It's not so much unavoidable as one of the things we're doing already with grey hydrogen (made from methane). It's about cleaning that up and using blue (grey with carbon capture) or green hydrogen, not finding new uses for ammonia (like using it as a fuel for e.g. shipping). Micheal Liebreich does a great job in his podcasts and articles explaining how that would be economically extremely unrealistic.
For ammonia specifically, cleaning that up requires energy that is equal to about 5% or so of global electricity production. A few petawatt hour basically. To produce around 190 million tonnes of ammonia. This setup in Minnesota is cute but it's a tiny little drop in the ocean in terms of what would be needed. It does about 1 tonne per day.
They haven't really solved or proved anything that we didn't already know. Yes you can make ammonia with electricity. Amazing. It's just that you need a ginormous amount of windmills to get to what is needed. It's doable but we're talking hundreds of thousands of windmills.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the other hydrogen based technologies up the same ladder that this website reports on / promotes, would need even more windmills, nuclear plants, perpetuum mobile machines, etc. to generate the stupendous amounts of power needed to produce all the hydrogen needed.
What Liebreich does with his ladder is making the simple point that even just converting what we currently do with grey hydrogen (i.e. mostly ammonia) to green hydrogen is going to be a decades long project.
It could probably work for arab countries as they have immense solar potential and are already big in fertilizer production and shipping. They know their natural gas is not going to last forever.
Liebreich hates green/hydrolysis because it's much more expensive (due to inefficiencies) and wasteful of green electrons compared to final consumption alternatives.
> A Minnesotan wind turbine shows that wind energy can produce more than just electricity.
No, it doesn't. It's just that electricity can be used to do lots of things, including splitting water as an input to ammonia production.
What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium), and the reason electrification is so important is because it allows faster replacement of fossil-fuel generation with carbon-free sources.
No it's not. That's not the equation. The only thing that matters is the final cost, including capex.
Utilities are pooling the wool over the eyes of PUCs and the media is not doing what it needs to show how the utilities are screwing customers because the media is illiterate...
But what China and other places (eg Spain) for this sort of ammonia is to place generation and batteries right at the ammonia site, bypassing the grid for most of their energy, dramatically lowering costs.
The grid costs more than electricity generation, and utilities get guaranteed profit on grid costs, so they try to make the grid as expensive as possible, even as renewables and storage are lowering the cost of generation.
Happily, and in fact it's the only responsible thing to do for somebody that says they care about struggling families!
Struggling families: off-grid electricity generation for clean fertilizers do not affect your electricity rates. Anybody who tries to get you angry about that is misdirecting your attention from the factors that do affect your electricity prices. If you want lower electricity prices, focus on reigning in your PUC to represent you rather than utility profits.
Or cut out the middle man and get your own solar. Who are the people in California paying $0.35/kWh to the power company when rooftop solar is less than a third of that?
Struggling families can’t buy their own off grid power generation.
I take this one rather personally as a friend of mine has had his power shut off now for the last month. I set him up with a gasoline generator which seems like the opposite of green. Electric should be very cheap and abundant.
> Struggling families can’t buy their own off grid power generation.
The premise is that the installment payments on the solar system are less than the monthly bill from paying the power company for the same amount of electricity. It can't be the thing they can't afford when it's the thing that costs less.
Right? You can go off grid anywhere. Well in some places you legally can't, and need to remain connected with a connection fee, but nobody is forcing you to draw any power from it.
> with some small number of notable exceptions like helium
Helium is one of the not-exceptions. Helium gets trapped in the same pockets as natural gas and we get it by separating it, which is an energy-intensive process, which in turn means that we don't do it for the vast majority of natural gas that gets extracted. If energy was cheaper then it would be viable to separate more of it.
Pedantically speaking, a Farnsworth Fusor makes it from hydrogen and electricity. Not in useful quantities.
That's the well known fusion reactor design that can be built by motivated high school students. Basically just accelerates hydrogen ions towards the center of a low pressure chamber using an electric field. Dead end for fusion power, but it does fuse!
Right. It also makes it sound like they’re not using the Haber Bosch process… but then:
> Electrolyzers are located on-site. They use wind energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
> Additionally, nitrogen gas is directly harnessed from the atmosphere using an air-separation unit.
> Hydrogen and nitrogen are combined under pressure, resulting in carbon-free ammonia fertilizer.
That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me. So they’re just saying, rather than divert excess generation to a battery, you could instead build a micro H-B plant on site to produce ammonia.
I doubt this makes any sense in the grand scheme of things as you achieve major efficiencies at scale for chemical plants. Makes more sense to just electrify existing ammonia plants and ensure they use renewable electricity sources.
The green chemistry industry is full of penny-wise pound-foolish concepts like this and it drives me absolutely nuts.
From doing a bit of digging into this myself after hearing it being promoted on the radio, I both agree and disagree. Working through the $/acre for on-site produced ammonia using locally-generated electricity (I forget if I was looking at PV or Wind, doesn’t matter) the payback period was surprisingly quick, like 2 or 3 years. One of the big reasons is that you don’t actually need a very big system; you only need on-farm ammonia a few days a year but you have all year long to harvest and store enough for those few days.
Then you have 1,000 separate ammonia generation systems that need upkeep, repairs, etc. It is doing chemical reactions under pressure to produce presumably ammonium nitrate which is explosive. The engineers you would need probably aren’t cheap, and storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate all year is sort of sketchy. Timothy McVeigh took out an entire federal building with about 4800 pounds of the stuff mixed with car fuel.
