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Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

energiesmedia.com

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Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#71

Post by caminante »

epistasis wrote: post #50
trollbridge wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrification is a no-go when electricity prices keep going up up up.

No it's not. That's not the equation. The only thing that matters is the final cost, including capex. Utilities are pooling the wool over the eyes of PUCs and the media is not doing what it needs to show how the utilities are screwing customers because the media is illiterate... But what China and other places (eg Spain) for this sort of ammonia is to place generation and batteries right at the ammonia site, bypassin…

[dead]

Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#72

Post by AnthonyMouse »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #4

This 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…

> 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.

Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#73

Post by surgical_fire »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #4

This 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…

Which 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.

Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#74

Post by NuclearPM »

epistasis wrote: post #50
trollbridge wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrification is a no-go when electricity prices keep going up up up.

No it's not. That's not the equation. The only thing that matters is the final cost, including capex. Utilities are pooling the wool over the eyes of PUCs and the media is not doing what it needs to show how the utilities are screwing customers because the media is illiterate... But what China and other places (eg Spain) for this sort of ammonia is to place generation and batteries right at the ammonia site, bypassin…

Pooling?

Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#75

Post by AnthonyMouse »

epistasis wrote: post #59
spacephysics wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to struggling family’s electric bills

Happily, 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 reignin…

Or 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?

Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#76

Post by dmoy »

NuclearPM wrote: post #74
epistasis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. That's not the equation. The only thing that matters is the final cost, including capex. Utilities are pooling the wool over the eyes of PUCs and the media is not doing what it needs to show how the utilities are screwing customers because the media is illiterate... But what China and other places (eg Spain) for this sort of ammonia is to place generation and batteries right at the ammonia site, bypassin…

Pooling?

pulling

Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#77

Post by inigyou »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #72
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #4

This 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…

> 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.

Pedantically 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!

Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#78

Post by inigyou »

spacephysics wrote: post #40
jandrese wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price of grid electricity is moot when you're powering the process with locally generated green energy.

Tell that to struggling family’s electric bills

what does this have to do with fertilizer production again?

Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#79

Post by inigyou »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #75
epistasis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happily, 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 reignin…

Or 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?

Right? You can go off grid anywhere. Well in some places you legally can't, and need to remain connected with a connection fee, but nobody is forcing you to draw any power from it.

Re: Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer

#80

Post by inigyou »

tonyarkles wrote: post #56
everforward wrote: post #43

Earlier 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 sounds like the Birkland-Eyde process. It's cool because it uses only electricity and air and seems to produce something from nothing, but it's not as efficient as Haber-Bosch.
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