9 ms·

Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

136 points by gritzko 3mo ago

epistasis 3mo ago
Perfect project for rural Minnesota, that needs the ammonia, but also has a surprising amount of solar colocated with farms. And a fair amount of wind in the southwest. However there are far far larger projects going on over the world. China is building multiple GW of wind and solar to power a massive ammonia/green hydrogen site right now. I frequently hear of sites in Spain in the hundreds of MW range. The US has been pivotal in the invention of these technologies, but hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests is preventing us from getting the benefits as quickly as we should.
- buckle8017 3mo ago
  Fossil fuels remain more cost effective. The US isn't a centrally planned economy (sort of) so the more economical option wins.
  - zanecodes 3mo ago
    Fossil fuel being heavily subsidised kind of undermines both of your points.
    - cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
      Heavily directly subsidized and then additionally "subsidized" through massive military expenditures as well.
      - zanecodes 3mo ago
        Not to mention indirectly subsidised by ignoring the externalities imposed on the health of ourselves and our environment.
  - epistasis 3mo ago
    For a very very long time, fracking was not economical, and only through massive government investment did it become cost effective. Same goes for renewables, and electrolyzers. All evidence points to a future with renewable energy costing a small fraction of fossil fuels, and electrolyzers being cheaper than hydrogen from gas. But the future needs to be built. We can either lose out and buy the tech from others, or be leaders and reap the early rewards.
    - colechristensen 3mo ago
      Where solar in particular really drops the cost of electricity is towards the end and beyond its design lifetime of 25-30 years. That's how a bunch of the costs are calculated and it's turning out systems are continuing to produce significantly beyond that. Paired with inflation, this makes old systems produce extremely low cost electricity. It's not about tech now, it's just commodity install base making sure to ride the adoption curve at a healthy pace which people are more than happy to do just because of greed.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 3mo ago
    The US is centrally planned to some degree, just in different ways and by different interests. I suspect the interests/actions of lobbyists for certain companies/sectors had significant influence on things like taxes, and is a type of central planning. It's different than most central planned economies because there are two entities operating in parallel (a quasi-private corporate state in addition to the usual government state), but I'd say it's still centralized/planned, even if it's not the state/government doing the planning.
  - jamal-kumar 3mo ago
    If you're not accounting for all the wildfire smoke costing billions of dollars maybe your calculations for cost effectiveness have some adjustments to be made
  - yegle 3mo ago
    Mostly because the carbon dioxide emission is not properly reflected in the fossil fuel pricing. Basically, every single person on earth is subsiding the big oil by bearing the consequence/cost of the higher CO2 concentration.
    - bricss 3mo ago
      [dead]
  - stymaar 3mo ago
    Like it or not every, non-failed-state, modern economy is a centrally-planned one. The economy never lives in a vacuum, it's always a product of the institutions that govern them (regulations, subsidies, taxes, etc.) Something is always “the most cost-effective option” because the institutions made it so.
    - andrekandre 3mo ago
      well, just to add to that: you cant even have any kind of economy at scale without some central authority to enforce property rights or contract law etc anyways...
  - dkackman11 3mo ago
    lol
  - kulahan 3mo ago
    No they don’t. They remain subsidized. Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago, and I don’t even LIKE solar. Fossil fuels have no redeeming qualities in the major energy sectors anymore, aside from ONE: the plants are VERY cheap to build.
    - otterley 3mo ago
      Solar farms are even cheaper to build!
    - hunterpayne 3mo ago
      "Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago" You are going to have to explain this. Because there is no measurement of efficiency in which solar PV in Minnesota in efficient in any way. To produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north. So it isn't even more environmentally friendly. And its far more expensive. It uses far more energy. So I have no idea at all what you are referring to. Cap Ex perhaps or cap cost...if that's what you mean, you have no idea what you are talking about.
      - defrost 3mo ago
        > to produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north. For the next watt, you need more natural gas which co-releases more CO2 .. or you can just use the same solar panel again - with its fixed up front CO2 cost already "paid for" Over 25 or 30 years a panel keeps producing w/out additional CO2 release, during that same period natural gas extraction and consumption continue releasing CO2.
        lebuffon 3mo ago
        And when we begin coupling solar to cheap sodium ion battery banks it gets very interesting. Sodium ion will even be compatible with a Minnesota winter!
      - icehawk 3mo ago
  - jimnotgym 3mo ago
    Yeah I can see your problem > owned by farmer cooperatives No way for a Corp to benefit=communism
  - otterley 3mo ago
    Solar and wind energy have been more economical than fossil fuel on a cost per unit energy basis for quite some time. The reasons we're still so tied to fossil fuel are largely political, not economic. Technology Connections goes into this in exhaustive detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM Also, you may not have heard that the Trump administration is actively stonewalling green energy projects, regardless of their economic prospects: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/06/29/875622.htm# https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/06/29/87...
