The production of fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate and urea require ammonia. Ammonia is synthesized on large scales with the Haber-Bosch process. This process requires hydrogen, which is obtained by steam reforming of methane in natural gas.
When natural gas prices exploded in Europe, many fertilizer factories had to stop production:
There are several fertilizers required to maintain current global agricultural productivity. Phosphate and potassium are mostly from mineral (mined) sources today, but the one that is captured from the air is nitrogen, and to be used by plants it must be reduced from N2 to NH3 (ammonia) at which point it can also be converted to NO3 (nitrate). Since the early 20th century this has been accomplished by the Bosch-Haber process which utilizes natural gas as the source of the hydrogen to convert N2 to NH3.
The point is that you can make H2 via the electrolysis of water at scale, eliminating the need for the natural gas, and feed that H2 into the existing Haber-Bosch plants. Since sunlight and water are available basically everywhere, this eliminates a lot of the geopolitical and supply chain problems that are currently plagueing countries around the world with respect to nitrogen fertilizers (mined fertilizers are another story, of course).
The Haber Process for making nitrogen fertilizer uses HYDROGEN as the feedstock for making ammonia, NOT methane! Natural gas steam reforming is just the cheapest source of hydrogen (usually), but before about 1950, we used electricity (usually from cheap renewables like hydro) to make hydrogen for ammonia. Easy peasy with wind and solar!
Gas is needed for fertilizer production because it's one of the input resources - Haber-Bosch capture of ammonia (nitrogen) requires a source of hydrogen and that's usually natural gas since it's rich in hydrogen.
As such, lumping in the gas that's used for fertilizer production in with gas used for energy production makes limited sense - it's not fungible and can't just replaced with nuclear (or any other) energy. In the future, it would be possible to use hydrogen generated via hydrolysis, but we're pretty far off doing that on industrial scale.
To make the point a little clearer - natural gas is an important resource for the chemical industry, for example input to the Haber-Bosch synthesis of Ammonia. The Hydrogen used is mostly gained from methane, that is natural gas. Ammonia is fundamental in producing fertilizer - cutting of natural gas could severely reduce fertilizer production, at a time when two of the largest grain exporters are at war and unlikely to produce much in terms of exports.
It’s possible to produce the required hydrogen using electricity and electrolysis, but not at a moments notice. You can’t just easily replace gas in electricity production by using nuclear- gas power plants are used for peak load, nuclear power plants for base load.
The Haber-Bosch process creates ammonia (a solution that can then be oxidized to create nitrates and nitrites) by passing nitrogen from the air and hydrogen, currently stripped from hydrocarbons, over an iron catalyst. If a "hydrogen economy" were to actually appear this same H2 would be used to produce ammonia (and you could actually cut out several steps in the current process that are necessary to eliminate any trace of carbon monoxide during the conversion of methane into H2, CO2, and water.) If alternative energy can be used to create hydrogen in a cost-effective manner then you are golden as far as fertilizer is concerned.
This statement may be wrong but for different reasons - it boils down to just how much electricity vs. petroleum we need to use to make fertilizer. I don't know much about fertilizer manufacturing, but from a quick look at Wikipedia I think that for nitrogen ones we could conceivably replace natural gas with some other hydrogen source and run the whole Haber-Bosch stack off electricity.
Probably because ammonia production is using a waste product from natural gas plants (hydrogen).
This just means that one of the inputs for ammonia production has esentially zero cost, on those plants. But it does not answer any of the following questions:
1) Can that scale to produce high quantities of ammonia, without having adverse effects. That is, if the goal is to reduce dependency on hydrocarbons, having more natural gas plants makes no sense.
2) Would it be cheaper to produce hydrogen (and thus ammonia) using other processes? Currently the hydrogen is free from natual gas plants, but the natural gas plant is very much non-free. If you do not want natural gas, it makes no sense.
The Haber-Bosch reaction is what turns atmospheric dinitrogen (N2) into ammonia. Ammonia can be oxidized to make nitric acid and nitrate fertilizers, combined with carbon dioxide to make urea, or used as-is for fertilizer. The inputs to the Haber-Bosch reaction are hydrogen and nitrogen gases:
The nitrogen is easily separated from air. The hydrogen is the energetically expensive input. Most hydrogen is presently made by steam reforming fossil fuels. Hydrogen can also be produced from water and electricity via electrolysis:
In the 20th century, surplus hydroelectric power from dams was used to electrolyze water for making ammonia. More direct demand for electricity and cheaper processes for making hydrogen from fossil fuels gradually eliminated it. Now people are planning to bring back large scale electrolytic hydrogen for fossil-free hydrogen from renewables:
In the case of the plant pictured in the article, the hydrogen is produced on site from methane. So, at least in that case, from the factory perspective, it is a methane in, ammonia + CO2 out. [1] I don't know how common it is for factories to do both processes at the same site, but that would explain why the article frames it that way.
