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Comment by rosalinekarr | Hacker News Reader

Theoretically, ATP could be harvested from plants or bacteria. They could also be modified to produce the ammonia directly via this reaction. That wouldn't actually reduce the energy cost, but it could reduce the economic cost by making it logistically easier to produce. Maybe instead of making ammonia in complicated chemical plants, we could "grow" it on farms.

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I mean, sure, you can do that. But it's kind of silly. "Grow" ammonia feedstock on farms to then turn into fertilizer to use at the farm to grow food?

Maybe you should just plant legumes instead and let them fix the nitrogen straight into the soil where you want to grow food. It's not sexy since it's 19th century technology (or older) but it works. And it requires very little in the way of logistics or infrastructure meaning that it's resilient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation

Oh you city slickers... This has been a thing for centuries and it works pretty well. Getting big industry in the middle of the process would be new but the process is old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_manure

IIRC, ATP is a short lived energy carrier in cells. Instead of harvesting it from cells, it's probably easier to turn that around and use the existing ATP mechanism in cells to generate ammonia.

All of the components involved are being extracted from existing cells. There are already plenty of nitrogen fixing bacteria, the sources of their nitrogenase and hydrogenase enzymes.

This is maybe novel in that they got the nitrogenases working in vitro. But from a world changing technology perspective this is a very tiny step compared to re-engineering the enzymes to work off of a different non-biological energy source than ATP.

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