It’s usually a lot cheaper and safer to condense all that demand into a purpose-built facility where they can hire an engineer to look after all the generation, have centralized container storage, backup parts, etc.
None of that prevents putting the panels or windmills on farmer land, though. You could imagine some sort of “get a discount on ammonia if we can put a solar panel in your field” scheme. Or, even more simply, put up your own panels, sell the power back to the grid, use that money to buy fertilizer from the factory buying your power off the grid.
I don’t know the exact process but I don’t think ammonium nitrate actually gets involved. The system I was looking at (Green Lightning) actually doesn’t make ammonia but rather liquid nitrogen fertilizer
Plasma to take N2 + O2 -> NO2 and NO gas
The NO and NO2 are dissolved in water to become HNO2 and HNO3, which then become NO2- and NO3- ions in the water.
It’s a low pH solution which stabilizes it and then you dilute right before application so that you don’t burn the crops.
I am curious what kind of plasma is used, as there are many ways to create plasma under various conditions, with very different efficiencies, selectivity, yield, etc.
Among the worst is the Birkeland-Eyde process, hot plasma by electric arcing, like it happens naturally during a thunderstorm. Even microwaving the air is more energy efficient. And amongst the most promising are transient non-equilibirum / cold plasma approaches using ns pulse generators.
Edit: So according to this video "Green Lightning" is indeed using the Birkeland-Eyde process. In other words, there is no way they even come close to their energy efficiency and yield claims. https://youtu.be/8TOnyAwJyvg?si=D9hat_XAfvuAAmpB&t=165
That is the Birkeland-Eyde process, which was superceded by the Haber-Bosch process because it is much more energy effective.
As far as I understand, the reasons for using methane as the hydrogen source in industrial processes is because of costs and the difficulty in scaling electrolysis industrially.
So this is pretty far outside of my area of expertise, but https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8133363/ suggests that there may be an evolution of Birkeland-Eyde that isn’t nearly as bad as the original process was. I haven’t gone through this in detail and even if I had I probably don’t have the background to do it justice.
That sounds like the Birkland-Eyde process. It's cool because it uses only electricity and air and seems to produce something from nothing, but it's not as efficient as Haber-Bosch.
There's a lot of places in the world where there's room for wind but the grid can't transport it to a user. In that case consuming it locally would make sense, and especially fertilizer is a very energy heavy product.
So it might be easier to pipe the ammonia to wherever it's needed? When it's in ammonia form the energy is essentially stored for a long time.
I don’t think this is true, but it’s not my forte.
Pure ammonia is toxic to animals. At normal outdoor temperatures it also only becomes a liquid at ~100 PSI (it’s like 150 at 80F). The boiling point at STP is like -27F.
I’m doubtful running a power transmission line to these places is harder than maintaining pipes that transport either a toxic gas, or a toxic pressurized liquid.
If you could turn it into ammonium nitrate, that’s a solid at room temp and easier to transport. It’s explosive but insensitive so it shouldn’t without another explosion first. Even if it does, this sounds remote enough that it shouldn’t matter and ammonium nitrate is a no -toxic fertilizer. Wildlife shouldn’t even notice.
I didn't realize this previously but straight anhydrous ammonia can be used directly in the field as a fertilizer - specialized trucks just inject it directly into the soil where it dissolves in soil moisture.
Yes, it needs to be stored as a "toxic pressurized liquid" in steel tanks, but we store and use lots of toxic pressurized liquids all the time. Lots of people run all their energy needs off propane tanks, after all.
Probably not pipes. Unless you have a huge flow, pipelines in general don't make sense. You'd fill up some kind of container and haul it away when it's nearly full. What kind of container stores ammonia, I don't really know - which is why ammonium nitrate is often used, as it's a solid at room temperature and pressure.
>That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me.
Well, kinda. But Haber-Bosch uses an iron catalyst. This is cheap, but it requires very high temperatures and pressures. There has been some recent work on ruthenium catalysts (particularly a Japanese company Tsubame BHB) which are more expensive, but allow the reaction to proceed under milder conditions. A particular goal is to have smaller facilities which can then be colocated with power generation. So you are exchanging a higher fixed cost for hopefully lower variable costs. I don't know if that's actually what they're doing here, though.
What I find funny is people that build machines that extract carbon from the atmosphere. None of the articles about it ever mention the energy cost in running the machine or howinell it could be scaled up to make a measurable difference.
But trees, for example, are 50% carbon, extracted from the atmosphere. And they're solar powered! And look nice.
I think that's called farming. But it doesn't work any more because the farmlords (landlords who own farms) extract 98% of your would-be profit. You know why so many farmers can't financially withstand a single bad year? That's why - not personal irresponsibility.
I assume what confused the article is that ammonia plants often use natural gas, but that's purely as a convenient energy source and a source of hydrogen, so they cover both angles. But that isn't remotely a necessity.
Not to mention ammonia isn't the friendliest of chemicals and doesn't exactly beg for decentralized logistics.
I think, projects like these grew out of dunkelflaute moral panic regarding renewable energy. Meanwhile grid battery storage has becomes cheap enough to completely obliterate this concern.
And quite frankly, fertilizer needs in agriculture should be addressed by ecological means anyway. If we want to lower the impact of climate change, we need to get out of this "just throw more energy at it" technology mindset.
