmarks ammonia not just for ships but for data
center backup power. Amogy also signed an April 2025 deal with Japanese
engineering giant JGC to industrialize its low-ruthenium catalyst, plus a
manufacturing contract with Samsung Heavy Industries.

Japan Engine Corporation (J-ENG), Akashi. Its 7UEC50LSJA-HPSCR engine,
a seven-cylinder marine diesel converted to a 95 percent ammonia co-firing
rate, finished factory trials in September 2025. Maritime Executive
reported nitrous oxide emissions of three parts per million at full load,
and an overall greenhouse-gas cut of more than 90 percent against heavy
fuel oil. The first unit ships to NYK’s new ammonia gas carrier this year.

Yara Clean Ammonia, Oslo. Yara, which runs the world’s largest
ammonia trading network, cut steel in August 2025 on the Yara Eyde, the
first ammonia-powered container ship. North Sea Container Line plans the
Oslo–Rotterdam run from 2027.

RTX Corporation (Pratt & Whitney). Two grants: US 11,920,524, a
multi-fuel ammonia/hydrogen turbine injector, and US 12,006,865, a gas
turbine with on-board cracking and membrane separation. Pratt & Whitney’s
public propulsion roadmap leads with its hydrogen-burning HySIITE rig,
which posted a 99.3 percent NOx reduction in DOE-sponsored single-nozzle
tests last year. The ammonia patents are the storage answer to HySIITE’s
combustion answer: cryogenic liquid hydrogen does not survive a
trans-Atlantic flight; ammonia sits in a wing tank and gets cracked on the
way to the combustor.

Behind them: Doosan Enerbility, Saudi Aramco, Hyundai Motor, Toyota
Industries, Perkins Engines, Haldor Topsøe, Johnson Matthey. The club that
already knows how to make and ship ammonia is small. It is now also the
club that knows how to burn it.

What an R&D director should take from this

The catalyst is the bottleneck, and the catalyst is proprietary. Amogy
told MIT News in November 2025 that miniaturized catalysts working at
lower temperatures are the rate-limiting metric, with low-ruthenium
loading the central goal. Anyone positioning in this space without a
catalyst story is selling commodity hardware.

The engineering that solves marine ammonia also solves data center
ammonia. Amogy’s last round was explicit, and hyperscale operators eyeing
multi-megawatt backup are watching. The chemistry does not care whether
the load is a ship’s screw or an Nvidia rack.

The aviation entry is real but distant. RTX has the IP; the flight test
is not in any public roadmap. But every marine and stationary ammonia
grant is a sub-component derisking step for a future ammonia turbofan.
Shipping is paying for aviation’s R&D learning curve two decades early.

The fertilizer molecule that has fed the world for a century is now being
asked to power it. The patents say it is not a question of whether, only
of which catalyst.

Method note. Patent counts come from the USPTO bulk grant feed (9.3
million U.S. utility grants), filtered to issued grants whose text matches
the phrases “ammonia fuel,” “ammonia engine,” “ammonia combustion,”
“ammonia cracking,” “cracking ammonia,” “ammonia decomposition,” “ammonia
reform,” or “reforming ammonia,” from January 2010 through early May 2026.
Assignee counts collapse corporate spelling variants. Literature counts
come from OpenAlex on the same phrase set. Regulatory citations are from
MEPC 83 documents and post-MEPC analyses published in spring 2025; company
facts are drawn from filings and trade press cited inline. Patent claims
are quoted from the granted documents. Numbers re-run on 2026-05-10.