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> Fertilizers aren't made from hydrocarbons, they extract hydrogen from hydrocarbons Granted, I’m not a native English speaker, but this looks like a plain con

> Fertilizers aren't made from hydrocarbons, they extract hydrogen from hydrocarbons Granted, I’m not a native English speaker, but this looks like a plain contradiction to me. Again, and to re-iterate, fertilizers is not “my” thing, is not anyone’s in particular thing, in a political manner, because you keep mentioning politics, it’s our 8-billion people thing, without fertilizers we cannot feed us, without fertilizers many more of us will die. You’re putting words into my mouth when it comes to externalities, I did acknowledge them, I was just saying that the externalities that you mentioned (presumably higher CO2 concentrations from using fossil fuels, granted, you didn’t get into much details) are different than the externalities that I explicitly mentioned, i.e. that putting taxes on things like natural gas will lead to increased mass poverty and hence to increased (mass) deaths. And to end on a positive note, glad the getting fertilizers out of hydrogen is getting cheaper, that means we won’t need taxes on natural gas, the simple law of supply and demand will do its thing.

photochemsyn 4y ago
There are several fertilizers required to maintain current global agricultural productivity. Phosphate and potassium are mostly from mineral (mined) sources today, but the one that is captured from the air is nitrogen, and to be used by plants it must be reduced from N2 to NH3 (ammonia) at which point it can also be converted to NO3 (nitrate). Since the early 20th century this has been accomplished by the Bosch-Haber process which utilizes natural gas as the source of the hydrogen to convert N2 to NH3. The point is that you can make H2 via the electrolysis of water at scale, eliminating the need for the natural gas, and feed that H2 into the existing Haber-Bosch plants. Since sunlight and water are available basically everywhere, this eliminates a lot of the geopolitical and supply chain problems that are currently plagueing countries around the world with respect to nitrogen fertilizers (mined fertilizers are another story, of course).
- paganel 4y ago
  > The point is that you can make H2 via the electrolysis of water at scale Perfect, so there's basically almost free money on the table for those wanting to invest in this. And then we get to transportation costs, afaik we're nowhere close to getting hydrogen-powered vehicles into mass production. And transportation costs represent a big part of the final price of food in some of the poorest parts of the world, think Central Africa. And then there are refrigeration prices, which might not sound cool as an industry but which bring enormous food-related benefits. Good luck with keeping the freezers on in the same Central Africa with the help of green energy only. Again, this green energy policy that is forced on almost all our throats here in the West from top to down looks eerily similar to the Maoist policies from the Great Leap Forward period, I sense the same "you're not a true believer" vibe if one starts stating the obvious. I don't think that my opinion or the opinion of the majority of the populace as a whole will manage to change things, unfortunately, but these things need to be said.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    > Perfect, so there's basically almost free money on the table for those wanting to invest in this. This is true. Have you ever actually tried to take advantage of free money though, when there's a cartel of giant corporations currently profiting from it not being done?. Harder than it looks. For starters they can convince a lot of people that the free money doesn't even exist. And once you convince someone to publicly state opinions like "renewables are expensive" or "EVs are worse for the environment" humans have a real hard time accepting new information that contradicts their previous public pronouncements. But early Tesla (and other EV related) stockholders for example, got rewarded for their attention to physical reality. I guess we'll need to wait to see how it turns out this time but "The global green hydrogen market size was valued at USD 0.3 Billion in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 9.8 Billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 54.7% from 2021 to 2028" so either we're going to make a lot of money, or waste a lot of money. > And then we get to transportation costs, afaik we're nowhere close to getting hydrogen-powered vehicles into mass production. Hydrogen powered vehicles are mostly less efficient than battery (and/or directly electrified) alternatives, so while better (which includes cheaper) than many current options, they're not going to be a big thing. But Hydrogen is and will be, just made with electricity not fossil fuels in future. Appropriately, one of the advantages of green hydrogen derived fertilizers, is that you don't need to transport fossil gas around the world and then expend a lot of energy seperating it into hydrogen, you can just generate the hydrogen and then the ammonia basically anywhere you have access to sun and air. Places with no methane reserves, high transport costs, and lots of sunshine will be where the green ammonia S-curve starts its ascent. The transport and production of fossil fuels is an absolutely astounding percentage of our current energy use. Half of all current global Hydrogen production is used in the desulpherisation of fossil fuels for example.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> Granted, I’m not a native English speaker, but this looks like a plain contradiction to me. In the context of taxing carbon to prevent climate change, and you claiming that taxing it would prevent people from making enough fertilizer to feed the world leading to millions of unnecessary deaths you don't see why it's an important distinction that the carbon vented into the atmosphere today in their production is a waste product of an entirely optional process for making one of the input elements (hydrogen) that fertilizers are built from and not actually necessary, or even desirable, for the end result? This is clearly political. You've been convinced by political people that it's just 'physics' and therefore not political, but you're wrong about both the physics and the politics. Plus, even when finding out you're wrong about the physics, you're mostly happy that this means that we won't need regulation, rather than happy about avoiding the tens of millions of deaths you were worried about when you thought other people were being political about something. Who convinced you regulations were a bad thing (even when 99% of economists support them as the best free market solution) and why is that not political? Or is that just physics too?

