Agustin Valera-Medina

Agustin Valera-Medina is a Professor at Cardiff School of Engineering, U.K. He has participated as PI/Co-I in 31 industrial projects with multinationals including PEMEX, Rolls-Royce, Siemens, Ricardo, Airbus, BP, etc. attracting approximately £13M in research to Cardiff University from more than £35M in participating projects. He has published 215 papers (h-index 31), 79 of these specifically concerning ammonia power. He has supervised 27 PhD students, 9 on ammonia-related topics.

Prof. Valera-Medina led Cardiff’s contribution to the Innovate-UK “Decoupled Green Energy” Project (2015–2018) led by Siemens and in partnership with STFC and the University of Oxford, which aimed to demonstrate the use of green ammonia produced from wind energy. He is currently PI of the project SAFE-AGT (EP/T009314/1, £1.9M) to demonstrate the use of ammonia as an efficient gas turbine fuel. He leads the combustion work package of the H2020 project FLEXnCONFU (884157), a €12.7M project conceived to demonstrate ammonia power in large turbine engines. He is co-leader of MariNH3 (£6M) UKRI program grant to develop and demonstrate ammonia fueling marine engines, and co-leader of OceanREFuel (£10M) UKRI program. He is also PI and co-I of projects related to ammonia for transportation, propulsion, and heat/cooling. He has been part of various scientific boards, chairing sessions in international conferences and moderating large industrial panels on the topic of “Ammonia for Direct Use.” He supported the preparation of the Royal Society Policy Briefings “Green Ammonia” on the use of ammonia as energy vector. He is the main author of the book 'Techno-economic challenges of ammonia as energy vector' (Elsevier). Prof. Valera-Medina is currently Director of the Net Zero Innovation Institute at Cardiff University.