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Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

ammoniaenergy.org

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Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#111

Post by serf »

hunterpayne wrote: post #104
benj111 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the bloody hell are you taking about. Minnesota is further south than the UK. Southern Minnesota is the same latitude as the Mediterranean coast. Learn some facts before spouting bs.

The UK is in the same boat as Minnesota for solar PV. There isn't a solar panel in the UK that will ever make more power than it took to produce.

>There isn't a solar panel in the UK that will ever make more power than it took to produce.

You're clearly and provably wrong, and looking at your comments shows me lots of clearly and provably wrong statements, and almost every single one of them pertains to energy.

..so I presume you have a dog in this race.

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#112

Post by otterley »

colechristensen wrote: post #108
hunterpayne wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, PG&E's accounting says otherwise.

PG&E is incentivized to spend more money on capex because the state guarantees a return on investment, a perverse incentive which causes them to make stupid money decisions to realize more profit. For example doubling the cost of energization by having a large proportion of it done by external contractors. 24% of PG&E's revenue (that is customer rate payments) goes to wildfire related costs.

The flip side of the incentive to spend more on capex is that rates are regulated by the PUC. So it’s not like the utilities get blank checks.

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#113

Post by philipkglass »

hunterpayne wrote: post #51
philipkglass wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 eff…

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.

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#114

Post by tancop »

otterley wrote: post #112
colechristensen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG&E is incentivized to spend more money on capex because the state guarantees a return on investment, a perverse incentive which causes them to make stupid money decisions to realize more profit. For example doubling the cost of energization by having a large proportion of it done by external contractors. 24% of PG&E's revenue (that is customer rate payments) goes to wildfire related costs.

The flip side of the incentive to spend more on capex is that rates are regulated by the PUC. So it’s not like the utilities get blank checks.

if pg&e was state owned (with good management, thats the hard part) it would operate at ~zero profit and pass through all savings to customers. that means rates as low as they can possible be at the current state of the grid and generation system.

most infra projects get taxpayer money through subsidies or partnerships anyway. taking it public would only kick out the investors with misaligned goals and replace them with fixed cost debt funding. you dont need to create incentives that hurt consumers when the state can invest directly.

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#115

Post by jimnotgym »

defrost wrote: post #85
Gibbon1 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#116

Post by 20after4 »

hunterpayne wrote: post #102
defrost wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But just build them in the US. Sorry, that's not going to work out for myself, the 8.5+ million hectares of grain growing about my location, nor for the billion+ tonne per annum of mineral resource shifted in my state. We're interested in producing fertilisers and fuel from non fossil sources.

The laws of physics don't like your politics. Also, last time you played around with this stuff, the outcome was very very bad and lots of people died. So before you start trying to mess around with industrial infrastructure, maybe learn physics and chemistry first. Because you keep trying to do things that simply don't work.

WTF are you even talking about? Be specific rather than spewing vague political smears.

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#117

Post by otterley »

tancop wrote: post #114
otterley wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flip side of the incentive to spend more on capex is that rates are regulated by the PUC. So it’s not like the utilities get blank checks.

if pg&e was state owned (with good management, thats the hard part) it would operate at ~zero profit and pass through all savings to customers. that means rates as low as they can possible be at the current state of the grid and generation system. most infra projects get taxpayer money through subsidies or partnerships anyway. taking it public would only kick out the investors with misaligned goals and replace them w…

I don’t follow. Taking what public? Most utility companies operating in CA are already publicly traded.

Do you mean “nationalizing” (or whatever the state equivalent is)? There are already some municipally owned utilities like DWP in LA and Santa Clara Power, but those began as municipal services and weren’t converted from independent businesses. The tendency over the past century has been to spin off public entities, not to take them in.

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#118

Post by epistasis »

KaiserPro wrote: post #94
epistasis wrote: post #2

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 be…

> 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.

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.

Re: Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

#119

Post by epistasis »

otterley wrote: post #112
colechristensen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG&E is incentivized to spend more money on capex because the state guarantees a return on investment, a perverse incentive which causes them to make stupid money decisions to realize more profit. For example doubling the cost of energization by having a large proportion of it done by external contractors. 24% of PG&E's revenue (that is customer rate payments) goes to wildfire related costs.

The flip side of the incentive to spend more on capex is that rates are regulated by the PUC. So it’s not like the utilities get blank checks.

Having watched CPUC in action, it's not quite a blank check, but damn close.

Utility comes in and says "we desperately need a rate hike to fund $X00 million" then CPUC gets them down to x-1 or x-2 and the whole thing could hav been avoided by better management from the start.

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