Current practice in the ammonia industry is to use plain tubes. This article demonstrates that the coefficient of performance (COP) can be increased by about 11% using tubes with ammonia-side enhancement and by about 26% using tubes with ammonia-side and water-side enhancement. Further improvements with respect to energy and cost are possible with the compact heat exchanger types-plate-frame and plate-fin-because they can be optimized for the system conditions for each application. These findings are based on experimentally determined overall heat transfer coefficients that were obtained for candidate heat exchangers for the Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) program.