Here in Germany we have up to three months of almost zero solar production in winter due to foggy conditions (measured from my own solar inverter). It is not feasible to store summer electricity until winter in batteries. Batteries have self-discharge and would be hilariously expensive per KWh if they only cycle once a year. Chemical storage is probably the way to go here at least, and hydrogen can be used for many other useful things than just heating or running power plants.
Although there are many sunny countries where solar + one or two days of battery storage are probably enough for the full year.
If you've ever played Factorio you'll know that everyone makes batteries because they are cheap, but you also have the option to have a separate power grid that just doesn't get powered at night and shut down your factory at night, which you would do if you modded it so that you couldn't make batteries so easily.
Right, in winter there is less sun. However, there still is some sunlight and in winter you also still got wind energy. Maybe more wind, especially off-shore. Not to mention geothermal and water energy.
In any case, battery storage has been shown to be economically feasible already and are as of now operating at scale. And battery tech is only getting better. The worries about grid stability are therefore unwarranted. If you can manage the up and down of wind and solar, you don't need gas energy to stabilize the grid, you got better bad options and the seasonal variation becomes highly predictable. And of course you could e.g. reserve water potential energy generation for winter times.
And as I said, we also need to cut down our energy consumption. Building data centers to undress celebrities is not the direction of survival.
Hydrogen generation, storage, logistics and electricity conversion are all very lossy. Again battery/solar/wind tech is already there and is only getting better. We should absolutely not use hydrogen for anything, where direct electrification/battery storage is possible. We critically need it for things like steel production, but that's a special use case, where it should be made on-site. Let's be real, the only reason anyone in Germany is pushing for hydrogen is because the German "industry" historically sabotaged local solar and storage tech and now try to salvage their obsolete combustion tech. Hydrogen has a lobby, but no future. For similar reasons Russia and USA are putting propaganda efforts into climate denial: China owns battery and solar tech, China owns the energy future. It's sad, but true. There is no one to blame but those legacy economies being all inert, fat and complacent - they got a million chances to win this slow, slow race, which has been advertised a century ago.
Which is why I always advocate that countries should generate energy in abundance. You should have energy to waste. If you are burning fossil fuels, that should be considered a failure mode. Fossil fuels should be bottom of the barrel stuff, what you burn when you have no other options.
Otherwise, do whatever. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear. Do everything. Do batteries. Do geothermal. Have so much energy you can waste on silly things. Diversity is good here.
> What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium)
You're saying freshwater shortage is really just an energy shortage?
You're saying every population everything on earth could solve their freshwater problem with desalination if only they had cheap energy? No other issues here besides lack of energy?
Try thinking of this another way to help you understand. How does nature get most of us surface freshwater to begin with? Energy from the sun heats ocean water which causes evaporation into the atmosphere (aka "natural desalinization") and then wind patterns in the atmosphere (also generated by energy from the sun) cause clouds to move over land where water vapor eventually condenses and falls as precipitation, filling lakes and rivers.
So the equation is basically energy input from the sun creates freshwater from salt water and transports it over land. Humans can, and have, replicated this process artificially, the limiting factor just being the cost of energy.
You also need seawater. But infinite energy lets you move fresh water a long distance. You could deliver it to the middle of the country from the coast. Or from other countries.
Even in the middle of the Atacama, it's still just an energy problem. The Atacama basically borders the Pacific, so it's just a desalinization and transport issue, which is, again, all just energy.
Yes, but that's localized and temporary. It's nothing like the ecological impact of burning fossil fuels, and more like the ecological impact of a quarry. It's a lower impact than a hydro dam, I think.
You have an intake that can suck in sea life accidentally, and an outlet that emits water too salty for sea life to survive, which doesn't go beyond a certain distance as it mixes again with normal ocean water.
> This process is extremely heat-intensive and accounts for up to 2% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
> While it is highly unsustainable, it has doubled the Earth’s food-carrying capacity and still feeds almost 50% of the population.
2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What?
> The key is to create synthetic ammonia fertilizer by combining atmospheric nitrogen with natural gas or coal.
> Synthetic fertilizer is traditionally created in chemical plants that require continuous, high-volume power. This is why producers remain reliant on fossil fuel-powered grids.
What, again? Haber-Bosch process requires continuous power doesn't mean it's natural gas or coal. Where is nuclear? Is solar/wind disrupt that much that it can't compress/heat up some gas??
> 2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What?
Eventually you cook everybody and the population drops to 0. We want to maintain the "feed everybody" aspect while eliminating the "continually add excess carbon to the atmosphere and render the planet uninhabitable" aspect.
Haber-Bosch require continuous input of hydrogen, but aside from that it is a net source of power. The reaction is exothermic and can provide more than enough work to drive compressors that pressurize the reactants.
Looking more closely, it's not true at all. So ignore what I wrote. I was confused by compressors being driven by steam from the SMR plant that made hydrogen from natural gas.
TIL the Red Pyramid looks remarkably like the Haber-Bosch ammonia production process. And the word "Amun" is the etymological root of the word Ammonia.
A loop where solar is converted to fertiliser using similar process , probably generating hydrogen as a side effect with some mechanism to probably capture some carbon for economically useful use when it reaches say an LCOE of 0.01 $/kwh and done on mind boggling scale might actually be the holy grail solution to a lot of problems at the same time. Might need quite a few breakthroughs in the material science scheme of things though. There are good reasons why hydrogen has never really taken off by itself even with so much scale, innovation thrown at it so far. The best hope is China doing to hydrogen now what it did to solar in 2010s.
