11 ms·

Industrial ammonia emits more CO2 than other chemical-making reactions (2019)

121 points by NoRagrets 5y ago

kurthr 5y ago
This is the well known Haber-Bosch process, "Between 75 and 90% of this ammonia goes toward making fertilizer, and about 50% of the world’s food production relies on ammonia fertilizer." For those not looking to create a free account to login and view it: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-5f9t99hc7IJ:https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-ammonia-production-emits-CO2/97/i24+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-5f9t9...
- brendoelfrendo 5y ago
  It’s worth noting that the Haber process doesn’t require methane, methane is used as a source of hydrogen because it’s cheap and easy to use. Any source of hydrogen could work, but most of them are more energy intensive and thus more expensive or inefficient than just using methane. If you wanted to use nuclear or renewables, you just dedicate your energy production to electrolysis or whatever. Edit to add: also worth noting that electrolysis currently amounts to about 5% of hydrogen production. You basically can’t remove fossil fuels from the food supply without lots of alternate energy input, so this is not a short term fix short of spooling up all kinds of nuclear reactors. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, and maybe if we need to be dependent on fossil fuels for any one thing then we should prioritize food supply rather than literally burning them (or worse, venting them to the atmosphere as is often done with methane), just trying to set the right expectations for people who might be learning all this for the first time.
  - semi-extrinsic 5y ago
    You can still use methane as your hydrogen source for ammonia production if you do CO2 capture and storage when you produce the hydrogen. This is often called blue hydrogen, as opposed to green hydrogen from electrolysis and gray hydrogen from methane witgout CO2 capture and storage. Most of the oil and gas companies are partly betting the farm on H2 from CH4 with CO2 capture and storage as a major source of energy in the coming transition, and thus a major source of profits for the next 30-40 years.
    - VBprogrammer 5y ago
      Many people regard CO2 capture and storage as an attempt by the oil and gas industry to be able to green-wash what they current do without actually having to change anything.
      - semi-extrinsic 5y ago
        I agree it's easy to spin it that way. But I do also think it's true that we can scale up CO2 capture and storage one or two orders of magnitude more quickly than we can scale up renewables. And we will need that capability. Just take solar power in Europe as an example. It is projected that we need to install 300 GW of solar in the next three years. But the rate of new installations has been basically flat at about 20-25 GW per year for the past 10 years. Or take wind - we are going to install 21 GW this year, but next year that number will decrease due to constraints in permits and transmission grid capacity. To meet climate targets we need to add at least 30 GW per year. At this point it's simple math that renewables cannot be deployed quickly enough.
      - sgent 5y ago
        I don't really care if Exxon is the most valuable company in the world because they discover a way to capture CO2 out of the air and pump it into old wells. Almost everyone agrees (finally!) global warming is an existential threat for humankind. If you start bringing up other random environmental concerns you lose supporters quickly.
  - fulafel 5y ago
    You can also produce methane from renewable biomass (biogas), this is mature tech and in many places used as a transport or CHP fuel.
  - tda 5y ago
    Define short term, if we really want I`m quite sure we can dramatically increase pv power generation in a few years. There are vast swathes of little used space in sunny environments. But you do need to invest proper amounts of money, just like we do for developing new fossil fuel sites. The investment for a new LNG field and liquefaction plant is in the order of USD 30-50B. We need to redirect such investments to PV and hydrolysis.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    "cheap" in the same sense as free parking in cities, as in "someone else pays the cost". And the "someone else" in these cases is actually us a.k.a not cheap, but rather pointlessly wasteful.
- 6nf 5y ago
  This process is the reason Malthus was proven wrong back in the day. We wouldn't be able to support 8 billion people without it.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Given that > Malthus observed that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the population, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level What proved him wrong (or at least currently looks that way) was declining fertility levels, not increased food production.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Malthus was wrong because he assumed that people would always want to have a lot of kids. Back in his days people would have a lot of kids because they kept dying, but he didn't realize that. Nobody did at the time.
shroompasta 5y ago
Why is depopulation not even a consideration as a solution for climate change? Surely there are ethical ways to implement it. Or do the world's largest and wealthiest nations only care for their hold on economic power?
- pfdietz 5y ago
  There are some very nazi problems with the whole approach.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Depopulation as in killing people? Or as in the one child policy? It turns out you don't need to implement a one child policy: people implement it themselves when the cost of living gets high enough.
  - shroompasta 5y ago
    obviously not killing people. I'm just demoralized that low birth rates are stigmatized as they are correlated with lower GDP, when low birth rates are somewhat of a godsend in times like these. Then nations with low birth rates scramble to find ways to up the birth rates despite understanding the C02 cost. It's ironic, really.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      > low birth rates are stigmatized as they are correlated with lower GDP You have this backwards
      - shroompasta 5y ago
        the case in point was obviously Japan which fell from the third largest economy to the sixth largest in the past two decades. Japan wants to be like China and the US, not like Qatar or Switzerland. GDP is not GDP/Capita I believe you have this backwards.
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
jackyinger 5y ago
