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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 o

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.)

malfist 5y ago
> which is 40% clean already in the US Can you define that statement a bit more? What do you mean by clean? If you're going off of the industry terms, that 40% includes natural gas, and is probably mostly natural gas. Which means cracking natural gas into hydrogen isn't any more or less polluting.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Nuclear, wind, hydro, and geothermal (and maybe some biomass) produce about 40% of the electricity in the US. And yeah, if we’re just using grid electricity at the current electricity mix to make hydrogen, we’re not any better off than using steam reforming. That’s a very valid point. But it’s relatively straightforward to decarbonize the grid. Just build more solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear and keep what we’ve already got running. Retire coal ASAP.
RobertoG 5y ago
I was reading the other day about these guys: https://www.nitricity.co/ https://www.nitricity.co/ "Renewable on-site nitrogen fertilizer production" Maybe some people here could find their process interesting.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Yes, this is interesting because it's not the haber process! Very exciting stuff, and drastically changing the transportation costs gives them a good niche so they can build a foothold without having to go toe-to-toe with the existing natural gas derived Haber process, which has the benefit of already being highly optimized.
cma 5y ago
But we need to keep all our hydro power for green crypto for ElonFlokiDoge token, not squander it on food.
rsj_hn 5y ago
>the mistaken notion that fossil fuels are essential for making fertilizer I think the correct statement is that fossil fuels are the cheapest way of making fertilizer, and that any other (known) way is currently much more expensive. Therefore raising the price of fossil fuels does raise the price of fertilizer. This is pretty incontrovertible.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  No, we use hydrogen to make ammonia. That hydrogen is grey hydrogen from fossil fuels usually, but the actual Haber process does not use any hydrocarbons. Using hydrogen to make ammonia is therefore not a new process. It literally IS the process we use today. An analogy would be an article on hydrogen fuel cell cars that never once used the word “hydrogen” in it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - acoard 5y ago
    I'm new to this so asking earnestly, but: >That hydrogen is grey hydrogen from fossil fuels usually, but the actual Haber process does not use any hydrocarbons. Using hydrogen to make ammonia is therefore not a new process. It literally IS the process we use today. It seems like this grey hydrogen still ultimately comes from fossil fuels. It might be further up the chain, so to speak, but it's still dependant on them. No? So doesn't the statement that raising fossil fuel prices raise fertilizer prices true then?
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      Yes, true in the narrow sense, but it’s misleading, I think, or at least it’s avoiding a really good opportunity to educate people about the role of hydrogen in our industrial processes. I don’t think it’s irrelevant minutiae. By not mentioning hydrogen but mentioning by natural gas, you reinforce the mistaken impression people have that the process we use to make fertilizers requires fossil fuels in particular. It actually uses hydrogen, which historically was, technically can be (and is today on a modest scale), and in the future likely will be made using electricity. It also avoids context that the Hydrogen Economy is something we have today, but it’s almost all fossil fuel reliant. So a hydrogen car or hydrogen heating or whatever is not intrinsically fossil-free, not even close. And ammonia is actually a really good use of hydrogen as the actual process itself uses hydrogen, so unlike for heating, where a Joule of hydrogen gives you the same as a Joule of natural gas for heat, a Joule of hydrogen gives you more ammonia than a Joule of natural gas would. AND you can avoid the capital cost of the on-site steam reforming. Anyway, I just think such articles should say something like “Fertilizer production, in which nitrogen from the atmosphere is fixed by combining it with hydrogen, is the largest industrial use of hydrogen—almost all of which is today produced on-site from fossil fuels like natural gas.” Or even just “nitrogen fertilizer, which uses hydrogen usually made from natural gas…” The idea that hydrogen is largely green but fertilizer intrinsically requires hydrocarbons are two really common misconceptions that we could easily fix by just mentioning “hydrogen” in these news articles.
jonnycomputer 5y ago
Ok, but most fertilizer production uses natural gas to supply the hydrogen and fossil fuels of one sort or another to bring everything up to temperature. So, why should this article go out and say, 'well theoretically we could obtain hydrogen some other way...'.