But beyond that, I think the parent comment is just saying that the price of the hydrogen plays a big role in the availability and price of fertilizer. Even with the current increases in price, it is not profitable to manufacture ammonia using green hydrogen at current market prices.
According to the podcast and the wiki page, the current source of hydrogen for ammonia is natural gas. Additionally the process is energy-intensive, using high temperature and pressure.
These things don't necessarily make it mandatory that it's petro-chemical, but due to the way we currently run it it is.
What bothers me in articles like this is that no one mentions that ammonia is not produced with natural gas. It’s produced with HYDROGEN.
The cheapest source of hydrogen is usually steam reforming of natural gas. (But this wasn’t the case until about 1950 when steam reforming became cheap and widespread. Before that, cheap hydroelectricity-produced green hydrogen was common for nitrogen fertilizer production.)
Not mentioning this means that the average person who reads the news (including the typical politician and HN reader) has the mistaken notion that fossil fuels are essential for making fertilizer.
My 2cents: Two consequences (which kind of go in opposite directions) of this are:
1) You really think we need to push hydrogen cars right now when we’re not even producing a significant amount of green hydrogen for fertilizer? Unlike the electric grid (which is 40% clean already in the US), almost no hydrogen for ammonia is made with clean electricity.
2) This should provide impetus for locally produced green hydrogen efforts as food security, insulation from fossil fuel price swings. (Blue hydrogen doesn’t have that advantage since it’s still fossil fuel based and is worse in other ways.)
That is incorrect. World ammonia production in 2016 was 175 million tonnes. Producing that much ammonia -- the basis for all synthetic nitrogen fertilizers -- requires about 31 million tonnes of hydrogen. At present this hydrogen is indeed mostly made from natural gas.
Producing the world's synthetic fertilizer starting from electricity instead of natural gas would require about a 7.4% increase in world electricity production: (20863+1550) / 20863 = 1.074. It is true that this would benefit the climate only if the extra electricity generation were based on low-emissions sources like hydroelectricity, wind, nuclear, or solar.
On the larger point, I think that corn-to-biofuel is a very poor use of money, land, and indirect fossil fuel inputs.
Oil-derived fertilizers? What are they? Do you mean NATURAL GAS derived fertilizer? Would that be ok if the hydrogen to synthesize the ammonia were instead sourced from renewable energy? It would be the same ammonia!
US annual hydrogen production is approximately 10 million metric tons (1.0E+10 kg), 68% of which is used in petroleum processing.
Given that worldwide production of hydrogen-derived ammonia is 140 million tons in total, compared with hydrotreated gasoline coming in at about 2000 million tons worldwide, it doesn't appear that the U.S. is an outlier.
Decarbonizing the fertilizer industry would be fantastic. Wind-powered and solar-powered electrolyzers are already starting to do that job, perfect uses for intermittent energy sources. I'm skeptical that your process can realistically make more fertilizer than it consumes.
I find it a little disturbing that you boast "Hydrogen's quite easy" with this little public documentation to back up your claims. Be real careful here: you don't want to be the next Theranos.
You have lightning trapped in a bottle because of your luck in landing a YC slot. I encourage you to consider pivoting technologies away from anything involving hydrogen. Since you're such a big fan of ammonia, why not just go straight for that? Getting your nitrogen from the plant instead of from the air might stand a better chance to beat Haber-Bosch.
Regardless of energy transport, we will be making huge amounts of ammonia using green hydrogen in the future.
We need ammonia for fertilizer, and right now we get the hydrogen for that from methane, which can't be the plan long-term. At the moment switching to hydrolysis would double to quadruple the cost of the hydrogen, but eventually falling electricity and rising natural gas prices should invert that. The Haber-Bosch process itself doesn't require petrochemicals, it's just the cheapest way to run it in the current market.
Just making ammonia without natural gas to meet the needs of the global fertilizer market would be difficult enough I imagine. Also, the notion that you'd easily burn NH3 + O2 -> H2O + N2 seems questionable, isn't a lot of NOx (a nasty air pollutant leading to PAN and really bad air pollution) also going to be generated?
The production of fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate and urea require ammonia. Ammonia is synthesized on large scales with the Haber-Bosch process. This process requires hydrogen, which is obtained by steam reforming of methane in natural gas.
When natural gas prices exploded in Europe, many fertilizer factories had to stop production:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-15/soaring-e...
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