    - hunterpayne 3mo ago
      You are confusing capacity costs (capital outlay) with utilization costs (what you actually pay per watt). Its true that renewables have a very low cap cost. They are also several times the utilization cost. That's why electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago. And energy prices are basically the same as 10 years ago. PS LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets, not a real market calculation that anyone pays.
      - otterley 3mo ago
        > They are also several times the utilization cost Prove it. > electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago. That has nothing to do with the cost of generation. The reason costs have gone up are 1/wildfire mitigation and liability, 2/replacement of aging grid infrastructure (plus a geographically diverse state - replacing infrastructure in mountains is costly), 3/rising demand and new fixed infrastructure cost (which is subsumed into everyone's bills), and 4/decommissioning of power plants (San Onofre and Diablo Canyon were both mothballed and haven't been replaced). Also, California utilities are heavily regulated. Utility rates have to be approved by the government, making the rate-setting process highly politicized. For a very long time the regulators refused to let the utilities raise rates even though it was necessary. Eventually, though, that became unsustainable. The result was that instead of raising rates a percentage point or two per year, all of a sudden there was a real threat of the system going completely bankrupt and so prices shot up dramatically. If you really want to understand the energy markets in CA, there's no better source than the Los Angeles Times. Or what's left of it, anyway. > LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets Let me get my popcorn while you explain it to us ignoramuses.
- avadodin 3mo ago
  I don't support fossil fuels but wind works a small fraction of the time, it is awful to wildlife and it is an eyesore. Instead of wasting the already wasteful energy by making fertilizer out of air, these farms could likely much more efficiently re–capture runoff from their waterways that is now being dumped into the sea harming humans and wildlife alike.
  - undersuit 3mo ago
    How are you going to recapture fertilizer runoff.
    - avadodin 3mo ago
      There are techniques both at origin and downstream. I have not reviewed every method but, even if they are energy intensive, they probably beat blasting a carburetor and dumping the compounds.
      - undersuit 3mo ago
        I mentioned removing the excess nutrients from the water because removing them "works a small fraction of the time, it is awful to wildlife and it is an eyesore." not to mention the energy requirements which you think shouldn't include wind.
  - strictnein 3mo ago
    The runoff from farms in rural Minnesota is being dumped into the sea? There's almost no place farther from the sea in North America than upper midwest rural farms.
    - epistasis 3mo ago
      It causes massive algeal growths in the Gulf of Mexico. This sucks massive amounts of oxygen out of the water leading to so-called "dead zones".
    - anyonecancode 3mo ago
- aaron695 3mo ago
  [dead]
- strictnein 3mo ago
  > hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests The #1 state, by far, in terms of solar, wind, and energy storage is Texas. There is likely no other state that is also as pro-fossil fuels as Texas. It's also a state known for its conservative stance on almost everything. But the market doesn't care and it flourished without government intervention or significant aid, simply because Texas let's you build things, and the market likes to make money.
  - thelastgallon 3mo ago
    Its mostly because of this guy(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Osborne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Osborne "Renewable Energy Policy. In 1984 Osborne co-founded the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association (now Alliance) (TREIA)[1] with two partners and worked with other key individuals and organizations to bring the nascent renewable energy industry to the attention of policymakers on the state and federal level. " This was a unplanned, unanticipated freak accident that gave Texas an early transmission for wind power. Because most of the farmers are republican, they built a transmission network for the farmers. This led to CREZ (Competitive Renewable Energy Zones), the goal of which is to integrate the wind supply regions with the large demand centers. Rich farmers are a much larger voting block than the dozens of fossil fuel billionaires. The bragging by Texas about renewables is entirely accidental and is a side-effect of building a transmission network for the rich farmers. Not because Texas runs markets efficiently, pro-business or pro-efficiency or anything like that. Thats just nonsense. Today, Texas tries very hard to limit renewables, but fails. They only want coal and natural gas, and use the legislation and state money to fund them: https://www.powermag.com/texas-moves-forward-with-5-38b-in-loans-for-10-gw-of-new-dispatchable-power-projects/ https://www.powermag.com/texas-moves-forward-with-5-38b-in-l... (1) I think this is the guy, but am not entirely sure. I read an article about this curious case of renewables in Texas, a long time back. It is hard to find that article, I've been searching for an hour and most of what I find credits politicians for CREZ. But there was a private person who made this possible. I'm assuming its this guy.
    - Dibby053 3mo ago
      So, synthesizing both comments: state-backed infrastructure funding + deregulated free-market buildout = rapid expansion
- KaiserPro 3mo ago
  > Spain in the hundreds of MW range. Its got to the point where there is now so much solar, that during solar maximum, there is too much energy and plants are being told to turn off. Natural gas was the main pricing predictor, but now that link has been pretty much severed. Given that spain is dependent on russian gas, its good that they are able to _try_ to lower their dependence.