- namibj 5y ago
  Haber-Bosch is slightly exothermic. The turbomachinery for doing the pressure-swing product condensing in the loop might have too high losses to get by without external power supply, though.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Electricity is a pretty great way to power turbomachinery.
    - namibj 5y ago
      Well, the reaction needs a compressor, followed by a pipe reactor loaded with catalyst, followed by an expander, followed by an ammonia droplet seperator/condenser. That result is then fed back to the input along with more educts, and side-products are siphoned off slowly to prevent their accumulation. The expander is there because you increase the percentage of ammonia that will condense by both lowering the temperature and lowering the pressure, which an ideal expander is very good at. You'd prefer if that expander can power the compressor, with this setup being essentially a gas turbine with exhaust rebreathing and the combustion chamber replaced with a giant tube reactor filled with catalyst.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  It’s not “theoretical.” It’s literally how we used to make hydrogen for ammonia. And all I’m asking is to mention this uses hydrogen so people aren’t confused.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
Electrolytic hydrogen production scales poorly. Cost aside, the additional electricity required to replace methane-derived hydrogen is completely infeasible for the foreseeable future. Just because we can produce almost any chemistry with electricity does not imply that we have remotely enough spare power generation capacity to make it feasible. Too many proposals for green industrial chemistry implicitly assume that we have several terawatts of green power generation just lying around, which is manifestly not the case nor are we likely to have that kind of extra capacity on any timeframe that matters.
- erhk 5y ago
  Power grids regularly go negative couldn't there be money made from chemical production on hot and windy days
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    For some unknown reason, transmission/distribution pricing is often fixed, even though peak users are directly culpable for the costs of upgrades.
- yxhuvud 5y ago
  I'm not certain that is actually correct. The biggest steel maker here in Sweden is in early stages of replacing coal with hydrogen in their new production chains they are building, based on wind power. The really good part is that it is a consumption of electricity that is pretty resilient against varying production volumes, which make it pretty ideal for renewables. The same logic could very well work with fertilizer.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Of course it’s not correct. I have no idea why people speak so confidently about electrolysis not being “scalable” when, in fact, that used to be pretty much the primary way of making hydrogen for ammonia. Also, the US used to double electricity generation every decade. If something needs a bit more electricity, there’s no “scaling” argument why we can’t just produce more electricity. It costs money, of course, but there’s no part of it that isn’t “scalable.”
yxhuvud 5y ago
3) It is fine with a slightly uneven production of hydrogen as it only means you have to build up a buffer of it for sustained usage. This means it is ideal for hydrogen produced by wind and solar power.
kvgr 5y ago
We need to build the freaking nuclear plants and make hydrogen as an energy storage when not in peak.
Johnny555 5y ago
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. But it's true - currently this is how fertilizer is made. Maybe there will be a large scale source of hydrogen in the future, but currently it comes from fossil fuels. You don't need to worry about politicians getting incorrect knowledge from the news, they get that knowledge directly from industry.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  > Maybe there will be a large scale source of hydrogen in the future, but currently it comes from fossil fuels. No, see, this is again the misunderstanding I’m talking about. Ammonia is made with hydrogen, period. The “large scale source of hydrogen” exists today. It is steam reforming of natural gas, and before that it was electrolysis of water.
  - Johnny555 5y ago
