Mastodawn

fossilesque 1d ago

That's how the world works.

https://mander.xyz/post/49309982

Natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, which is then used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia from nitrogen in the atmosphere. Only about 6% of natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, so even if the price were to rise substantially, we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen, it’s just that natural gas is more established.

PEM electrolyzers paired with cheap solar in countries with high insolation can now produce hydrogen for less than the cost of natural gas, but we’re only recently starting to see the construction of the large-scale green ammonia plants needed to accomplish this. Egypt is currently constructing a 100-MW green ammonia plant powered by solar energy. Even if you didn’t have enough PEM eletrolyzers you could still just pass current through some salt water and produce hydrogen, albeit much less efficiently.

It’s not going to be a catastrophic issue.

we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen

We can’t do any of those in a scale large enough to replace the destruction and have it online for the next planting season on the North Hemisphere. Or the next one on the South Hemisphere either, btw. Or the following ones for each.

BodyBySisyphus [he/him]1d ago

Also, while it’s still new, plasma nitrogen has the potential to rapidly scale if the economics stop making sense for Haber-Bosch nitrogen.

Using plasma technology to feed the world

Using state-of-the-art plasma technology to make cheap fertilizer for small farmers may sound like magic, but it has now become reality. Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have built a small plasma-powered plant that produces nitrogen-based liquid fertilizer only using sun, water and air. "The plant is easy to set up, sustainable and very efficient," says TU/e researcher Fausto Gallucci, who together with partners in Africa, Germany and Portugal has done successful tests of the device in Uganda. "We now want to bring the mini-plant to the market, so that it becomes available to farmers around the world."

Farmers almost uniformly over-apply N fertilizer. Having it be more expensive and forcing them to look into more efficient ways of applying fertilizer and managing nutrients is not a bad thing.

KairuByte 1d ago

Unless it just causes the crop to cost more without any change in behavior.

Farmers are price-takers not price-makers. The prices they receive are driven by speculation on the commodities markets (even for crops not traded on the market).

Since they can’t control the price they receive for their crop, they are very sensitive to any change in the cost of inputs. Determining how much to spent on inputs is the part of their profitablity they can control. So widespread behavioral change is usually pretty close to immediate.

Fun fact: Fritz Haber, the German guy that invented the Haber-Bosch process is the same Fritz Haber that invented the use of chlorine gas in chemical warfare. He was personally overseeing it’s effect in the battle of Ypres.

far_university1990 1d ago

Habern wir einen an der Waffel? Ja

ChicoSuave 1d ago

Dude knew his chemicals

Clara Immerwahr, who was married to Fritz Haber and was a successful chemist in her own right, spoke out against his research as a “perversion of the ideals of science” and “a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life.” She ended her own life the day before he traveled to the eastern front to oversee the use of chlorine gas against Russian troops.

Clara Immerwahr - Wikipedia

Thank you for explaining the process, because the pro-fuel-cell pact doesn’t understand that hydrogen isn’t free.

“Oh it comes from ammonia”. Alright, where does the ammonia come from???

You’ll make hydrogen from renewable energy. That is the point.

But why not just make electricity from renewable energy?

Like, I get the benefit of fuel cells, but people need to realize that hydrogen closer to a battery than a fuel source itself. You’re expending energy now to make storage of energy that can be tapped later.

It’s good for places where vehicles can’t tap into the grid and need dense energy storage (i.e. transoceanic freighters), or where long charging times are infeasible (like long-range trucking).

And probably good for grid-level storage, too.

But for a typical family car/commuter? There’s really no point. You’re adding more steps in energy conversion, and losing efficiency at every additional step (thanks to basic physics), and to gain what? A faster refueling time on a long road trip? An experience closer to what we were used to with ICE-cars? An experience that really isn’t that great anywhere that has a winter.

Maybe for people who can’t have a charger at home, even an L1, but there are better solutions for that (like…adding an outlet? Making landlords responsible for providing power whenever there is parking? More municipal charging locations?)

You can’t store electricity by itself. The problem we are facing is massive curtailment, i.e. massive overproduction of green energy that can’t be utilized. There needs to be way of storing it at a massive scale. There is no feasible way of storing that much energy in conventional batteries.

If you can acknowledge that hydrogen is needed for dense energy storage and grid-level storage, then you should realize that we will eventually have a huge hydrogen infrastructure, and production capacity to match. That will create very cheap green hydrogen, and will mirror what happened with solar and wind.

Cheap hydrogen alone will drive large-scale adoption of hydrogen cars, regardless of the popularity of BEVs. A lot of people will choose hydrogen cars (possible e-fuel cars too, since e-fuels can be made from hydrogen) simply because it is akin to an ICE-car in usage.

The other point is that battery production is not green and is very resource intensive. Hydrogen cars let’s you avoid that almost entirely. In the long-run, it will be pointless to care about efficiency when green energy becomes nearly free. That suggests hydrogen, not batteries, is the better idea.

Agent641 1d ago

You can’t fertilize crops with electricity, nor can you eat it

Making food from pure electricity would be a cool sci-fi thing

exasperation 1h ago

Some startups are trying to synthesize edible fats from non-biological feedstocks, using just energy, water, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen, through the Fischer Tropsch process.

Personally I’m more interested in seeing whether that can expand into just manufacturing hydrocarbons with excess solar energy, rather than synthetic food, but it’s still cool to see that people can do it.

OhVenus_Baby 1d ago

It might not be a massive scientific issue but I bet prices will still rise and the news will be fearmongering causing pricing to go up and never come back down. It’s a capitalism issue and corruption and greed.

fullsquare 20h ago

Adding to that, logistics are such that direct impact will be felt strongest in places like India that rely heavily on Qatari LNG to make fertilizer, but many places have other sources of both gas and fertilizer. Americas, EU, Russia and China will get by because they have their own supply and will be only affected by price increase