I work with a company that produces ammonia from local waste streams. The current policies and war has really hurt farmers. Certain fertilizers and other inputs have more than doubled in price, if they can even be found anymore.
Sounds like an opportunity to scale up your business. If the competition suddenly gets expensive that is a market opportunity.
Of course it's never that simple. If the war ends tomorrow and fertilizer prices drop back to normal over the course of the next two years an expansion could find itself uncompetitive just as its coming online.
We are expanding and we’ve ensured our loyal customers remain supplied! Because of our waste processing ability I’m not worried about competition, it’s a fundamentally different value prop than Haber Bosch.
the talk about "electricity can do things" misses whats actually interesting here. Working in the energy sector, the hard problem is rarely generating the power, it is getting it into the grid. connection queue runs for years and turbines regularly get curtailed when the grid c anncot absorb more. A flexible load behind the meter, like an electrolyzer making ammonia on site, monetizes energy that would otherwise be wasted or never get built at all. The fertilizer is almost a side effect, the real product is a use for stranded wind. i would also add that wind + battery would be much better both for stablization and also the same use as mentioned in the article.
A nice thing about the fertilizer is that it is only needed for a few weeks out of the year, which means it can be produced intermittently and stored without causing problems. If there are two weeks of non-production due to weather that isn't an issue so long as it averages out over the year. One could imagine a plant that only runs when the electricity is almost free.
Well, the problem of storage blew up Beirut. I wouldn't say it isn't a problem. It's manageable if you pay attention to storage conditions which they didn't for several years.
yeah and imagine you store the unregulated energy source in a battery so you can use it whenever you want OR you could also help stabilize the grid and or sell your energy from the battery if you want. wind + battery will become very popular in the comming years and is already being highly adopted in countries like spain
It's AI-generated dog shit, and I feel bad for getting roped in by it. Another commenter noticed there is another article on that site that's almost identical despite being about a different topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049204
I would prefer to have figures how this compares to the traditional Haber-Bosch-process, how much energy is put into this, and how much fertilizer do we get for it, if it's just a PoC without evaluation of how much energy is used. in this whole process we got nothing NB: to beat Haber-Bosch you don't need much. it isn't only about the produced carbon dioxide
To make sense, this has to compete with the cost and value of battery storage. That depends on location and energy and fertilizer needs at that location. So I guess it's possible that the cost makes sense, but it doesn't seem very likely compared to the ever falling cost of battery storage.
Some will criticize renewable energy because the power output is spiky. This sort of thing is why that doesn't matter. There are plenty of things you can do with excess power. There's been research in manufacturing gasoline from the air. It's not economical to do for its own sake but when we're talking about excess power, that's not really a factor. Fertilizer is a new one (to me). But it makes sense. You'll still need phosphorus (phosphate) from somewhere.
Thought about something similar a few months ago, love seeing it in action. The article was terrible however, dunno why every other sentence is bold. Genuenly feels like I'm reading a middle schooler trying to fulfill a word usage/sentience structure quota.
This is one of the "unavoidable" uses of clean hydrogen, in the Clean Hydrogen Ladder.
At the other end of the spectrum ("uncompetitive") you get things like fuel-cell cars.
https://liebreich.com/the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-...
It's not so much unavoidable as one of the things we're doing already with grey hydrogen (made from methane). It's about cleaning that up and using blue (grey with carbon capture) or green hydrogen, not finding new uses for ammonia (like using it as a fuel for e.g. shipping). Micheal Liebreich does a great job in his podcasts and articles explaining how that would be economically extremely unrealistic.
For ammonia specifically, cleaning that up requires energy that is equal to about 5% or so of global electricity production. A few petawatt hour basically. To produce around 190 million tonnes of ammonia. This setup in Minnesota is cute but it's a tiny little drop in the ocean in terms of what would be needed. It does about 1 tonne per day.
They haven't really solved or proved anything that we didn't already know. Yes you can make ammonia with electricity. Amazing. It's just that you need a ginormous amount of windmills to get to what is needed. It's doable but we're talking hundreds of thousands of windmills.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the other hydrogen based technologies up the same ladder that this website reports on / promotes, would need even more windmills, nuclear plants, perpetuum mobile machines, etc. to generate the stupendous amounts of power needed to produce all the hydrogen needed.
What Liebreich does with his ladder is making the simple point that even just converting what we currently do with grey hydrogen (i.e. mostly ammonia) to green hydrogen is going to be a decades long project.
It could probably work for arab countries as they have immense solar potential and are already big in fertilizer production and shipping. They know their natural gas is not going to last forever.
Liebreich hates green/hydrolysis because it's much more expensive (due to inefficiencies) and wasteful of green electrons compared to final consumption alternatives.
Most recent dealflow in the space as well as national hydrogen strategies have been explicitly calling out fertilizer for almost a decade now.
Saudi's PIF has specifically been active on this thesis becuase becoming a lead fertilizer producer is part of Vision 2030.
I'd recommend reading "Hydrogen Diplomacy" [0] to deep dive into this.
[0] - https://fupubco.com/books/index.php/fupub/catalog/book/2
This sentence really bugged me:
> A Minnesotan wind turbine shows that wind energy can produce more than just electricity.