photochemsyn 4y ago

There are several fertilizers required to maintain current global agricultural productivity. Phosphate and potassium are mostly from mineral (mined) sources today, but the one that is captured from the air is nitrogen, and to be used by plants it must be reduced from N2 to NH3 (ammonia) at which point it can also be converted to NO3 (nitrate). Since the early 20th century this has been accomplished by the Bosch-Haber process which utilizes natural gas as the source of the hydrogen to convert N2 to NH3. The point is that you can make H2 via the electrolysis of water at scale, eliminating the need for the natural gas, and feed that H2 into the existing Haber-Bosch plants. Since sunlight and water are available basically everywhere, this eliminates a lot of the geopolitical and supply chain problems that are currently plagueing countries around the world with respect to nitrogen fertilizers (mined fertilizers are another story, of course).

paganel 4y ago
> The point is that you can make H2 via the electrolysis of water at scale Perfect, so there's basically almost free money on the table for those wanting to invest in this. And then we get to transportation costs, afaik we're nowhere close to getting hydrogen-powered vehicles into mass production. And transportation costs represent a big part of the final price of food in some of the poorest parts of the world, think Central Africa. And then there are refrigeration prices, which might not sound cool as an industry but which bring enormous food-related benefits. Good luck with keeping the freezers on in the same Central Africa with the help of green energy only. Again, this green energy policy that is forced on almost all our throats here in the West from top to down looks eerily similar to the Maoist policies from the Great Leap Forward period, I sense the same "you're not a true believer" vibe if one starts stating the obvious. I don't think that my opinion or the opinion of the majority of the populace as a whole will manage to change things, unfortunately, but these things need to be said.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  > Perfect, so there's basically almost free money on the table for those wanting to invest in this. This is true. Have you ever actually tried to take advantage of free money though, when there's a cartel of giant corporations currently profiting from it not being done?. Harder than it looks. For starters they can convince a lot of people that the free money doesn't even exist. And once you convince someone to publicly state opinions like "renewables are expensive" or "EVs are worse for the environment" humans have a real hard time accepting new information that contradicts their previous public pronouncements. But early Tesla (and other EV related) stockholders for example, got rewarded for their attention to physical reality. I guess we'll need to wait to see how it turns out this time but "The global green hydrogen market size was valued at USD 0.3 Billion in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 9.8 Billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 54.7% from 2021 to 2028" so either we're going to make a lot of money, or waste a lot of money. > And then we get to transportation costs, afaik we're nowhere close to getting hydrogen-powered vehicles into mass production. Hydrogen powered vehicles are mostly less efficient than battery (and/or directly electrified) alternatives, so while better (which includes cheaper) than many current options, they're not going to be a big thing. But Hydrogen is and will be, just made with electricity not fossil fuels in future. Appropriately, one of the advantages of green hydrogen derived fertilizers, is that you don't need to transport fossil gas around the world and then expend a lot of energy seperating it into hydrogen, you can just generate the hydrogen and then the ammonia basically anywhere you have access to sun and air. Places with no methane reserves, high transport costs, and lots of sunshine will be where the green ammonia S-curve starts its ascent. The transport and production of fossil fuels is an absolutely astounding percentage of our current energy use. Half of all current global Hydrogen production is used in the desulpherisation of fossil fuels for example.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> Granted, I’m not a native English speaker, but this looks like a plain contradiction to me. In the context of taxing carbon to prevent climate change, and you claiming that taxing it would prevent people from making enough fertilizer to feed the world leading to millions of unnecessary deaths you don't see why it's an important distinction that the carbon vented into the atmosphere today in their production is a waste product of an entirely optional process for making one of the input elements (hydrogen) that fertilizers are built from and not actually necessary, or even desirable, for the end result? This is clearly political. You've been convinced by political people that it's just 'physics' and therefore not political, but you're wrong about both the physics and the politics. Plus, even when finding out you're wrong about the physics, you're mostly happy that this means that we won't need regulation, rather than happy about avoiding the tens of millions of deaths you were worried about when you thought other people were being political about something. Who convinced you regulations were a bad thing (even when 99% of economists support them as the best free market solution) and why is that not political? Or is that just physics too?