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Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
- spiderfarmer 3mo agoIn other news, wind mills have been used to produce lots of other things that require electricity.
- fnordpiglet 3mo agoAs 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.
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- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoThis sentence really bugged me: > 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.
- plaidfuji 3mo agoRight. 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.
- scythe 3mo 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.
- inigyou 3mo agoOne presumes the temperature and pressure can also be created renewably.
- senthil_rajasek 3mo agoWhat if the Ammonia is used locally? Potentially, in that Minnesota farm. It eliminates the need to connect the turbine to the grid.
- hvb2 3mo agoThere'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.
- everforward 3mo agoI don’t think this is true, but it’s not my forte. Pure ammonia is toxic to animals. At normal outdoor temperatures it also only becomes a liquid at ~100 PSI (it’s like 150 at 80F). The boiling point at STP is like -27F. I’m doubtful running a power transmission line to these places is harder than maintaining pipes that transport either a toxic gas, or a toxic pressurized liquid. If you could turn it into ammonium nitrate, that’s a solid at room temp and easier to transport. It’s explosive but insensitive so it shouldn’t without another explosion first. Even if it does, this sounds remote enough that it shouldn’t matter and ammonium nitrate is a no -toxic fertilizer. Wildlife shouldn’t even notice.
- pinkyboy 3mo agoEven if carbon was a complete non-issue, electrification and a greater diversity of energy sources would still have immense value.
- trollbridge 3mo agoElectrification is a no-go when electricity prices keep going up up up.
- jandrese 3mo agoThe price of grid electricity is moot when you're powering the process with locally generated green energy.
- spacephysics 3mo agoTell that to struggling family’s electric bills
- epistasis 3mo agoHappily, and in fact it's the only responsible thing to do for somebody that says they care about struggling families! Struggling families: off-grid electricity generation for clean fertilizers do not affect your electricity rates. Anybody who tries to get you angry about that is misdirecting your attention from the factors that do affect your electricity prices. If you want lower electricity prices, focus on reigning in your PUC to represent you rather than utility profits.
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoOr cut out the middle man and get your own solar. Who are the people in California paying $0.35/kWh to the power company when rooftop solar is less than a third of that?
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- jijijijij 3mo agoThe 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?
- caminante 3mo agoReads like a hallucinated writeup to me.
- halestock 3mo agoJust wait until you hear about the underwater turbine that can do far more than generate electricity! https://energiesmedia.com/texas-turbine-under-water-more-than-electricity/ https://energiesmedia.com/texas-turbine-under-water-more-tha...
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoThanks. Ugh, now I feel bad for wasting time on this AI-generated slop.
- dataflow 3mo ago> 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?
- matthewdgreen 3mo agoWith desalinization, in most places that is the case.
- dataflow 3mo agoEr... for starters, hasn't one of the biggest arguments against desalination been the ecological impact? Or are we assuming spherical cows here?
- inigyou 3mo agoYes, but that's localized and temporary. It's nothing like the ecological impact of burning fossil fuels, and more like the ecological impact of a quarry. It's a lower impact than a hydro dam, I think. You have an intake that can suck in sea life accidentally, and an outlet that emits water too salty for sea life to survive, which doesn't go beyond a certain distance as it mixes again with normal ocean water.
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoYes, 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.
- dataflow 3mo agoYou're saying every population everything on earth could solve their freshwater problem with desalination if only they had cheap energy? No other issues here besides lack of energy?
- masklinn 3mo ago> No, it doesn't. Also it doesn’t need to, wind energy was used to produce things before electricity was harnessed in the first place. Sailboats are harnessed wind energy and some 10kY old. Windmills and wind pumps were invented some time between 700 and 900.
- AnthonyMouse 3mo ago> with some small number of notable exceptions like helium Helium is one of the not-exceptions. Helium gets trapped in the same pockets as natural gas and we get it by separating it, which is an energy-intensive process, which in turn means that we don't do it for the vast majority of natural gas that gets extracted. If energy was cheaper then it would be viable to separate more of it.
- inigyou 3mo agoPedantically speaking, a Farnsworth Fusor makes it from hydrogen and electricity. Not in useful quantities. That's the well known fusion reactor design that can be built by motivated high school students. Basically just accelerates hydrogen ions towards the center of a low pressure chamber using an electric field. Dead end for fusion power, but it does fuse!
- surgical_fire 3mo agoWhich is why I always advocate that countries should generate energy in abundance. You should have energy to waste. If you are burning fossil fuels, that should be considered a failure mode. Fossil fuels should be bottom of the barrel stuff, what you burn when you have no other options. Otherwise, do whatever. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear. Do everything. Do batteries. Do geothermal. Have so much energy you can waste on silly things. Diversity is good here.
- newyankee 3mo agoA 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.
