> 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.
pinkyboy 40 minutes ago [-]
Even if carbon was a complete non-issue, electrification and a greater diversity of energy sources would still have immense value.
plaidfuji 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
tonyarkles 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
WalterBright 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
hvb2 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
senthil_rajasek 43 minutes ago [-]
What if the Ammonia is used locally? Potentially, in that Minnesota farm.
It eliminates the need to connect the turbine to the grid.
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.
scythe 45 minutes ago [-]
>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.
jijijijij 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
halestock 36 minutes ago [-]
Just wait until you hear about the underwater turbine that can do far more than generate electricity!
> 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?
hn_throwaway_99 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
Beltiras 10 minutes ago [-]
We have near perfect processes for saltwater filtering.
matthewdgreen 12 minutes ago [-]
With desalinization, in most places that is the case.
jijijijij 39 minutes 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?
Rygian 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
alephnerd 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
> 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??
pfdietz 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
bix6 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
23 minutes ago [-]
newyankee 1 hours ago [-]
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.
wolfi1 51 minutes ago [-]
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
1 hours ago [-]
nba456_ 20 minutes ago [-]
We need to hurry and kill this tech before environmentalists try to make other fertilizers illegal and cause mass famine.
pydry 57 minutes ago [-]
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:
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.
kogasa240p 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
43 minutes ago [-]
spiderfarmer 1 hours ago [-]
In other news, wind mills have been used to produce lots of other things that require electricity.
fnordpiglet 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
deton3991 38 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 17:27:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> 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.
> 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.
But trees, for example, are 50% carbon, extracted from the atmosphere. And they're solar powered! And look nice.
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.
It eliminates the need to connect the turbine to the grid.
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.
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 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.
https://energiesmedia.com/texas-turbine-under-water-more-tha...
You're saying freshwater shortage is really just an energy shortage?
Every sentence its own paragraph.
Every second word bold.
Who writes like that?
Is this some kind of stupid SEO/AI crawler optimization?
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
> 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??
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.