  - epistasis 3mo ago
    Spain has only started installing storage too; that will not only make energy cheaper but also increase reliability massively. California's grid is rock solid these days because of it, and it pays for itself with time arbitrage of solar.
daliusd 3mo ago
It would be interesting to get details what’s the process behind. Can you reproduce it on personal level?
- WJW 3mo ago
  It's just electrolysing water into hydrogen and then using the hydrogen in a Haber-Bosch reactor with nitrogen from the air to make ammonia. Electrolysis is easy enough to do on a small scale. Fritz Haber initially demonstrated his process producing 125 milliliters per hour of ammonia in a "tabletop machine", so it's obviously technically possible. Typical process parameters are about 200 bars and 500 degrees C, so it's not trivial but also not outside of what a dedicated hobbyist could reach. I'm pretty sure it's not economically feasible at small scales though. Even the earliest industrial plants in the 1920s made 20 tons of ammonia per day. It will be vastly cheaper to just buy the stuff in bulk from a plant churning out hundreds of tons per day than it will be to make it yourself at a rate of 2 liters per day. That said, go for it! A factory is just a room, and similarly a chemical reactor is basically just a steel drum.
- tastyfreeze 3mo ago
  On a smaller scale plasma electrolytic cells look more economical than Haber-Bosch but are still new tech. I don't remember the company trying to commercialize it but their target is on farm nitrate production.
  - allannienhuis 3mo ago
    you might be thinking of https://www.greenlightning.ag/ https://www.greenlightning.ag/ - seems really cool tech. combined with variable cheap power source like solar or wind, seems like a good way to give ai bit more control over inputs for farmers.
Animats 3mo ago
There are press releases which link to other press releases. Found the technical paper from 2021.[1] The ammonia plant is built for intermittent operation, so it can shut down or reduce output when there's no wind. No need to store much electrical energy. Storage tanks hold the ammonia. It's a reasonable idea, but is it cost-effective? No numbers are given. Still, fertilizer independence alone is worth something. You can do this anywhere with wind or sun. [1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1838620 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1838620
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- possiblyburrito 3mo ago
  The catch is that the electrolyzer is most of the capex, so intermittency cuts both ways. Tanks are cheap, which makes flexibility nearly free on the storage side, but every hour the stack sits idle the hydrogen coming out of it gets more expensive. That is why these projects obsess over capacity factor and usually want a mix of wind and solar rather than wind alone. Agreed on wanting numbers, the whole question lives in how many hours per year the stack actually runs.
- hunterpayne 3mo ago
  Its trying to complete with making ammonia from natural gas. So probably not. Natural gas is priced as a waste product and the industrial process we use there is about 120 years old. So its just about the hardest target on the board to beat on price.
  - defrost 3mo ago
    It's providing an alternative to middle east sourced fertiliser from plants that can no longer ship or, in some cases, can no longer operate due to war damage. US states aren't the only places on the globe building out renewable powered green hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, etc.
    - c1ccccc1 3mo ago
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819
umvi 3mo ago
So basically: wind generators power electrolysis to create hydrogen, the hydrogen is fed to a normal Haber-Bosch plant which is still powered by coal or gas. So basically the wind power is just replacing the carbon footprint of a single input (hydrogen) to a H-B plant?
- philipkglass 3mo ago
  The only chemical inputs a Haber-Bosch plant needs are nitrogen and hydrogen. The nitrogen always comes from air and in this plant the hydrogen comes from electrolysis. The plant also needs electrical power to run compressors, but that can also be supplied by wind and it's minor compared to the embodied energy of the hydrogen input.
  - hunterpayne 3mo ago
    Sort of, but there are important details you miss. First the nitrogen triple bond is one of the strongest in nature so it takes a lot of energy to break it. So we don't actually do that in the way you think in a real ammonia plant. Instead we heat (usually) Magnesium and that extracts Nitrogen from the air (actually a pure nitrogen atmosphere). That's not what is happening in this plant. And the difference in the effectiveness of those two different methods is probably pretty big. This seems more like a PR stunt to get investment.
    - philipkglass 3mo ago
      The reaction N2 + 3 H2 => 2 NH3 is thermodynamically spontaneously but kinetically forbidden by the strength of the N-N bond. That's why the key breakthrough of the Haber-Bosch process is the use of a doped iron oxide (magnetite -- is that what you meant?) catalyst that allows the reaction to proceed at an industrially useful rate. This wind powered ammonia plant gets the hydrogen from water electrolysis instead of steam-reformed methane; the plant is otherwise using a conventional Haber-Bosch process. Using electrolytic hydrogen to make ammonia was fairly common in the first half of the 20th century, because a lot of remote hydroelectric plants didn't immediately have uses for all of the electricity they could generate. They turned low cost electricity into pure hydrogen and used it to make ammonia and derivatives, which were easier-to-transport high value products.
richardc323 3mo ago
I grew up on an organic orchard, so don't get excited about artificial sources of nitrogen for agriculture and horticulture. It is better than getting fertiliser from fossil fuels, but it is still not great. My mind goes to energy storage. If it was a smart way to do that, people would probably be doing it, who knows. Well, someone wrote a paper about it in 2022: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148122008473 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