This is very interesting from an agricultural perspective. According to the Wikipedia article for ammonia, “In the US as of 2019, approximately 88% of ammonia was used as fertilizers”. To me this is a very interesting and damning fact with regards to current dominant agricultural practices. Yet another reason that it would be beneficial to further redevelop closed loop nutrient systems. For instance, sewage solids from cites in are sold to farmers for use as fertilizer. Funnily enough Fritz Haber (who developed the Haber Process used to manufacture ammonia) also developed chemical weapons in WWI. Some people claim he is somewhat redeemed by his contribution to artificial fertilizer. I disagree with this reasoning on several levels.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I wonder why you see his chemical weapons developments during WW1 as a particularly egregious sin. My great grandfather was on the front lines in France and was gassed several times. To the day he died you could see the veins in his eyes from that experience, but when I went to the local VFW with him as a child and saw the men with no arms or no legs - the product of boring old TNT and shrapnel - I would always ask myself why we handwave that as the costs of war.
- rembicilious 5y ago
  Why is it damning that 88% of ammonia is used in fertilizer? Is their some other industry that ought to consume a larger percentage?
  - lcam84 5y ago
    We could avoid this number by investing in soil preservation, nitrogen fixing plants, reduce meat consumption, even in concepts like humanure.
    - ahartmetz 5y ago
      None of these would produce as much food per area and time. Reducing total calories required by eating less meat is a different argument.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
Yes, this is the case due to the enormous scale of production. Replacing the hydrogen source at similar scales with electrolysis is plausible with base load power generation. The cost increase is a small integer factor, and in the bigger scheme of things is likely something we can adapt to at least for agriculture. An obvious challenge is that we don't have available green base load power -- nuclear, hydro, or geothermal -- at anything remotely resembling the necessary scale. The requirement for base load power follows from the economics of industrial chemistry, which becomes much more expensive if you can't run your process in a continuous steady-state equilibrium. If we tried to produce ammonia via micro-batching chemistry or similar, those economics may not be practical. The other unfortunate reality is that ammonia production is often a way to extract value from excess methane that might otherwise be vented or burned. It is a better use than the alternative. It isn't a coincidence that ammonia is primarily produced in countries with a persistent surplus of methane. As long as we have vast amounts of methane lying around, and we will for the foreseeable future, conversion into ammonia is a pretty reasonable choice since that carbon will often end up in the atmosphere regardless.
- mtsr 5y ago
  While nuclear has different pollution than fossil fuels, one can hardly call it green with the everlasting poison it produces.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    At least the poison is very concentrated and easy to store. CO2 in the atmosphere is "forever" too, and much harder to deal with.
    - mtsr 5y ago
      Not really, the most abundant life forms on earth consume CO2 to grow. Of course not at the rate we would like (especially with current coverage and that we’re still freeing more carbon daily by chopping down more forests).
divbzero 5y ago
The article points out that ammonia generates far more emissions than any other single chemical compound [1] but it is still a fraction of cement [2]. [1]: https://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/97/24/WEB/09724-industrialimpact.pdf https://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/97/24/WEB/09724-industri... [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02612-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02612-5
- pgorczak 5y ago
  While roughly 3/4 of total emissions come from generating energy (electricity, heating, moving things). https://www.wri.org/data/world-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2018 https://www.wri.org/data/world-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2018
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
elevaet 5y ago
This process would be a good candidate for point source carbon capture and storage. Unfortunately CCS seems to have mostly been a red herring so far, but if it's going to work anywhere, this is a perfect application.
frereubu 5y ago
This became very apparent when a chemicals company with plants in the UK annouced plans to curtail their ammonia production, and it was going to have a knock-on effect on other industries because they got a lot of their CO2 from that process: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/17/warnings-carbon-dioxide-shortage-could-force-farmers-to-cull-pigs https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/17/warnings...
- irthomasthomas 5y ago
  B.S. Story. This happens every year. CO2 for drinks etc is always in short supply in the summer because it can only be made cheaply as a by product of ammonia production, which slows down in the summer due to no demand.
Gravityloss 5y ago
You could make ammonia on wind or solar farms in the middle of nowhere and get it via tanker a couple of times per year, obviating the need for expensive powerlines. Bonus: the tankers can run on ammonia fuel.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  I don't know about ammonia, but aluminium (a similarly "energy-intensive" commodity) is produced in Iceland where they have lots of cheap geothermal energy. Similar situation, making use of a local energy source and exporting the embodied energy as a physical product.
  - cromka 5y ago
    That's exactly what I read while traveling there, that this is why there's so many aluminum plants – because aluminium requires a lot of energy that they have for almost free, yet they cannot export (as electricity) due to their distance to potential markets.
    - Gravityloss 5y ago
      Aluminum plants might require a bit more tending than ammonia, which can be made out of thin air and seawater...
jakewins 5y ago
It’s largely 80/20 right - 80% of emissions come from a small group of sources. That’s hopeful, in some way, since it opens the door to big wins if we tackle those large sources first. I wrote up a summary of the big picture emissions here last year: https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/big-picture-2020/ https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/big-picture-2020/
ambericanonion 5y ago
Collecting cat urine for ammonia production (as was done in the past) might make more sense these days, as the food cost would be offset by the near unlimited supply of cute cat videos - which could be detected with AI. The carbon emitted by respiration would probably be dwarfed by the emissions from users watching the videos, so more work is required on the efficiency of video playback before this could become a viable solution.
einpoklum 5y ago
In processes which emit a lot of CO_2 - is it not possible to capture that CO_2 before it's just released to the outside atmosphere? i.e. when it is rather highly concentrated?

