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

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

#81

Post by inigyou »

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.

Probably not pipes. Unless you have a huge flow, pipelines in general don't make sense. You'd fill up some kind of container and haul it away when it's nearly full. What kind of container stores ammonia, I don't really know - which is why ammonium nitrate is often used, as it's a solid at room temperature and pressure.

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

#82

Post by inigyou »

scythe wrote: post #12
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…

>That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me. Well, kinda. But Haber-Bosch uses an iron catalyst. This is cheap, but it requires very high temperatures and pressures. There has been some recent work on ruthenium catalysts (particularly a Japanese company Tsubame BHB) which are more expensive, but allow the reaction to proceed under milder conditions. A particular goal is to have smaller facilities which can…

One presumes the temperature and pressure can also be created renewably.

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

#83

Post by inigyou »

0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #49
jijijijij wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention ammonia isn't the friendliest of chemicals and doesn't exactly beg for decentralized logistics. I think, projects like these grew out of dunkelflaute moral panic regarding renewable energy. Meanwhile grid battery storage has becomes cheap enough to completely obliterate this concern. And quite frankly, fertilizer needs in agriculture should be addressed by ecological means anyway. If we want to lower t…

Here in Germany we have up to three months of almost zero solar production in winter due to foggy conditions (measured from my own solar inverter). It is not feasible to store summer electricity until winter in batteries. Batteries have self-discharge and would be hilariously expensive per KWh if they only cycle once a year. Chemical storage is probably the way to go here at least, and hydrogen can be used for many o…

If you've ever played Factorio you'll know that everyone makes batteries because they are cheap, but you also have the option to have a separate power grid that just doesn't get powered at night and shut down your factory at night, which you would do if you modded it so that you couldn't make batteries so easily.

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

#84

Post by inigyou »

adrianN wrote: post #58
trollbridge wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

I think that's called farming. But it doesn't work any more because the farmlords (landlords who own farms) extract 98% of your would-be profit. You know why so many farmers can't financially withstand a single bad year? That's why - not personal irresponsibility.

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

#85

Post by inigyou »

dataflow wrote: post #65
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You also need seawater. But infinite energy lets you move fresh water a long distance. You could deliver it to the middle of the country from the coast. Or from other countries.

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

#86

Post by inigyou »

dataflow wrote: post #63
matthewdgreen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, but that's localized and temporary. It's nothing like the ecological impact of burning fossil fuels, and more like the ecological impact of a quarry. It's a lower impact than a hydro dam, I think.

You have an intake that can suck in sea life accidentally, and an outlet that emits water too salty for sea life to survive, which doesn't go beyond a certain distance as it mixes again with normal ocean water.

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

#87

Post by MariusGjerd »

jandrese wrote: post #47
MariusGjerd wrote: post #36

the 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.

yeah and imagine you store the unregulated energy source in a battery so you can use it whenever you want OR you could also help stabilize the grid and or sell your energy from the battery if you want. wind + battery will become very popular in the comming years and is already being highly adopted in countries like spain

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

#88

Post by trollbridge »

inigyou wrote: post #84
adrianN wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that's called farming. But it doesn't work any more because the farmlords (landlords who own farms) extract 98% of your would-be profit. You know why so many farmers can't financially withstand a single bad year? That's why - not personal irresponsibility.

What are you talking about? Farmland usually leases for $50-$200 an acre per year.

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

#89

Post by inigyou »

pfdietz wrote: post #16
tntxtnt wrote: post #13

> This process is extremely heat-intensive and accounts for up to 2% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. > While it is highly unsustainable, it has doubled the Earth’s food-carrying capacity and still feeds almost 50% of the population. 2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What? > The key is to create synthetic ammonia fertilizer by combining atmospheric nitrogen with natural gas…

Haber-Bosch require continuous input of hydrogen, but aside from that it is a net source of power. The reaction is exothermic and can provide more than enough work to drive compressors that pressurize the reactants.

Is that true in practice or just in theory?

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

#90

Post by trollbridge »

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?

Struggling families can’t buy their own off grid power generation.

I take this one rather personally as a friend of mine has had his power shut off now for the last month. I set him up with a gasoline generator which seems like the opposite of green. Electric should be very cheap and abundant.

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