- richardc323 3mo ago
  Turns out the article is on the Ammonia Energy Association website, wake up Richard.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- oconnore 3mo ago
  There are two camps: people who are fans of Haber Bosch because it feeds most of humanity, and absolute psychopaths.
  - richardc323 3mo ago
    That is a bit extreme. Wanting to preserve the environment isn't the same as wanting to let everyone starve, it's quite the opposite. Spend a minute or two looking up soil erosion, and extrapolate 100 years.
- philipkglass 3mo ago
  We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia by now if fracking hadn't made natural gas so cheap. Natural gas is the largest variable-cost input to making most ammonia (it's processed with steam reforming to generate hydrogen), and in the United States it cost more 20 years ago than it does now: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DHHNGSP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DHHNGSP The cost of wind power and solar power have fallen dramatically, but without accounting for the externalities of CO2 emissions, natural gas is still the cheaper way to make ammonia.
kerrieshitz 3mo ago
[dead]
cyberax 3mo ago
Ammonia production is more-or-less a synonym for "hydrogen production" chemically. The NH3 formation happens at a high temperature and pressure, but it doesn't use a lot of energy. Technically, it's even energetically favorable, but with the enthalpy of just -46kJ/mol. For comparison, water is -300 kJ/mol. In other words, to split 1 mole (18 grams) of water into constituent parts (molecular hydrogen and oxygen), you need to invest at least 300 kJ of energy. If you then use 1 mole of hydrogen to produce ammonia, you can get back 30 kJ of energy. This is chemically pretty much the best case from the thermodynamic efficiency standpoint (especially when you also factor in the entropy changes) with almost zero potential waste. The kicker is, of course, that you need extremely high temperature and pressure for the reaction to work. And this is just hard to do on small scale. But that's not a theoretical barrier, but "just" a question of clever engineering! It's great to hear that we're solving these issues.
ajdude 3mo ago
I think this is a [dup] of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819
SadErn 3mo ago
[dead]
jimnotgym 3mo ago
I don't know about the US, but in the UK in times of high renewable production and low demand the electricity price goes negative. Sounds like a nice use for waste electricity, as well as your own renewables? Would like to know the capex numbers though. Is it viable in todays market to have it stood idle?
jimnotgym 3mo ago
For those trying to work out the economics. 1 ton of urea is apparently worth $451 I think I would need to know the capex cost to go any further, but my gut feel is this is really a technical demonstration rather than an instant goldmine.
- Gibbon1 3mo ago
  You need about 50-55kwh to produce a kg of hydrogen. Urea molar mass is 60. And the formula is CO(NH2)2. 4 moles of hydrogen per mole. So 6.6% hydrogen by weight. 1000kg of urea needs then 66.6kg of hydrogen. At 55khw per kg of hydrogen you need 3666 kwh per ton of urea. (not counting other energy inputs). At $0.05/kwh that's $183 for the hydrogen input. Worth mentioning the internet says fertilizer is about 7% of an average farm budget and only 1% of the cost of food at the store. I'm on the side of sure no problem really when it comes to green nitrogen fertilizer.
  - defrost 3mo ago
    Another PoV is not the profit from producing home ground fertiliser but the risk of not having fertiliser at "just the right time". Locally (Western Australia) there are some 8.3 (ish) million hectares of grain planted annually; that's a high spike demand for both fertiliser and fuel that can be interrupted by supply chain issues (eg: war) leading to extensive losses wrt expected harvests.
    - jimnotgym 3mo ago
      Oh I'm in that camp. I live in a country that didn't produce its own fertilizer. Sounds like a terrific risk to me
RickJWagner 3mo ago
Good for Morris! 40 years ago I was exiting the US Air Force and selected the University of Minnesota at Morris as my college. It’s a tiny campus, they advertised themselves as a ‘small college, like a mini Ivy League school’. I went, and enjoyed a semester there, but then fate intervened when my father died. I went home, got sidetracked a while and eventually returned to school at the University of Minnesota at Mankato, chosen because they had an active bowling team. ( I wanted to go pro, but later found out I probably wouldn’t make much money at it. Reality set in. )
ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
Ghost of Timothy McVeigh has entered the chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate
thelastgallon 3mo ago
Use Solar/Wind and convert it to green hydrogen or green ammonia. We've reached the limits of pumped hydro and batteries are not dirt cheap yet. Green hydrogen and ammonia solve multiple problems. Both are fossil fuel products now. Hydrogen is corrosive and explosive, next to impossible to store/transport safely. Green Hydrogen for immediate consumption at industries that require high heat and electricity is not an option. Green ammonia for fertilizer and as energy storage. With abundant oversupply of solar, we can start building alternatives to all fossil fuels.
Alien1Being 3mo ago
China operates a massive green hydrogen and ammonia facility in Chifeng, which is powered entirely by off-grid wind and solar. The site already produces 320,000 tonnes of green ammonia annually. This is going to be the century of China... In contrast, this Minnesotan plant aims to scale up to 300 tonnes a year some day.
benj111 3mo ago
Cool, hope this is successful. I've commented previously about doing exactly this more as a form of alternative energy storage or just to use 'free' energy. Good to know I wasn't speaking completely out of my arse.
cyanlimetea 3mo ago
[flagged]