121 points by NoRagrets 5y ago

This is the well known Haber-Bosch process, "Between 75 and 90% of this ammonia goes toward making fertilizer, and about 50% of the world’s food production relies on ammonia fertilizer." For those not looking to create a free account to login and view it: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-5f9t99hc7IJ:https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-ammonia-production-emits-CO2/97/i24+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-5f9t9...

brendoelfrendo 5y ago
It’s worth noting that the Haber process doesn’t require methane, methane is used as a source of hydrogen because it’s cheap and easy to use. Any source of hydrogen could work, but most of them are more energy intensive and thus more expensive or inefficient than just using methane. If you wanted to use nuclear or renewables, you just dedicate your energy production to electrolysis or whatever. Edit to add: also worth noting that electrolysis currently amounts to about 5% of hydrogen production. You basically can’t remove fossil fuels from the food supply without lots of alternate energy input, so this is not a short term fix short of spooling up all kinds of nuclear reactors. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, and maybe if we need to be dependent on fossil fuels for any one thing then we should prioritize food supply rather than literally burning them (or worse, venting them to the atmosphere as is often done with methane), just trying to set the right expectations for people who might be learning all this for the first time.
- semi-extrinsic 5y ago
  You can still use methane as your hydrogen source for ammonia production if you do CO2 capture and storage when you produce the hydrogen. This is often called blue hydrogen, as opposed to green hydrogen from electrolysis and gray hydrogen from methane witgout CO2 capture and storage. Most of the oil and gas companies are partly betting the farm on H2 from CH4 with CO2 capture and storage as a major source of energy in the coming transition, and thus a major source of profits for the next 30-40 years.
  - VBprogrammer 5y ago
    Many people regard CO2 capture and storage as an attempt by the oil and gas industry to be able to green-wash what they current do without actually having to change anything.
    - semi-extrinsic 5y ago
      I agree it's easy to spin it that way. But I do also think it's true that we can scale up CO2 capture and storage one or two orders of magnitude more quickly than we can scale up renewables. And we will need that capability. Just take solar power in Europe as an example. It is projected that we need to install 300 GW of solar in the next three years. But the rate of new installations has been basically flat at about 20-25 GW per year for the past 10 years. Or take wind - we are going to install 21 GW this year, but next year that number will decrease due to constraints in permits and transmission grid capacity. To meet climate targets we need to add at least 30 GW per year. At this point it's simple math that renewables cannot be deployed quickly enough.
    - sgent 5y ago
      I don't really care if Exxon is the most valuable company in the world because they discover a way to capture CO2 out of the air and pump it into old wells. Almost everyone agrees (finally!) global warming is an existential threat for humankind. If you start bringing up other random environmental concerns you lose supporters quickly.
- fulafel 5y ago
  You can also produce methane from renewable biomass (biogas), this is mature tech and in many places used as a transport or CHP fuel.
- tda 5y ago
  Define short term, if we really want I`m quite sure we can dramatically increase pv power generation in a few years. There are vast swathes of little used space in sunny environments. But you do need to invest proper amounts of money, just like we do for developing new fossil fuel sites. The investment for a new LNG field and liquefaction plant is in the order of USD 30-50B. We need to redirect such investments to PV and hydrolysis.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  "cheap" in the same sense as free parking in cities, as in "someone else pays the cost". And the "someone else" in these cases is actually us a.k.a not cheap, but rather pointlessly wasteful.
6nf 5y ago
This process is the reason Malthus was proven wrong back in the day. We wouldn't be able to support 8 billion people without it.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Given that > Malthus observed that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the population, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level What proved him wrong (or at least currently looks that way) was declining fertility levels, not increased food production.
- oblio 5y ago
  Malthus was wrong because he assumed that people would always want to have a lot of kids. Back in his days people would have a lot of kids because they kept dying, but he didn't realize that. Nobody did at the time.