No, it doesn't. It's just that electricity can be used to do lots of things, including splitting water as an input to ammonia production.
What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium), and the reason electrification is so important is because it allows faster replacement of fossil-fuel generation with carbon-free sources.
Even if carbon was a complete non-issue, electrification and a greater diversity of energy sources would still have immense value.
Electrification is a no-go when electricity prices keep going up up up.
No it's not. That's not the equation. The only thing that matters is the final cost, including capex.
Utilities are pooling the wool over the eyes of PUCs and the media is not doing what it needs to show how the utilities are screwing customers because the media is illiterate...
But what China and other places (eg Spain) for this sort of ammonia is to place generation and batteries right at the ammonia site, bypassing the grid for most of their energy, dramatically lowering costs.
The grid costs more than electricity generation, and utilities get guaranteed profit on grid costs, so they try to make the grid as expensive as possible, even as renewables and storage are lowering the cost of generation.
Pooling?
Ugh, too late to edit some serious typos/autocorrect errors:
pooling --> pulling
illiterate --> innumerate.
pulling
The price of grid electricity is moot when you're powering the process with locally generated green energy.
Tell that to struggling family’s electric bills
Happily, and in fact it's the only responsible thing to do for somebody that says they care about struggling families!
Struggling families: off-grid electricity generation for clean fertilizers do not affect your electricity rates. Anybody who tries to get you angry about that is misdirecting your attention from the factors that do affect your electricity prices. If you want lower electricity prices, focus on reigning in your PUC to represent you rather than utility profits.
Or cut out the middle man and get your own solar. Who are the people in California paying $0.35/kWh to the power company when rooftop solar is less than a third of that?
Struggling families can’t buy their own off grid power generation.
I take this one rather personally as a friend of mine has had his power shut off now for the last month. I set him up with a gasoline generator which seems like the opposite of green. Electric should be very cheap and abundant.
> Struggling families can’t buy their own off grid power generation.
The premise is that the installment payments on the solar system are less than the monthly bill from paying the power company for the same amount of electricity. It can't be the thing they can't afford when it's the thing that costs less.
Right? You can go off grid anywhere. Well in some places you legally can't, and need to remain connected with a connection fee, but nobody is forcing you to draw any power from it.
what does this have to do with fertilizer production again?
> with some small number of notable exceptions like helium
Helium is one of the not-exceptions. Helium gets trapped in the same pockets as natural gas and we get it by separating it, which is an energy-intensive process, which in turn means that we don't do it for the vast majority of natural gas that gets extracted. If energy was cheaper then it would be viable to separate more of it.
Pedantically speaking, a Farnsworth Fusor makes it from hydrogen and electricity. Not in useful quantities.
That's the well known fusion reactor design that can be built by motivated high school students. Basically just accelerates hydrogen ions towards the center of a low pressure chamber using an electric field. Dead end for fusion power, but it does fuse!
Right. It also makes it sound like they’re not using the Haber Bosch process… but then:
> Electrolyzers are located on-site. They use wind energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
> Additionally, nitrogen gas is directly harnessed from the atmosphere using an air-separation unit.
> Hydrogen and nitrogen are combined under pressure, resulting in carbon-free ammonia fertilizer.
That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me. So they’re just saying, rather than divert excess generation to a battery, you could instead build a micro H-B plant on site to produce ammonia.
I doubt this makes any sense in the grand scheme of things as you achieve major efficiencies at scale for chemical plants. Makes more sense to just electrify existing ammonia plants and ensure they use renewable electricity sources.
The green chemistry industry is full of penny-wise pound-foolish concepts like this and it drives me absolutely nuts.
From doing a bit of digging into this myself after hearing it being promoted on the radio, I both agree and disagree. Working through the $/acre for on-site produced ammonia using locally-generated electricity (I forget if I was looking at PV or Wind, doesn’t matter) the payback period was surprisingly quick, like 2 or 3 years. One of the big reasons is that you don’t actually need a very big system; you only need on-farm ammonia a few days a year but you have all year long to harvest and store enough for those few days.
Then you have 1,000 separate ammonia generation systems that need upkeep, repairs, etc. It is doing chemical reactions under pressure to produce presumably ammonium nitrate which is explosive. The engineers you would need probably aren’t cheap, and storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate all year is sort of sketchy. Timothy McVeigh took out an entire federal building with about 4800 pounds of the stuff mixed with car fuel.
It’s usually a lot cheaper and safer to condense all that demand into a purpose-built facility where they can hire an engineer to look after all the generation, have centralized container storage, backup parts, etc.
None of that prevents putting the panels or windmills on farmer land, though. You could imagine some sort of “get a discount on ammonia if we can put a solar panel in your field” scheme. Or, even more simply, put up your own panels, sell the power back to the grid, use that money to buy fertilizer from the factory buying your power off the grid.
I don’t know the exact process but I don’t think ammonium nitrate actually gets involved. The system I was looking at (Green Lightning) actually doesn’t make ammonia but rather liquid nitrogen fertilizer
Plasma to take N2 + O2 -> NO2 and NO gas
The NO and NO2 are dissolved in water to become HNO2 and HNO3, which then become NO2- and NO3- ions in the water.
It’s a low pH solution which stabilizes it and then you dilute right before application so that you don’t burn the crops.
I am curious what kind of plasma is used, as there are many ways to create plasma under various conditions, with very different efficiencies, selectivity, yield, etc.