136 points by gritzko 3mo ago

Perfect project for rural Minnesota, that needs the ammonia, but also has a surprising amount of solar colocated with farms. And a fair amount of wind in the southwest. However there are far far larger projects going on over the world. China is building multiple GW of wind and solar to power a massive ammonia/green hydrogen site right now. I frequently hear of sites in Spain in the hundreds of MW range. The US has been pivotal in the invention of these technologies, but hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests is preventing us from getting the benefits as quickly as we should.

buckle8017 3mo ago
Fossil fuels remain more cost effective. The US isn't a centrally planned economy (sort of) so the more economical option wins.
- zanecodes 3mo ago
  Fossil fuel being heavily subsidised kind of undermines both of your points.
  - cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
    Heavily directly subsidized and then additionally "subsidized" through massive military expenditures as well.
    - zanecodes 3mo ago
      Not to mention indirectly subsidised by ignoring the externalities imposed on the health of ourselves and our environment.
- epistasis 3mo ago
  For a very very long time, fracking was not economical, and only through massive government investment did it become cost effective. Same goes for renewables, and electrolyzers. All evidence points to a future with renewable energy costing a small fraction of fossil fuels, and electrolyzers being cheaper than hydrogen from gas. But the future needs to be built. We can either lose out and buy the tech from others, or be leaders and reap the early rewards.
  - colechristensen 3mo ago
    Where solar in particular really drops the cost of electricity is towards the end and beyond its design lifetime of 25-30 years. That's how a bunch of the costs are calculated and it's turning out systems are continuing to produce significantly beyond that. Paired with inflation, this makes old systems produce extremely low cost electricity. It's not about tech now, it's just commodity install base making sure to ride the adoption curve at a healthy pace which people are more than happy to do just because of greed.
- omgwtfbyobbq 3mo ago
  The US is centrally planned to some degree, just in different ways and by different interests. I suspect the interests/actions of lobbyists for certain companies/sectors had significant influence on things like taxes, and is a type of central planning. It's different than most central planned economies because there are two entities operating in parallel (a quasi-private corporate state in addition to the usual government state), but I'd say it's still centralized/planned, even if it's not the state/government doing the planning.
- jamal-kumar 3mo ago
  If you're not accounting for all the wildfire smoke costing billions of dollars maybe your calculations for cost effectiveness have some adjustments to be made
- yegle 3mo ago
  Mostly because the carbon dioxide emission is not properly reflected in the fossil fuel pricing. Basically, every single person on earth is subsiding the big oil by bearing the consequence/cost of the higher CO2 concentration.
  - bricss 3mo ago
    [dead]
- stymaar 3mo ago
  Like it or not every, non-failed-state, modern economy is a centrally-planned one. The economy never lives in a vacuum, it's always a product of the institutions that govern them (regulations, subsidies, taxes, etc.) Something is always “the most cost-effective option” because the institutions made it so.
  - andrekandre 3mo ago
    well, just to add to that: you cant even have any kind of economy at scale without some central authority to enforce property rights or contract law etc anyways...
- dkackman11 3mo ago
  lol
- kulahan 3mo ago
  No they don’t. They remain subsidized. Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago, and I don’t even LIKE solar. Fossil fuels have no redeeming qualities in the major energy sectors anymore, aside from ONE: the plants are VERY cheap to build.
  - otterley 3mo ago
    Solar farms are even cheaper to build!
  - hunterpayne 3mo ago
    "Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago" You are going to have to explain this. Because there is no measurement of efficiency in which solar PV in Minnesota in efficient in any way. To produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north. So it isn't even more environmentally friendly. And its far more expensive. It uses far more energy. So I have no idea at all what you are referring to. Cap Ex perhaps or cap cost...if that's what you mean, you have no idea what you are talking about.
    - defrost 3mo ago
      > to produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north. For the next watt, you need more natural gas which co-releases more CO2 .. or you can just use the same solar panel again - with its fixed up front CO2 cost already "paid for" Over 25 or 30 years a panel keeps producing w/out additional CO2 release, during that same period natural gas extraction and consumption continue releasing CO2.
      - lebuffon 3mo ago
        And when we begin coupling solar to cheap sodium ion battery banks it gets very interesting. Sodium ion will even be compatible with a Minnesota winter!
    - icehawk 3mo ago
- jimnotgym 3mo ago
  Yeah I can see your problem > owned by farmer cooperatives No way for a Corp to benefit=communism
- otterley 3mo ago
  Solar and wind energy have been more economical than fossil fuel on a cost per unit energy basis for quite some time. The reasons we're still so tied to fossil fuel are largely political, not economic. Technology Connections goes into this in exhaustive detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM Also, you may not have heard that the Trump administration is actively stonewalling green energy projects, regardless of their economic prospects: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/06/29/875622.htm# https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/06/29/87...
  - hunterpayne 3mo ago