- pydry 3mo agoOnce wind and solar is routinely overproducing what the grid and grid storage can consume, lots of things like this start to become economic. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-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/ https://syntholene.com/
- Rygian 3mo agoThis 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. https://liebreich.com/the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-to-v4-1/ https://liebreich.com/the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-...
- alephnerd 3mo agoMost 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. [0] - https://fupubco.com/books/index.php/fupub/catalog/book/2 https://fupubco.com/books/index.php/fupub/catalog/book/2
- jillesvangurp 3mo agoIt'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.
- wolfi1 3mo agoI 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
- quickthrowman 3mo agoThis setup uses the Haber-Bosch process. It’s different because it’s not tied to the grid (it’s not actually different at all)
- bix6 3mo agoI 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.
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- jandrese 3mo agoSounds like an opportunity to scale up your business. If the competition suddenly gets expensive that is a market opportunity. Of course it's never that simple. If the war ends tomorrow and fertilizer prices drop back to normal over the course of the next two years an expansion could find itself uncompetitive just as its coming online.
- bix6 3mo agoWe are expanding and we’ve ensured our loyal customers remain supplied! Because of our waste processing ability I’m not worried about competition, it’s a fundamentally different value prop than Haber Bosch.
- tntxtnt 3mo ago> 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 3mo agoHaber-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.
- westurner 3mo agoTIL the Red Pyramid looks remarkably like the Haber-Bosch ammonia production process. And the word "Amun" is the etymological root of the word Ammonia. From "Brawndo Plasma Thermos Makes What Plants Crave [video]" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793495 about hot plasma treatment turning water into fertilizer; > [Magnesium-doped geotextile water bags yield Struvite fertilizer (at lower cost but with Pb contamination risk)]
- inigyou 3mo agoIs that true in practice or just in theory?
- pfdietz 3mo agoLooking more closely, it's not true at all. So ignore what I wrote. I was confused by compressors being driven by steam from the SMR plant that made hydrogen from natural gas.
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- kogasa240p 3mo agoThought 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.
- deton3991 3mo ago[flagged]
- jmyeet 3mo agoSome 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.
- inigyou 3mo agoSadly I suspect crypto mining may be more profitable
- nba456_ 3mo agoWe need to hurry and kill this tech before environmentalists try to make other fertilizers illegal and cause mass famine.
- MariusGjerd 3mo agothe talk about "electricity can do things" misses whats actually interesting here. Working in the energy sector, the hard problem is rarely generating the power, it is getting it into the grid. connection queue runs for years and turbines regularly get curtailed when the grid c anncot absorb more. A flexible load behind the meter, like an electrolyzer making ammonia on site, monetizes energy that would otherwise be wasted or never get built at all. The fertilizer is almost a side effect, the real product is a use for stranded wind. i would also add that wind + battery would be much better both for stablization and also the same use as mentioned in the article.
- jandrese 3mo agoA nice thing about the fertilizer is that it is only needed for a few weeks out of the year, which means it can be produced intermittently and stored without causing problems. If there are two weeks of non-production due to weather that isn't an issue so long as it averages out over the year. One could imagine a plant that only runs when the electricity is almost free.
- rapidfl 3mo agoyou guys made the case better in 2 comments - the original article is bloated and misses these key aspects.
- MariusGjerd 3mo agoyeah and imagine you store the unregulated energy source in a battery so you can use it whenever you want OR you could also help stabilize the grid and or sell your energy from the battery if you want. wind + battery will become very popular in the comming years and is already being highly adopted in countries like spain
- inigyou 3mo agoWell, the problem of storage blew up Beirut. I wouldn't say it isn't a problem. It's manageable if you pay attention to storage conditions which they didn't for several years.
- doodlebugging 3mo agoI read that article. I don't know why. It was a difficult read. Nearly every sentence has a bold-face phrase. There are no paragraphs, only sentences. It is borderline incoherent and very off-putting. That style article needs to eliminated. Surely there is a better information source for this site and process than this online rag.
- roelschroeven 3mo agoKinda looks like a low-quality executive summary of a longer text. I agree, it's garbage.
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoIt's AI-generated dog shit, and I feel bad for getting roped in by it. Another commenter noticed there is another article on that site that's almost identical despite being about a different topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049204
- Zigurd 3mo agoTo make sense, this has to compete with the cost and value of battery storage. That depends on location and energy and fertilizer needs at that location. So I guess it's possible that the cost makes sense, but it doesn't seem very likely compared to the ever falling cost of battery storage.
- megnaro 3mo agoFound this cool PBS video on the Western Minnesota researchers working on this. If you'd like to ingest this info in the form of a nine-minute PBS piece, here you go: https://pbswisconsin.org/watch/prairie-sportsman/fertilizer-from-the-wind-ltpmua/ https://pbswisconsin.org/watch/prairie-sportsman/fertilizer-...