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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

#51

Post by bix6 »

jandrese wrote: post #46
bix6 wrote: post #11

I 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.

Sounds 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.

We 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.

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

#52

Post by roelschroeven »

doodlebugging wrote: post #48

I 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.

Kinda looks like a low-quality executive summary of a longer text. I agree, it's garbage.

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

#53

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jandrese wrote: post #42
dataflow wrote: post #30

Earlier 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?

Unless you're in the middle of the Atacama or on the moon or something, yes.

Even in the middle of the Atacama, it's still just an energy problem. The Atacama basically borders the Pacific, so it's just a desalinization and transport issue, which is, again, all just energy.

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

#54

Post by everforward »

hvb2 wrote: post #22
plaidfuji wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. 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 Hab…

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 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.

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

#55

Post by masklinn »

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…

> 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.

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

#56

Post by tonyarkles »

everforward wrote: post #43
tonyarkles wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From doing a bit of digging into this myself after hearing it being promoted on the radio, I both agree and disagree. Working through the $/acre for on-site produced ammonia using locally-generated electricity (I forget if I was looking at PV or Wind, doesn’t matter) the payback period was surprisingly quick, like 2 or 3 years. One of the big reasons is that you don’t actually need a very big system; you only need on…

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 dilute right before application so that you don’t burn the crops.

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

#57

Post by mock-possum »

dataflow wrote: post #30
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…

> 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?

Are you saying it isn’t?

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

#58

Post by adrianN »

trollbridge wrote: post #38
WalterBright wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find funny is people that build machines that extract carbon from the atmosphere. None of the articles about it ever mention the energy cost in running the machine or howinell it could be scaled up to make a measurable difference. But trees, for example, are 50% carbon, extracted from the atmosphere. And they're solar powered! And look nice.

“Plant more trees” won’t get you an IPO.

Finding a way to make money by capturing CO2 will get you an IPO. The technology you use is only of secondary concern.

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

#59

Post by epistasis »

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

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 reigning in your PUC to represent you rather than utility profits.

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

#60

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #29
Rygian wrote: post #8

This 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…

It could probably work for arab countries as they have immense solar potential and are already big in fertilizer production and shipping. They know their natural gas is not going to last forever.
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