    You are confusing capacity costs (capital outlay) with utilization costs (what you actually pay per watt). Its true that renewables have a very low cap cost. They are also several times the utilization cost. That's why electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago. And energy prices are basically the same as 10 years ago. PS LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets, not a real market calculation that anyone pays.
    - otterley 3mo ago
      > They are also several times the utilization cost Prove it. > electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago. That has nothing to do with the cost of generation. The reason costs have gone up are 1/wildfire mitigation and liability, 2/replacement of aging grid infrastructure (plus a geographically diverse state - replacing infrastructure in mountains is costly), 3/rising demand and new fixed infrastructure cost (which is subsumed into everyone's bills), and 4/decommissioning of power plants (San Onofre and Diablo Canyon were both mothballed and haven't been replaced). Also, California utilities are heavily regulated. Utility rates have to be approved by the government, making the rate-setting process highly politicized. For a very long time the regulators refused to let the utilities raise rates even though it was necessary. Eventually, though, that became unsustainable. The result was that instead of raising rates a percentage point or two per year, all of a sudden there was a real threat of the system going completely bankrupt and so prices shot up dramatically. If you really want to understand the energy markets in CA, there's no better source than the Los Angeles Times. Or what's left of it, anyway. > LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets Let me get my popcorn while you explain it to us ignoramuses.
avadodin 3mo ago
I don't support fossil fuels but wind works a small fraction of the time, it is awful to wildlife and it is an eyesore. Instead of wasting the already wasteful energy by making fertilizer out of air, these farms could likely much more efficiently re–capture runoff from their waterways that is now being dumped into the sea harming humans and wildlife alike.
- undersuit 3mo ago
  How are you going to recapture fertilizer runoff.
  - avadodin 3mo ago
    There are techniques both at origin and downstream. I have not reviewed every method but, even if they are energy intensive, they probably beat blasting a carburetor and dumping the compounds.
    - undersuit 3mo ago
      I mentioned removing the excess nutrients from the water because removing them "works a small fraction of the time, it is awful to wildlife and it is an eyesore." not to mention the energy requirements which you think shouldn't include wind.
- strictnein 3mo ago
  The runoff from farms in rural Minnesota is being dumped into the sea? There's almost no place farther from the sea in North America than upper midwest rural farms.
  - epistasis 3mo ago
    It causes massive algeal growths in the Gulf of Mexico. This sucks massive amounts of oxygen out of the water leading to so-called "dead zones".
  - anyonecancode 3mo ago
aaron695 3mo ago
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strictnein 3mo ago
> hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests The #1 state, by far, in terms of solar, wind, and energy storage is Texas. There is likely no other state that is also as pro-fossil fuels as Texas. It's also a state known for its conservative stance on almost everything. But the market doesn't care and it flourished without government intervention or significant aid, simply because Texas let's you build things, and the market likes to make money.
- thelastgallon 3mo ago
  Its mostly because of this guy(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Osborne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Osborne "Renewable Energy Policy. In 1984 Osborne co-founded the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association (now Alliance) (TREIA)[1] with two partners and worked with other key individuals and organizations to bring the nascent renewable energy industry to the attention of policymakers on the state and federal level. " This was a unplanned, unanticipated freak accident that gave Texas an early transmission for wind power. Because most of the farmers are republican, they built a transmission network for the farmers. This led to CREZ (Competitive Renewable Energy Zones), the goal of which is to integrate the wind supply regions with the large demand centers. Rich farmers are a much larger voting block than the dozens of fossil fuel billionaires. The bragging by Texas about renewables is entirely accidental and is a side-effect of building a transmission network for the rich farmers. Not because Texas runs markets efficiently, pro-business or pro-efficiency or anything like that. Thats just nonsense. Today, Texas tries very hard to limit renewables, but fails. They only want coal and natural gas, and use the legislation and state money to fund them: https://www.powermag.com/texas-moves-forward-with-5-38b-in-loans-for-10-gw-of-new-dispatchable-power-projects/ https://www.powermag.com/texas-moves-forward-with-5-38b-in-l... (1) I think this is the guy, but am not entirely sure. I read an article about this curious case of renewables in Texas, a long time back. It is hard to find that article, I've been searching for an hour and most of what I find credits politicians for CREZ. But there was a private person who made this possible. I'm assuming its this guy.
  - Dibby053 3mo ago
    So, synthesizing both comments: state-backed infrastructure funding + deregulated free-market buildout = rapid expansion
KaiserPro 3mo ago
> Spain in the hundreds of MW range. Its got to the point where there is now so much solar, that during solar maximum, there is too much energy and plants are being told to turn off. Natural gas was the main pricing predictor, but now that link has been pretty much severed. Given that spain is dependent on russian gas, its good that they are able to _try_ to lower their dependence.
- epistasis 3mo ago
  Spain has only started installing storage too; that will not only make energy cheaper but also increase reliability massively. California's grid is rock solid these days because of it, and it pays for itself with time arbitrage of solar.