Among the worst is the Birkeland-Eyde process, hot plasma by electric arcing, like it happens naturally during a thunderstorm. Even microwaving the air is more energy efficient. And amongst the most promising are transient non-equilibirum / cold plasma approaches using ns pulse generators.
Edit: So according to this video "Green Lightning" is indeed using the Birkeland-Eyde process. In other words, there is no way they even come close to their energy efficiency and yield claims. https://youtu.be/8TOnyAwJyvg?si=D9hat_XAfvuAAmpB&t=165
That is the Birkeland-Eyde process, which was superceded by the Haber-Bosch process because it is much more energy effective.
As far as I understand, the reasons for using methane as the hydrogen source in industrial processes is because of costs and the difficulty in scaling electrolysis industrially.
Right, makes perfect sense.
So this is pretty far outside of my area of expertise, but https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8133363/ suggests that there may be an evolution of Birkeland-Eyde that isn’t nearly as bad as the original process was. I haven’t gone through this in detail and even if I had I probably don’t have the background to do it justice.
That sounds like the Birkland-Eyde process. It's cool because it uses only electricity and air and seems to produce something from nothing, but it's not as efficient as Haber-Bosch.
There's a lot of places in the world where there's room for wind but the grid can't transport it to a user. In that case consuming it locally would make sense, and especially fertilizer is a very energy heavy product.
So it might be easier to pipe the ammonia to wherever it's needed? When it's in ammonia form the energy is essentially stored for a long time.
I don’t think this is true, but it’s not my forte.
Pure ammonia is toxic to animals. At normal outdoor temperatures it also only becomes a liquid at ~100 PSI (it’s like 150 at 80F). The boiling point at STP is like -27F.
I’m doubtful running a power transmission line to these places is harder than maintaining pipes that transport either a toxic gas, or a toxic pressurized liquid.
If you could turn it into ammonium nitrate, that’s a solid at room temp and easier to transport. It’s explosive but insensitive so it shouldn’t without another explosion first. Even if it does, this sounds remote enough that it shouldn’t matter and ammonium nitrate is a no -toxic fertilizer. Wildlife shouldn’t even notice.
I didn't realize this previously but straight anhydrous ammonia can be used directly in the field as a fertilizer - specialized trucks just inject it directly into the soil where it dissolves in soil moisture.
Yes, it needs to be stored as a "toxic pressurized liquid" in steel tanks, but we store and use lots of toxic pressurized liquids all the time. Lots of people run all their energy needs off propane tanks, after all.
Probably not pipes. Unless you have a huge flow, pipelines in general don't make sense. You'd fill up some kind of container and haul it away when it's nearly full. What kind of container stores ammonia, I don't really know - which is why ammonium nitrate is often used, as it's a solid at room temperature and pressure.
What if the Ammonia is used locally? Potentially, in that Minnesota farm.
It eliminates the need to connect the turbine to the grid.
>That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me.
Well, kinda. But Haber-Bosch uses an iron catalyst. This is cheap, but it requires very high temperatures and pressures. There has been some recent work on ruthenium catalysts (particularly a Japanese company Tsubame BHB) which are more expensive, but allow the reaction to proceed under milder conditions. A particular goal is to have smaller facilities which can then be colocated with power generation. So you are exchanging a higher fixed cost for hopefully lower variable costs. I don't know if that's actually what they're doing here, though.
One presumes the temperature and pressure can also be created renewably.
What I find funny is people that build machines that extract carbon from the atmosphere. None of the articles about it ever mention the energy cost in running the machine or howinell it could be scaled up to make a measurable difference.
But trees, for example, are 50% carbon, extracted from the atmosphere. And they're solar powered! And look nice.
“Plant more trees” won’t get you an IPO.
Finding a way to make money by capturing CO2 will get you an IPO. The technology you use is only of secondary concern.
I think that's called farming. But it doesn't work any more because the farmlords (landlords who own farms) extract 98% of your would-be profit. You know why so many farmers can't financially withstand a single bad year? That's why - not personal irresponsibility.
What are you talking about? Farmland usually leases for $50-$200 an acre per year.
Equipment too?
It is literally the Haber-Bosch process, without question. The school actually calls it that in their own paper, https://cbsi-asabe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Harvesting..., because that is what it is.
I assume what confused the article is that ammonia plants often use natural gas, but that's purely as a convenient energy source and a source of hydrogen, so they cover both angles. But that isn't remotely a necessity.
Not to mention ammonia isn't the friendliest of chemicals and doesn't exactly beg for decentralized logistics.
I think, projects like these grew out of dunkelflaute moral panic regarding renewable energy. Meanwhile grid battery storage has becomes cheap enough to completely obliterate this concern.
And quite frankly, fertilizer needs in agriculture should be addressed by ecological means anyway. If we want to lower the impact of climate change, we need to get out of this "just throw more energy at it" technology mindset.
Here in Germany we have up to three months of almost zero solar production in winter due to foggy conditions (measured from my own solar inverter). It is not feasible to store summer electricity until winter in batteries. Batteries have self-discharge and would be hilariously expensive per KWh if they only cycle once a year. Chemical storage is probably the way to go here at least, and hydrogen can be used for many other useful things than just heating or running power plants.
Although there are many sunny countries where solar + one or two days of battery storage are probably enough for the full year.
