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Discussion (57 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It eliminates the need to connect the turbine to the grid.
But trees, for example, are 50% carbon, extracted from the atmosphere. And they're solar powered! And look nice.
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.
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.
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.
Although there are many sunny countries where solar + one or two days of battery storage are probably enough for the full year.
Also it doesn’t need to, wind energy was used to produce shit before electricity was harnessed!
Sailboats are harnessed wind energy and some 10kY old. Windmills and wind pumps were invented some time between 700 and 900.
Every sentence its own paragraph.
Every second word bold.
Who writes like that?
Is this some kind of stupid SEO/AI crawler optimization?
https://energiesmedia.com/texas-turbine-under-water-more-tha...
You're saying freshwater shortage is really just an energy shortage?
At the other end of the spectrum ("uncompetitive") you get things like fuel-cell cars.
https://liebreich.com/the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-...
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.
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
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.
> 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??
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.
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)]
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.
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/
In other news, no whales were bothered by this windmill, either.