daliusd 3mo ago

It would be interesting to get details what’s the process behind. Can you reproduce it on personal level?

WJW 3mo ago
It's just electrolysing water into hydrogen and then using the hydrogen in a Haber-Bosch reactor with nitrogen from the air to make ammonia. Electrolysis is easy enough to do on a small scale. Fritz Haber initially demonstrated his process producing 125 milliliters per hour of ammonia in a "tabletop machine", so it's obviously technically possible. Typical process parameters are about 200 bars and 500 degrees C, so it's not trivial but also not outside of what a dedicated hobbyist could reach. I'm pretty sure it's not economically feasible at small scales though. Even the earliest industrial plants in the 1920s made 20 tons of ammonia per day. It will be vastly cheaper to just buy the stuff in bulk from a plant churning out hundreds of tons per day than it will be to make it yourself at a rate of 2 liters per day. That said, go for it! A factory is just a room, and similarly a chemical reactor is basically just a steel drum.
tastyfreeze 3mo ago
On a smaller scale plasma electrolytic cells look more economical than Haber-Bosch but are still new tech. I don't remember the company trying to commercialize it but their target is on farm nitrate production.
- allannienhuis 3mo ago
  you might be thinking of https://www.greenlightning.ag/ https://www.greenlightning.ag/ - seems really cool tech. combined with variable cheap power source like solar or wind, seems like a good way to give ai bit more control over inputs for farmers.

Animats 3mo ago

There are press releases which link to other press releases. Found the technical paper from 2021.[1] The ammonia plant is built for intermittent operation, so it can shut down or reduce output when there's no wind. No need to store much electrical energy. Storage tanks hold the ammonia. It's a reasonable idea, but is it cost-effective? No numbers are given. Still, fertilizer independence alone is worth something. You can do this anywhere with wind or sun. [1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1838620 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1838620

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possiblyburrito 3mo ago
The catch is that the electrolyzer is most of the capex, so intermittency cuts both ways. Tanks are cheap, which makes flexibility nearly free on the storage side, but every hour the stack sits idle the hydrogen coming out of it gets more expensive. That is why these projects obsess over capacity factor and usually want a mix of wind and solar rather than wind alone. Agreed on wanting numbers, the whole question lives in how many hours per year the stack actually runs.
hunterpayne 3mo ago
Its trying to complete with making ammonia from natural gas. So probably not. Natural gas is priced as a waste product and the industrial process we use there is about 120 years old. So its just about the hardest target on the board to beat on price.
- defrost 3mo ago
  It's providing an alternative to middle east sourced fertiliser from plants that can no longer ship or, in some cases, can no longer operate due to war damage. US states aren't the only places on the globe building out renewable powered green hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, etc.
  - c1ccccc1 3mo ago

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819

umvi 3mo ago

So basically: wind generators power electrolysis to create hydrogen, the hydrogen is fed to a normal Haber-Bosch plant which is still powered by coal or gas. So basically the wind power is just replacing the carbon footprint of a single input (hydrogen) to a H-B plant?

philipkglass 3mo ago
The only chemical inputs a Haber-Bosch plant needs are nitrogen and hydrogen. The nitrogen always comes from air and in this plant the hydrogen comes from electrolysis. The plant also needs electrical power to run compressors, but that can also be supplied by wind and it's minor compared to the embodied energy of the hydrogen input.
- hunterpayne 3mo ago
  Sort of, but there are important details you miss. First the nitrogen triple bond is one of the strongest in nature so it takes a lot of energy to break it. So we don't actually do that in the way you think in a real ammonia plant. Instead we heat (usually) Magnesium and that extracts Nitrogen from the air (actually a pure nitrogen atmosphere). That's not what is happening in this plant. And the difference in the effectiveness of those two different methods is probably pretty big. This seems more like a PR stunt to get investment.
  - philipkglass 3mo ago
    The reaction N2 + 3 H2 => 2 NH3 is thermodynamically spontaneously but kinetically forbidden by the strength of the N-N bond. That's why the key breakthrough of the Haber-Bosch process is the use of a doped iron oxide (magnetite -- is that what you meant?) catalyst that allows the reaction to proceed at an industrially useful rate. This wind powered ammonia plant gets the hydrogen from water electrolysis instead of steam-reformed methane; the plant is otherwise using a conventional Haber-Bosch process. Using electrolytic hydrogen to make ammonia was fairly common in the first half of the 20th century, because a lot of remote hydroelectric plants didn't immediately have uses for all of the electricity they could generate. They turned low cost electricity into pure hydrogen and used it to make ammonia and derivatives, which were easier-to-transport high value products.

richardc323 3mo ago

I grew up on an organic orchard, so don't get excited about artificial sources of nitrogen for agriculture and horticulture. It is better than getting fertiliser from fossil fuels, but it is still not great. My mind goes to energy storage. If it was a smart way to do that, people would probably be doing it, who knows. Well, someone wrote a paper about it in 2022: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148122008473 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...