If you've ever played Factorio you'll know that everyone makes batteries because they are cheap, but you also have the option to have a separate power grid that just doesn't get powered at night and shut down your factory at night, which you would do if you modded it so that you couldn't make batteries so easily.
Right, in winter there is less sun. However, there still is some sunlight and in winter you also still got wind energy. Maybe more wind, especially off-shore. Not to mention geothermal and water energy.
In any case, battery storage has been shown to be economically feasible already and are as of now operating at scale. And battery tech is only getting better. The worries about grid stability are therefore unwarranted. If you can manage the up and down of wind and solar, you don't need gas energy to stabilize the grid, you got better bad options and the seasonal variation becomes highly predictable. And of course you could e.g. reserve water potential energy generation for winter times.
And as I said, we also need to cut down our energy consumption. Building data centers to undress celebrities is not the direction of survival.
Hydrogen generation, storage, logistics and electricity conversion are all very lossy. Again battery/solar/wind tech is already there and is only getting better. We should absolutely not use hydrogen for anything, where direct electrification/battery storage is possible. We critically need it for things like steel production, but that's a special use case, where it should be made on-site. Let's be real, the only reason anyone in Germany is pushing for hydrogen is because the German "industry" historically sabotaged local solar and storage tech and now try to salvage their obsolete combustion tech. Hydrogen has a lobby, but no future. For similar reasons Russia and USA are putting propaganda efforts into climate denial: China owns battery and solar tech, China owns the energy future. It's sad, but true. There is no one to blame but those legacy economies being all inert, fat and complacent - they got a million chances to win this slow, slow race, which has been advertised a century ago.
The whole article is trash.
Every sentence its own paragraph.
Every second word bold.
Who writes like that?
Is this some kind of stupid SEO/AI crawler optimization?
Reads like a hallucinated writeup to me.
Just wait until you hear about the underwater turbine that can do far more than generate electricity!
https://energiesmedia.com/texas-turbine-under-water-more-tha...
Thanks. Ugh, now I feel bad for wasting time on this AI-generated slop.
Which is why I always advocate that countries should generate energy in abundance. You should have energy to waste. If you are burning fossil fuels, that should be considered a failure mode. Fossil fuels should be bottom of the barrel stuff, what you burn when you have no other options.
Otherwise, do whatever. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear. Do everything. Do batteries. Do geothermal. Have so much energy you can waste on silly things. Diversity is good here.
> What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium)
You're saying freshwater shortage is really just an energy shortage?
Yes, absolutely. Look at places like Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East that run on desalinization plants. It's energy, all the way down.
You're saying every population everything on earth could solve their freshwater problem with desalination if only they had cheap energy? No other issues here besides lack of energy?
Try thinking of this another way to help you understand. How does nature get most of us surface freshwater to begin with? Energy from the sun heats ocean water which causes evaporation into the atmosphere (aka "natural desalinization") and then wind patterns in the atmosphere (also generated by energy from the sun) cause clouds to move over land where water vapor eventually condenses and falls as precipitation, filling lakes and rivers.
So the equation is basically energy input from the sun creates freshwater from salt water and transports it over land. Humans can, and have, replicated this process artificially, the limiting factor just being the cost of energy.
You also need seawater. But infinite energy lets you move fresh water a long distance. You could deliver it to the middle of the country from the coast. Or from other countries.
Unless you're in the middle of the Atacama or on the moon or something, yes.
Even in the middle of the Atacama, it's still just an energy problem. The Atacama basically borders the Pacific, so it's just a desalinization and transport issue, which is, again, all just energy.
With desalinization, in most places that is the case.
Er... for starters, hasn't one of the biggest arguments against desalination been the ecological impact? Or are we assuming spherical cows here?
Yes, but that's localized and temporary. It's nothing like the ecological impact of burning fossil fuels, and more like the ecological impact of a quarry. It's a lower impact than a hydro dam, I think.
You have an intake that can suck in sea life accidentally, and an outlet that emits water too salty for sea life to survive, which doesn't go beyond a certain distance as it mixes again with normal ocean water.
We have near perfect processes for saltwater filtering.
Are you saying it isn’t?
> No, it doesn't.
Also it doesn’t need to, wind energy was used to produce things before electricity was harnessed in the first place.
Sailboats are harnessed wind energy and some 10kY old. Windmills and wind pumps were invented some time between 700 and 900.
> This process is extremely heat-intensive and accounts for up to 2% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
> While it is highly unsustainable, it has doubled the Earth’s food-carrying capacity and still feeds almost 50% of the population.
2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What?
> The key is to create synthetic ammonia fertilizer by combining atmospheric nitrogen with natural gas or coal.
> Synthetic fertilizer is traditionally created in chemical plants that require continuous, high-volume power. This is why producers remain reliant on fossil fuel-powered grids.
What, again? Haber-Bosch process requires continuous power doesn't mean it's natural gas or coal. Where is nuclear? Is solar/wind disrupt that much that it can't compress/heat up some gas??
> 2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What?
Eventually you cook everybody and the population drops to 0. We want to maintain the "feed everybody" aspect while eliminating the "continually add excess carbon to the atmosphere and render the planet uninhabitable" aspect.
Haber-Bosch require continuous input of hydrogen, but aside from that it is a net source of power. The reaction is exothermic and can provide more than enough work to drive compressors that pressurize the reactants.
Is that true in practice or just in theory?