    This is the misunderstanding I'm talking about: "steam reforming of natural gas", is the same as "fossil fuels". If you're going to rely on some future development where the hydrogen doesn't come from fossil fuels, then you can also declare that gasoline and diesel are not fossil fuels since non-fossil fuel sources exist for both.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      I mean, there’s lots of green hydrogen production in California right now. Clean electric synthesis of hydrocarbons is most certainly possible but a lot more expensive, complex, and inefficient, and I’m not aware of any place you can just buy it, unlike green hydrogen in places like California. Hydrogen electrolysis used to be the dominant method of making ammonia hydrogen. Hydrogen electrolysis is simple enough there’s a Kiwi Co tutorial on how to do it with household items: https://www.kiwico.com/diy/stem/quick-easy-experiments/splitting-water https://www.kiwico.com/diy/stem/quick-easy-experiments/split... Hydrogen allows you to skip steps in the typical ammonia plant. Synthesized gasoline is just a huge cost increase, almost an order of magnitude larger than that for clean ammonia.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Many argue that we need to end our dependence on chemical fertilizers and farm in a biodynamic way. https://youtu.be/1BH0NkN6zHs https://youtu.be/1BH0NkN6zHs
- xxpor 5y ago
  And many people are dumb. The Haber process is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind. A majority of people alive today can directly trace their very existence to the food production yield increases from artificial fertilizer. It's estimated that 50% of the nitrogen in the average human comes from the Haber process. Now I'm not going to try to pretend there are absolutely no downsides. Runoff from fields is a huge issue. But when you advocate for large scale returns to "natural" farming, you're taking a position that leads directly to ecofacism and genocide though famine. Or at least a radical restructuring of the global economy where much greater sections of land and the labor force would be required to be farmers.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    I think you will find if you watch the video I linked that Jean Martin Fortier is anything but dumb.
  - belorn 5y ago
    In order to not downplay how much of an issue artificial fertilizer is in term of runoff, practically every fresh water lake in western countries have become poisoned. The whole Baltic Sea is turning into dead zone where even bacteria have a hard time surviving, and in many countries that have a coast, both humans and animals can't be in the water during long parts of the year for the risk of getting poisoned. If you have one ocean area where you test nuclear bombs, and the other where you have "normal" amount of runoff from artificial fertilizer, the nuclear bomb site will be healthier and have more diverse ecological environment. We might not want to ban the stuff, but we need to start demanding that farming is a closed loop in term of artificial fertilizers.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
I have an odd, and possibly naive, question. Why wouldn't it be easier ( and cheaper ) to produce hydrogen from water rather than natural gas?
- bbojan 5y ago
  Hydrogen is bound in both compounds - you need to expand energy to extract it. As in our oxidizing atmosphere natural gas is a source of (chemical) energy, you can burn it to provide the energy needed to extract the hydrogen. This is the steam reforming reaction. Since water is not a source of energy, you need to add (expensive) electrical energy in order to extract the hydrogen. This is the electrolysis reaction.
- thinkcontext 5y ago
  It's significantly more expensive to make it from water than methane.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  The cost of industrial chemistry is largely the amount of energy required to produce a ton of chemical. There are different ways to make any chemical all of which have different cost structures depending on the application. Making hydrogen from water is extremely electricity intensive, around 50 MWh per ton. Even aluminum production from ore, which is famously electricity intensive, only requires a small fraction of the energy input that hydrogen requires when produced this way. Making hydrogen from methane has a more expensive feedstock (methane versus water) but requires vastly less energy which makes it much cheaper overall. I would guess that methane feedstock also requires a less expensive plant per ton of production capacity, which would also lower costs.
hinkley 5y ago
We need green hydrogen for steel production as well, if we want to get that carbon footprint down.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Indeed. All new iron ore reduction plants built in the last few decades in the US have used syngas (a mixture of hydrogen and CO) made with natural gas for reducing the iron ore to iron metal, NOT coal/coke. These plants use about 50% hydrogen already, that amount can be increased modestly at existing plants with almost no modifications, and with significant modifications that can handle over 90% hydrogen. “Midrex” is one proprietary version of this Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) process. I think few people (unless they’re actually in the industry) are aware that all new iron ore plants in the US use natural gas, NOT coal.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    But what fraction of total production comes from those, and how do we increase that ratio?