richardc323 3mo ago
Turns out the article is on the Ammonia Energy Association website, wake up Richard.
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oconnore 3mo ago
There are two camps: people who are fans of Haber Bosch because it feeds most of humanity, and absolute psychopaths.
- richardc323 3mo ago
  That is a bit extreme. Wanting to preserve the environment isn't the same as wanting to let everyone starve, it's quite the opposite. Spend a minute or two looking up soil erosion, and extrapolate 100 years.
philipkglass 3mo ago
We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia by now if fracking hadn't made natural gas so cheap. Natural gas is the largest variable-cost input to making most ammonia (it's processed with steam reforming to generate hydrogen), and in the United States it cost more 20 years ago than it does now: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DHHNGSP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DHHNGSP The cost of wind power and solar power have fallen dramatically, but without accounting for the externalities of CO2 emissions, natural gas is still the cheaper way to make ammonia.

kerrieshitz 3mo ago

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cyberax 3mo ago

Ammonia production is more-or-less a synonym for "hydrogen production" chemically. The NH3 formation happens at a high temperature and pressure, but it doesn't use a lot of energy. Technically, it's even energetically favorable, but with the enthalpy of just -46kJ/mol. For comparison, water is -300 kJ/mol. In other words, to split 1 mole (18 grams) of water into constituent parts (molecular hydrogen and oxygen), you need to invest at least 300 kJ of energy. If you then use 1 mole of hydrogen to produce ammonia, you can get back 30 kJ of energy. This is chemically pretty much the best case from the thermodynamic efficiency standpoint (especially when you also factor in the entropy changes) with almost zero potential waste. The kicker is, of course, that you need extremely high temperature and pressure for the reaction to work. And this is just hard to do on small scale. But that's not a theoretical barrier, but "just" a question of clever engineering! It's great to hear that we're solving these issues.

ajdude 3mo ago

I think this is a [dup] of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819

SadErn 3mo ago

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jimnotgym 3mo ago

I don't know about the US, but in the UK in times of high renewable production and low demand the electricity price goes negative. Sounds like a nice use for waste electricity, as well as your own renewables? Would like to know the capex numbers though. Is it viable in todays market to have it stood idle?

jimnotgym 3mo ago

For those trying to work out the economics. 1 ton of urea is apparently worth $451 I think I would need to know the capex cost to go any further, but my gut feel is this is really a technical demonstration rather than an instant goldmine.

Gibbon1 3mo ago
You need about 50-55kwh to produce a kg of hydrogen. Urea molar mass is 60. And the formula is CO(NH2)2. 4 moles of hydrogen per mole. So 6.6% hydrogen by weight. 1000kg of urea needs then 66.6kg of hydrogen. At 55khw per kg of hydrogen you need 3666 kwh per ton of urea. (not counting other energy inputs). At $0.05/kwh that's $183 for the hydrogen input. Worth mentioning the internet says fertilizer is about 7% of an average farm budget and only 1% of the cost of food at the store. I'm on the side of sure no problem really when it comes to green nitrogen fertilizer.
- defrost 3mo ago
  Another PoV is not the profit from producing home ground fertiliser but the risk of not having fertiliser at "just the right time". Locally (Western Australia) there are some 8.3 (ish) million hectares of grain planted annually; that's a high spike demand for both fertiliser and fuel that can be interrupted by supply chain issues (eg: war) leading to extensive losses wrt expected harvests.
  - jimnotgym 3mo ago
    Oh I'm in that camp. I live in a country that didn't produce its own fertilizer. Sounds like a terrific risk to me

RickJWagner 3mo ago

Good for Morris! 40 years ago I was exiting the US Air Force and selected the University of Minnesota at Morris as my college. It’s a tiny campus, they advertised themselves as a ‘small college, like a mini Ivy League school’. I went, and enjoyed a semester there, but then fate intervened when my father died. I went home, got sidetracked a while and eventually returned to school at the University of Minnesota at Mankato, chosen because they had an active bowling team. ( I wanted to go pro, but later found out I probably wouldn’t make much money at it. Reality set in. )

ButlerianJihad 3mo ago

Ghost of Timothy McVeigh has entered the chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate

thelastgallon 3mo ago

Use Solar/Wind and convert it to green hydrogen or green ammonia. We've reached the limits of pumped hydro and batteries are not dirt cheap yet. Green hydrogen and ammonia solve multiple problems. Both are fossil fuel products now. Hydrogen is corrosive and explosive, next to impossible to store/transport safely. Green Hydrogen for immediate consumption at industries that require high heat and electricity is not an option. Green ammonia for fertilizer and as energy storage. With abundant oversupply of solar, we can start building alternatives to all fossil fuels.

Alien1Being 3mo ago

China operates a massive green hydrogen and ammonia facility in Chifeng, which is powered entirely by off-grid wind and solar. The site already produces 320,000 tonnes of green ammonia annually. This is going to be the century of China... In contrast, this Minnesotan plant aims to scale up to 300 tonnes a year some day.

benj111 3mo ago

Cool, hope this is successful. I've commented previously about doing exactly this more as a form of alternative energy storage or just to use 'free' energy. Good to know I wasn't speaking completely out of my arse.

cyanlimetea 3mo ago

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