To 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.
Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
61–70 of 103 posts
Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
There'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.
I 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 ni…
I didn't realize this previously but straight anhydrous ammonia can be used directly in the field as a fertilizer - specialized trucks just inject it directly into the soil where it dissolves in soil moisture.
Yes, it needs to be stored as a "toxic pressurized liquid" in steel tanks, but we store and use lots of toxic pressurized liquids all the time. Lots of people run all their energy needs off propane tanks, after all.
Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
With desalinization, in most places that is the case.
Er... for starters, hasn't one of the biggest arguments against desalination been the ecological impact? Or are we assuming spherical cows here?
Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you have 1,000 separate ammonia generation systems that need upkeep, repairs, etc. It is doing chemical reactions under pressure to produce presumably ammonium nitrate which is explosive. The engineers you would need probably aren’t cheap, and storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate all year is sort of sketchy. Timothy McVeigh took out an entire federal building with about 4800 pounds of the stuff mixed wit…
I don’t know the exact process but I don’t think ammonium nitrate actually gets involved. The system I was looking at (Green Lightning) actually doesn’t make ammonia but rather liquid nitrogen fertilizer Plasma to take N2 + O2 -> NO2 and NO gas The NO and NO2 are dissolved in water to become HNO2 and HNO3, which then become NO2- and NO3- ions in the water. It’s a low pH solution which stabilizes it and then you dilut…
That is the Birkeland-Eyde process, which was superceded by the Haber-Bosch process because it is much more energy effective.
As far as I understand, the reasons for using methane as the hydrogen source in industrial processes is because of costs and the difficulty in scaling electrolysis industrially.
Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Yes, 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.
You'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?
Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
#66the 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 w…
A 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.
you guys made the case better in 2 comments - the original article is bloated and misses these key aspects.
Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know the exact process but I don’t think ammonium nitrate actually gets involved. The system I was looking at (Green Lightning) actually doesn’t make ammonia but rather liquid nitrogen fertilizer Plasma to take N2 + O2 -> NO2 and NO gas The NO and NO2 are dissolved in water to become HNO2 and HNO3, which then become NO2- and NO3- ions in the water. It’s a low pH solution which stabilizes it and then you dilut…
That is the Birkeland-Eyde process, which was superceded by the Haber-Bosch process because it is much more energy effective. As far as I understand, the reasons for using methane as the hydrogen source in industrial processes is because of costs and the difficulty in scaling electrolysis industrially.
Right, makes perfect sense.
So this is pretty far outside of my area of expertise, but https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8133363/ suggests that there may be an evolution of Birkeland-Eyde that isn’t nearly as bad as the original process was. I haven’t gone through this in detail and even if I had I probably don’t have the background to do it justice.
Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you have 1,000 separate ammonia generation systems that need upkeep, repairs, etc. It is doing chemical reactions under pressure to produce presumably ammonium nitrate which is explosive. The engineers you would need probably aren’t cheap, and storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate all year is sort of sketchy. Timothy McVeigh took out an entire federal building with about 4800 pounds of the stuff mixed wit…
I don’t know the exact process but I don’t think ammonium nitrate actually gets involved. The system I was looking at (Green Lightning) actually doesn’t make ammonia but rather liquid nitrogen fertilizer Plasma to take N2 + O2 -> NO2 and NO gas The NO and NO2 are dissolved in water to become HNO2 and HNO3, which then become NO2- and NO3- ions in the water. It’s a low pH solution which stabilizes it and then you dilut…
I am curious what kind of plasma is used, as there are many ways to create plasma under various conditions, with very different efficiencies, selectivity, yield, etc.
Among the worst is the Birkeland-Eyde process, hot plasma by electric arcing, like it happens naturally during a thunderstorm. Even microwaving the air is more energy efficient. And amongst the most promising are transient non-equilibirum / cold plasma approaches using ns pulse generators.
Edit: So according to this video "Green Lightning" is indeed using the Birkeland-Eyde process. In other words, there is no way they even come close to their energy efficiency and yield claims. https://youtu.be/8TOnyAwJyvg?si=D9hat_XAfvuAAmpB&t=165
Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
#69This 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 notab…
The 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?
Reads like a hallucinated writeup to me.
Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer
#70This 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-...
It'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 sp…
Liebreich hates green/hydrolysis because it's much more expensive (due to inefficiencies) and wasteful of green electrons compared to final consumption alternatives.