malfist 5y ago

> which is 40% clean already in the US Can you define that statement a bit more? What do you mean by clean? If you're going off of the industry terms, that 40% includes natural gas, and is probably mostly natural gas. Which means cracking natural gas into hydrogen isn't any more or less polluting.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Nuclear, wind, hydro, and geothermal (and maybe some biomass) produce about 40% of the electricity in the US. And yeah, if we’re just using grid electricity at the current electricity mix to make hydrogen, we’re not any better off than using steam reforming. That’s a very valid point. But it’s relatively straightforward to decarbonize the grid. Just build more solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear and keep what we’ve already got running. Retire coal ASAP.

RobertoG 5y ago

I was reading the other day about these guys: https://www.nitricity.co/ https://www.nitricity.co/ "Renewable on-site nitrogen fertilizer production" Maybe some people here could find their process interesting.

epistasis 5y ago
Yes, this is interesting because it's not the haber process! Very exciting stuff, and drastically changing the transportation costs gives them a good niche so they can build a foothold without having to go toe-to-toe with the existing natural gas derived Haber process, which has the benefit of already being highly optimized.

cma 5y ago

But we need to keep all our hydro power for green crypto for ElonFlokiDoge token, not squander it on food.

rsj_hn 5y ago

>the mistaken notion that fossil fuels are essential for making fertilizer I think the correct statement is that fossil fuels are the cheapest way of making fertilizer, and that any other (known) way is currently much more expensive. Therefore raising the price of fossil fuels does raise the price of fertilizer. This is pretty incontrovertible.

Robotbeat 5y ago
No, we use hydrogen to make ammonia. That hydrogen is grey hydrogen from fossil fuels usually, but the actual Haber process does not use any hydrocarbons. Using hydrogen to make ammonia is therefore not a new process. It literally IS the process we use today. An analogy would be an article on hydrogen fuel cell cars that never once used the word “hydrogen” in it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- acoard 5y ago
  I'm new to this so asking earnestly, but: >That hydrogen is grey hydrogen from fossil fuels usually, but the actual Haber process does not use any hydrocarbons. Using hydrogen to make ammonia is therefore not a new process. It literally IS the process we use today. It seems like this grey hydrogen still ultimately comes from fossil fuels. It might be further up the chain, so to speak, but it's still dependant on them. No? So doesn't the statement that raising fossil fuel prices raise fertilizer prices true then?
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Yes, true in the narrow sense, but it’s misleading, I think, or at least it’s avoiding a really good opportunity to educate people about the role of hydrogen in our industrial processes. I don’t think it’s irrelevant minutiae. By not mentioning hydrogen but mentioning by natural gas, you reinforce the mistaken impression people have that the process we use to make fertilizers requires fossil fuels in particular. It actually uses hydrogen, which historically was, technically can be (and is today on a modest scale), and in the future likely will be made using electricity. It also avoids context that the Hydrogen Economy is something we have today, but it’s almost all fossil fuel reliant. So a hydrogen car or hydrogen heating or whatever is not intrinsically fossil-free, not even close. And ammonia is actually a really good use of hydrogen as the actual process itself uses hydrogen, so unlike for heating, where a Joule of hydrogen gives you the same as a Joule of natural gas for heat, a Joule of hydrogen gives you more ammonia than a Joule of natural gas would. AND you can avoid the capital cost of the on-site steam reforming. Anyway, I just think such articles should say something like “Fertilizer production, in which nitrogen from the atmosphere is fixed by combining it with hydrogen, is the largest industrial use of hydrogen—almost all of which is today produced on-site from fossil fuels like natural gas.” Or even just “nitrogen fertilizer, which uses hydrogen usually made from natural gas…” The idea that hydrogen is largely green but fertilizer intrinsically requires hydrocarbons are two really common misconceptions that we could easily fix by just mentioning “hydrogen” in these news articles.