shroompasta 5y ago

Why is depopulation not even a consideration as a solution for climate change? Surely there are ethical ways to implement it. Or do the world's largest and wealthiest nations only care for their hold on economic power?

pfdietz 5y ago
There are some very nazi problems with the whole approach.
zarzavat 5y ago
Depopulation as in killing people? Or as in the one child policy? It turns out you don't need to implement a one child policy: people implement it themselves when the cost of living gets high enough.
- shroompasta 5y ago
  obviously not killing people. I'm just demoralized that low birth rates are stigmatized as they are correlated with lower GDP, when low birth rates are somewhat of a godsend in times like these. Then nations with low birth rates scramble to find ways to up the birth rates despite understanding the C02 cost. It's ironic, really.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    > low birth rates are stigmatized as they are correlated with lower GDP You have this backwards
    - shroompasta 5y ago
      the case in point was obviously Japan which fell from the third largest economy to the sixth largest in the past two decades. Japan wants to be like China and the US, not like Qatar or Switzerland. GDP is not GDP/Capita I believe you have this backwards.
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago

jackyinger 5y ago

This is very interesting from an agricultural perspective. According to the Wikipedia article for ammonia, “In the US as of 2019, approximately 88% of ammonia was used as fertilizers”. To me this is a very interesting and damning fact with regards to current dominant agricultural practices. Yet another reason that it would be beneficial to further redevelop closed loop nutrient systems. For instance, sewage solids from cites in are sold to farmers for use as fertilizer. Funnily enough Fritz Haber (who developed the Haber Process used to manufacture ammonia) also developed chemical weapons in WWI. Some people claim he is somewhat redeemed by his contribution to artificial fertilizer. I disagree with this reasoning on several levels.

missedthecue 5y ago
I wonder why you see his chemical weapons developments during WW1 as a particularly egregious sin. My great grandfather was on the front lines in France and was gassed several times. To the day he died you could see the veins in his eyes from that experience, but when I went to the local VFW with him as a child and saw the men with no arms or no legs - the product of boring old TNT and shrapnel - I would always ask myself why we handwave that as the costs of war.
rembicilious 5y ago
Why is it damning that 88% of ammonia is used in fertilizer? Is their some other industry that ought to consume a larger percentage?
- lcam84 5y ago
  We could avoid this number by investing in soil preservation, nitrogen fixing plants, reduce meat consumption, even in concepts like humanure.
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    None of these would produce as much food per area and time. Reducing total calories required by eating less meat is a different argument.

