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

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 notable exceptions like helium), and the reason electrification is so important is because it allows faster replacement of fossil-fuel generation with carbon-free sources.

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-...

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.

> 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 or coal.

> Synthetic fertilizer is traditionally created in chemical plants that require continuous, high-volume power. This is why producers remain reliant on fossil fuel-powered grids.

What, again? Haber-Bosch process requires continuous power doesn't mean it's natural gas or coal. Where is nuclear? Is solar/wind disrupt that much that it can't compress/heat up some gas??

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 wasted or never get built at all. The fertilizer is almost a side effect, the real product is a use for stranded wind. i would also add that wind + battery would be much better both for stablization and also the same use as mentioned in the article.

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.

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.

A loop where solar is converted to fertiliser using similar process , probably generating hydrogen as a side effect with some mechanism to probably capture some carbon for economically useful use when it reaches say an LCOE of 0.01 $/kwh and done on mind boggling scale might actually be the holy grail solution to a lot of problems at the same time. Might need quite a few breakthroughs in the material science scheme of things though. There are good reasons why hydrogen has never really taken off by itself even with so much scale, innovation thrown at it so far. The best hope is China doing to hydrogen now what it did to solar in 2010s.

I would prefer to have figures how this compares to the traditional Haber-Bosch-process, how much energy is put into this, and how much fertilizer do we get for it, if it's just a PoC without evaluation of how much energy is used. in this whole process we got nothing NB: to beat Haber-Bosch you don't need much. it isn't only about the produced carbon dioxide

Some will criticize renewable energy because the power output is spiky. This sort of thing is why that doesn't matter. There are plenty of things you can do with excess power. There's been research in manufacturing gasoline from the air. It's not economical to do for its own sake but when we're talking about excess power, that's not really a factor. Fertilizer is a new one (to me). But it makes sense. You'll still need phosphorus (phosphate) from somewhere.

Once wind and solar is routinely overproducing what the grid and grid storage can consume, lots of things like this start to become economic. Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas to help manage seasonal fluctuations in demand (e.g. windless winter nights) since gas is cheap to store for long periods.

It's even possible to synthesize airline fuel this way - https://syntholene.com/

Thought about something similar a few months ago, love seeing it in action. The article was terrible however, dunno why every other sentence is bold. Genuenly feels like I'm reading a middle schooler trying to fulfill a word usage/sentience structure quota.

In other news, wind mills have been used to produce lots of other things that require electricity.

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We need to hurry and kill this tech before environmentalists try to make other fertilizers illegal and cause mass famine.