jonnycomputer 5y ago

Ok, but most fertilizer production uses natural gas to supply the hydrogen and fossil fuels of one sort or another to bring everything up to temperature. So, why should this article go out and say, 'well theoretically we could obtain hydrogen some other way...'.

namibj 5y ago
Haber-Bosch is slightly exothermic. The turbomachinery for doing the pressure-swing product condensing in the loop might have too high losses to get by without external power supply, though.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Electricity is a pretty great way to power turbomachinery.
  - namibj 5y ago
    Well, the reaction needs a compressor, followed by a pipe reactor loaded with catalyst, followed by an expander, followed by an ammonia droplet seperator/condenser. That result is then fed back to the input along with more educts, and side-products are siphoned off slowly to prevent their accumulation. The expander is there because you increase the percentage of ammonia that will condense by both lowering the temperature and lowering the pressure, which an ideal expander is very good at. You'd prefer if that expander can power the compressor, with this setup being essentially a gas turbine with exhaust rebreathing and the combustion chamber replaced with a giant tube reactor filled with catalyst.
Robotbeat 5y ago
It’s not “theoretical.” It’s literally how we used to make hydrogen for ammonia. And all I’m asking is to mention this uses hydrogen so people aren’t confused.

jandrewrogers 5y ago

Electrolytic hydrogen production scales poorly. Cost aside, the additional electricity required to replace methane-derived hydrogen is completely infeasible for the foreseeable future. Just because we can produce almost any chemistry with electricity does not imply that we have remotely enough spare power generation capacity to make it feasible. Too many proposals for green industrial chemistry implicitly assume that we have several terawatts of green power generation just lying around, which is manifestly not the case nor are we likely to have that kind of extra capacity on any timeframe that matters.

erhk 5y ago
Power grids regularly go negative couldn't there be money made from chemical production on hot and windy days
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  For some unknown reason, transmission/distribution pricing is often fixed, even though peak users are directly culpable for the costs of upgrades.
yxhuvud 5y ago
I'm not certain that is actually correct. The biggest steel maker here in Sweden is in early stages of replacing coal with hydrogen in their new production chains they are building, based on wind power. The really good part is that it is a consumption of electricity that is pretty resilient against varying production volumes, which make it pretty ideal for renewables. The same logic could very well work with fertilizer.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Of course it’s not correct. I have no idea why people speak so confidently about electrolysis not being “scalable” when, in fact, that used to be pretty much the primary way of making hydrogen for ammonia. Also, the US used to double electricity generation every decade. If something needs a bit more electricity, there’s no “scaling” argument why we can’t just produce more electricity. It costs money, of course, but there’s no part of it that isn’t “scalable.”

yxhuvud 5y ago

3) It is fine with a slightly uneven production of hydrogen as it only means you have to build up a buffer of it for sustained usage. This means it is ideal for hydrogen produced by wind and solar power.

kvgr 5y ago

We need to build the freaking nuclear plants and make hydrogen as an energy storage when not in peak.

Johnny555 5y ago

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. But it's true - currently this is how fertilizer is made. Maybe there will be a large scale source of hydrogen in the future, but currently it comes from fossil fuels. You don't need to worry about politicians getting incorrect knowledge from the news, they get that knowledge directly from industry.

Robotbeat 5y ago
> Maybe there will be a large scale source of hydrogen in the future, but currently it comes from fossil fuels. No, see, this is again the misunderstanding I’m talking about. Ammonia is made with hydrogen, period. The “large scale source of hydrogen” exists today. It is steam reforming of natural gas, and before that it was electrolysis of water.
- Johnny555 5y ago
  This is the misunderstanding I'm talking about: "steam reforming of natural gas", is the same as "fossil fuels". If you're going to rely on some future development where the hydrogen doesn't come from fossil fuels, then you can also declare that gasoline and diesel are not fossil fuels since non-fossil fuel sources exist for both.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    I mean, there’s lots of green hydrogen production in California right now. Clean electric synthesis of hydrocarbons is most certainly possible but a lot more expensive, complex, and inefficient, and I’m not aware of any place you can just buy it, unlike green hydrogen in places like California. Hydrogen electrolysis used to be the dominant method of making ammonia hydrogen. Hydrogen electrolysis is simple enough there’s a Kiwi Co tutorial on how to do it with household items: https://www.kiwico.com/diy/stem/quick-easy-experiments/splitting-water https://www.kiwico.com/diy/stem/quick-easy-experiments/split... Hydrogen allows you to skip steps in the typical ammonia plant. Synthesized gasoline is just a huge cost increase, almost an order of magnitude larger than that for clean ammonia.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