Looking more closely, it's not true at all. So ignore what I wrote. I was confused by compressors being driven by steam from the SMR plant that made hydrogen from natural gas.
TIL the Red Pyramid looks remarkably like the Haber-Bosch ammonia production process. And the word "Amun" is the etymological root of the word Ammonia.
From "Brawndo Plasma Thermos Makes What Plants Crave [video]" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793495 about hot plasma treatment turning water into fertilizer;
> [Magnesium-doped geotextile water bags yield Struvite fertilizer (at lower cost but with Pb contamination risk)]
A loop where solar is converted to fertiliser using similar process , probably generating hydrogen as a side effect with some mechanism to probably capture some carbon for economically useful use when it reaches say an LCOE of 0.01 $/kwh and done on mind boggling scale might actually be the holy grail solution to a lot of problems at the same time. Might need quite a few breakthroughs in the material science scheme of things though. There are good reasons why hydrogen has never really taken off by itself even with so much scale, innovation thrown at it so far. The best hope is China doing to hydrogen now what it did to solar in 2010s.
I work with a company that produces ammonia from local waste streams. The current policies and war has really hurt farmers. Certain fertilizers and other inputs have more than doubled in price, if they can even be found anymore.
Sounds like an opportunity to scale up your business. If the competition suddenly gets expensive that is a market opportunity.
Of course it's never that simple. If the war ends tomorrow and fertilizer prices drop back to normal over the course of the next two years an expansion could find itself uncompetitive just as its coming online.
We are expanding and we’ve ensured our loyal customers remain supplied! Because of our waste processing ability I’m not worried about competition, it’s a fundamentally different value prop than Haber Bosch.
the talk about "electricity can do things" misses whats actually interesting here. Working in the energy sector, the hard problem is rarely generating the power, it is getting it into the grid. connection queue runs for years and turbines regularly get curtailed when the grid c anncot absorb more. A flexible load behind the meter, like an electrolyzer making ammonia on site, monetizes energy that would otherwise be wasted or never get built at all. The fertilizer is almost a side effect, the real product is a use for stranded wind. i would also add that wind + battery would be much better both for stablization and also the same use as mentioned in the article.
A nice thing about the fertilizer is that it is only needed for a few weeks out of the year, which means it can be produced intermittently and stored without causing problems. If there are two weeks of non-production due to weather that isn't an issue so long as it averages out over the year. One could imagine a plant that only runs when the electricity is almost free.
Well, the problem of storage blew up Beirut. I wouldn't say it isn't a problem. It's manageable if you pay attention to storage conditions which they didn't for several years.
yeah and imagine you store the unregulated energy source in a battery so you can use it whenever you want OR you could also help stabilize the grid and or sell your energy from the battery if you want. wind + battery will become very popular in the comming years and is already being highly adopted in countries like spain
you guys made the case better in 2 comments - the original article is bloated and misses these key aspects.
I read that article. I don't know why. It was a difficult read.
Nearly every sentence has a bold-face phrase. There are no paragraphs, only sentences. It is borderline incoherent and very off-putting.
That style article needs to eliminated. Surely there is a better information source for this site and process than this online rag.
It's AI-generated dog shit, and I feel bad for getting roped in by it. Another commenter noticed there is another article on that site that's almost identical despite being about a different topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049204
Kinda looks like a low-quality executive summary of a longer text. I agree, it's garbage.
Found this cool PBS video on the Western Minnesota researchers working on this. If you'd like to ingest this info in the form of a nine-minute PBS piece, here you go: https://pbswisconsin.org/watch/prairie-sportsman/fertilizer-...
I would prefer to have figures how this compares to the traditional Haber-Bosch-process, how much energy is put into this, and how much fertilizer do we get for it, if it's just a PoC without evaluation of how much energy is used. in this whole process we got nothing NB: to beat Haber-Bosch you don't need much. it isn't only about the produced carbon dioxide
This setup uses the Haber-Bosch process. It’s different because it’s not tied to the grid (it’s not actually different at all)
To make sense, this has to compete with the cost and value of battery storage. That depends on location and energy and fertilizer needs at that location. So I guess it's possible that the cost makes sense, but it doesn't seem very likely compared to the ever falling cost of battery storage.
Some will criticize renewable energy because the power output is spiky. This sort of thing is why that doesn't matter. There are plenty of things you can do with excess power. There's been research in manufacturing gasoline from the air. It's not economical to do for its own sake but when we're talking about excess power, that's not really a factor. Fertilizer is a new one (to me). But it makes sense. You'll still need phosphorus (phosphate) from somewhere.
Sadly I suspect crypto mining may be more profitable
Once wind and solar is routinely overproducing what the grid and grid storage can consume, lots of things like this start to become economic. Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas to help manage seasonal fluctuations in demand (e.g. windless winter nights) since gas is cheap to store for long periods.
It's even possible to synthesize airline fuel this way - https://syntholene.com/
Thought about something similar a few months ago, love seeing it in action. The article was terrible however, dunno why every other sentence is bold. Genuenly feels like I'm reading a middle schooler trying to fulfill a word usage/sentience structure quota.
In other news, wind mills have been used to produce lots of other things that require electricity.
As well as tons of other things without electricity involved at all! Don Quixote was never in fear of being electrocuted.
In other news, no whales were bothered by this windmill, either.
We need to hurry and kill this tech before environmentalists try to make other fertilizers illegal and cause mass famine.