jandrewrogers 5y ago

Yes, this is the case due to the enormous scale of production. Replacing the hydrogen source at similar scales with electrolysis is plausible with base load power generation. The cost increase is a small integer factor, and in the bigger scheme of things is likely something we can adapt to at least for agriculture. An obvious challenge is that we don't have available green base load power -- nuclear, hydro, or geothermal -- at anything remotely resembling the necessary scale. The requirement for base load power follows from the economics of industrial chemistry, which becomes much more expensive if you can't run your process in a continuous steady-state equilibrium. If we tried to produce ammonia via micro-batching chemistry or similar, those economics may not be practical. The other unfortunate reality is that ammonia production is often a way to extract value from excess methane that might otherwise be vented or burned. It is a better use than the alternative. It isn't a coincidence that ammonia is primarily produced in countries with a persistent surplus of methane. As long as we have vast amounts of methane lying around, and we will for the foreseeable future, conversion into ammonia is a pretty reasonable choice since that carbon will often end up in the atmosphere regardless.

mtsr 5y ago
While nuclear has different pollution than fossil fuels, one can hardly call it green with the everlasting poison it produces.
- adrianN 5y ago
  At least the poison is very concentrated and easy to store. CO2 in the atmosphere is "forever" too, and much harder to deal with.
  - mtsr 5y ago
    Not really, the most abundant life forms on earth consume CO2 to grow. Of course not at the rate we would like (especially with current coverage and that we’re still freeing more carbon daily by chopping down more forests).

divbzero 5y ago

The article points out that ammonia generates far more emissions than any other single chemical compound [1] but it is still a fraction of cement [2]. [1]: https://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/97/24/WEB/09724-industrialimpact.pdf https://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/97/24/WEB/09724-industri... [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02612-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02612-5

pgorczak 5y ago
While roughly 3/4 of total emissions come from generating energy (electricity, heating, moving things). https://www.wri.org/data/world-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2018 https://www.wri.org/data/world-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2018
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

elevaet 5y ago

This process would be a good candidate for point source carbon capture and storage. Unfortunately CCS seems to have mostly been a red herring so far, but if it's going to work anywhere, this is a perfect application.

frereubu 5y ago

This became very apparent when a chemicals company with plants in the UK annouced plans to curtail their ammonia production, and it was going to have a knock-on effect on other industries because they got a lot of their CO2 from that process: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/17/warnings-carbon-dioxide-shortage-could-force-farmers-to-cull-pigs https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/17/warnings...

irthomasthomas 5y ago
B.S. Story. This happens every year. CO2 for drinks etc is always in short supply in the summer because it can only be made cheaply as a by product of ammonia production, which slows down in the summer due to no demand.

Gravityloss 5y ago

You could make ammonia on wind or solar farms in the middle of nowhere and get it via tanker a couple of times per year, obviating the need for expensive powerlines. Bonus: the tankers can run on ammonia fuel.

HPsquared 5y ago
I don't know about ammonia, but aluminium (a similarly "energy-intensive" commodity) is produced in Iceland where they have lots of cheap geothermal energy. Similar situation, making use of a local energy source and exporting the embodied energy as a physical product.
- cromka 5y ago
  That's exactly what I read while traveling there, that this is why there's so many aluminum plants – because aluminium requires a lot of energy that they have for almost free, yet they cannot export (as electricity) due to their distance to potential markets.
  - Gravityloss 5y ago
    Aluminum plants might require a bit more tending than ammonia, which can be made out of thin air and seawater...

jakewins 5y ago

It’s largely 80/20 right - 80% of emissions come from a small group of sources. That’s hopeful, in some way, since it opens the door to big wins if we tackle those large sources first. I wrote up a summary of the big picture emissions here last year: https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/big-picture-2020/ https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/big-picture-2020/

ambericanonion 5y ago

Collecting cat urine for ammonia production (as was done in the past) might make more sense these days, as the food cost would be offset by the near unlimited supply of cute cat videos - which could be detected with AI. The carbon emitted by respiration would probably be dwarfed by the emissions from users watching the videos, so more work is required on the efficiency of video playback before this could become a viable solution.

einpoklum 5y ago

In processes which emit a lot of CO_2 - is it not possible to capture that CO_2 before it's just released to the outside atmosphere? i.e. when it is rather highly concentrated?