Many argue that we need to end our dependence on chemical fertilizers and farm in a biodynamic way. https://youtu.be/1BH0NkN6zHs https://youtu.be/1BH0NkN6zHs

xxpor 5y ago
And many people are dumb. The Haber process is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind. A majority of people alive today can directly trace their very existence to the food production yield increases from artificial fertilizer. It's estimated that 50% of the nitrogen in the average human comes from the Haber process. Now I'm not going to try to pretend there are absolutely no downsides. Runoff from fields is a huge issue. But when you advocate for large scale returns to "natural" farming, you're taking a position that leads directly to ecofacism and genocide though famine. Or at least a radical restructuring of the global economy where much greater sections of land and the labor force would be required to be farmers.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  I think you will find if you watch the video I linked that Jean Martin Fortier is anything but dumb.
- belorn 5y ago
  In order to not downplay how much of an issue artificial fertilizer is in term of runoff, practically every fresh water lake in western countries have become poisoned. The whole Baltic Sea is turning into dead zone where even bacteria have a hard time surviving, and in many countries that have a coast, both humans and animals can't be in the water during long parts of the year for the risk of getting poisoned. If you have one ocean area where you test nuclear bombs, and the other where you have "normal" amount of runoff from artificial fertilizer, the nuclear bomb site will be healthier and have more diverse ecological environment. We might not want to ban the stuff, but we need to start demanding that farming is a closed loop in term of artificial fertilizers.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

I have an odd, and possibly naive, question. Why wouldn't it be easier ( and cheaper ) to produce hydrogen from water rather than natural gas?

bbojan 5y ago
Hydrogen is bound in both compounds - you need to expand energy to extract it. As in our oxidizing atmosphere natural gas is a source of (chemical) energy, you can burn it to provide the energy needed to extract the hydrogen. This is the steam reforming reaction. Since water is not a source of energy, you need to add (expensive) electrical energy in order to extract the hydrogen. This is the electrolysis reaction.
thinkcontext 5y ago
It's significantly more expensive to make it from water than methane.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
The cost of industrial chemistry is largely the amount of energy required to produce a ton of chemical. There are different ways to make any chemical all of which have different cost structures depending on the application. Making hydrogen from water is extremely electricity intensive, around 50 MWh per ton. Even aluminum production from ore, which is famously electricity intensive, only requires a small fraction of the energy input that hydrogen requires when produced this way. Making hydrogen from methane has a more expensive feedstock (methane versus water) but requires vastly less energy which makes it much cheaper overall. I would guess that methane feedstock also requires a less expensive plant per ton of production capacity, which would also lower costs.

hinkley 5y ago

We need green hydrogen for steel production as well, if we want to get that carbon footprint down.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Indeed. All new iron ore reduction plants built in the last few decades in the US have used syngas (a mixture of hydrogen and CO) made with natural gas for reducing the iron ore to iron metal, NOT coal/coke. These plants use about 50% hydrogen already, that amount can be increased modestly at existing plants with almost no modifications, and with significant modifications that can handle over 90% hydrogen. “Midrex” is one proprietary version of this Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) process. I think few people (unless they’re actually in the industry) are aware that all new iron ore plants in the US use natural gas, NOT coal.
- hinkley 5y ago
  But what fraction of total production comes from those, and how do we increase that ratio?