Nitrogen fertilizer shortage threatens to cut global crop yields – CF Industries

>That hydrogen is grey hydrogen from fossil fuels usually, but the actual Haber process does not use any hydrocarbons. Using hydrogen to make ammonia is therefore not a new process. It literally IS the process we use today.

It seems like this grey hydrogen still ultimately comes from fossil fuels. It might be further up the chain, so to speak, but it's still dependant on them. No? So doesn't the statement that raising fossil fuel prices raise fertilizer prices true then?

But beyond that, I think the parent comment is just saying that the price of the hydrogen plays a big role in the availability and price of fertilizer. Even with the current increases in price, it is not profitable to manufacture ammonia using green hydrogen at current market prices.

[1] https://www.cffertilisers.co.uk/about-us/how-our-fertiliser-...

We "usually" make the hydrogen from fossil fuels because this is by far the cheapest way to make it, so if we raise the price of fossil fuels, the fertilizer becomes more expensive. And man, you are twisting and turning in order to obscure this fact.

A bushel of corn weighs about 56 pounds and a pound of corn has about 1566 kilocalories.

Grey hydrogen is about $2/kg (more in Europe right now, about $5/kg not counting CO2 tax), and green hydrogen is about $3-6/kg, depending on your electricity costs.

So one kg of hydrogen produces about 1,367,000 kilocalories, or about 683 days’ worth if you ate just 2000kilocalories of field corn per day. :) A price difference of $1-4/kg for hydrogen means less than 1¢/day… of course that’s only if you eat just corn at the bottom of the food chain and use efficient agricultural practices… also, everyone gets a cut on the way…

As with everything else in the food supply the difference will be felt at the bottom first.

Whole Foods stuff has plenty of margin (obviously "plenty" is relative, this is a thin margin industry) to absorb a small increase. Those bottom dollar Walmart tomatoes that have to get here from Argentina and need to be sold for bottom dollar? Yeah there's no space in the margin, those have to go up in price proportional to inputs.

Also, the US used to double electricity generation every decade. If something needs a bit more electricity, there’s no “scaling” argument why we can’t just produce more electricity. It costs money, of course, but there’s no part of it that isn’t “scalable.”

Making hydrogen via electrolysis requires 50 MWh per ton. Manufacturing ammonia requires tens of millions of tons of hydrogen every year.

We might not want to ban the stuff, but we need to start demanding that farming is a closed loop in term of artificial fertilizers.

Your take is very opinionated but doesn’t seem to include any helpful solutions.

Habitat and environment is more important than profit margin because we are a super apex predator and rely on the planet’s eco system to survive…not just thrive.

Genocide through famine occurred in India when the British exported Indian cotton and tobacco and turning fields of grain into cash crops. It was not ‘eco fascism’ but colonialism that caused it.

Fertilizer run off, deadzones and poisoning of our water tables is just one side effect of Big Ag.

Long supply chains and cold supply chains and an animal based diet has caused more famine (not to mention food waste amongst the wealthy) than ecological focus on Ag. Not to mention an overpopulated planet that has long since crossed carrying capacity. Perhaps temper your hot takes with relevant inputs?

Actually I am designing an open source farming robot focused on regenerative agriculture so that everyone can move to automated regenerative agriculture in an affordable way. Honestly I really think you are talking a big game without really knowing what you are saying.

Guessing dependency on oil and gas would be much much lower which also frees up a large chunk of the military budget.

If this makes me a "funny" one, I gladly am. I don't like dealing with people throwing out unsubstantiated claims or dismissing others with ad hominems.

Btw. you could just provide a counter argument (I would be open to that in a empirical discussion) but you chose to do a counter question showing you actually have no interest in rational, fact based discussion culture.

To quote numbers:

Between 2013 and 2025, 14 nuclear plants are slated to shut down. As of July 2018, there are 99 operational plants in the country.[1]

I wasn't able to quickly find the number of reactors that compromise said plants.

But from a purely nationalistic perspective you are right. The US actually looses reactors. But I stated World wide numbers. I don't care about the US loosing reactors. I was looking at it from a global perspective and just providing one counter point to someone stating unsubstantiated stuff.

Btw. themain reason for the US not building new reactors in the same amount they are shutting down others seems to be economic, though. Other sources of energy are nowadays way cheaper to produce and atomic seems to have lost the status of cash cow for the industry. [1]

[1]: https://theconversation.com/the-demise-of-us-nuclear-power-i...

The Haber Process for making nitrogen fertilizer uses HYDROGEN as the feedstock for making ammonia, NOT methane! Natural gas steam reforming is just the cheapest source of hydrogen (usually), but before about 1950, we used electricity (usually from cheap renewables like hydro) to make hydrogen for ammonia. Easy peasy with wind and solar!

You can have a much smoother transition if you make it expensive by policy before it runs out. But no, short-sighted people will complain all the way until they kill their jobs and throw everybody into a crisis.

Nuclear Energy powered electric cars only cuts emissions by about 50%, we need a lot more than that. You have an easy solution to a complex problem -- you're as bad as any activist you're bad mouthing now.

I think for some of us, it's less about 'eww' and more about how foolish is it have near active fault lines or below sea level (like Fukushima, SONGS, Dablo Canyon etc...) where they KNEW it was an issue but did nothing about it. I've lived through the cluster** that was SONGS refurbishment, and eventual decommissioning, it's not something I'd want anyone to have to go through and it was only possible an unmonitored effluence event (typical for that time in 2011) that coincided with the Fukushima disaster.

I've come around the idea that I'm less anti-nuclear and more anti-20th Century Nuclear and it's headlong methods that was backed by GE and it's American Century at all costs type of thinking. Because for years we've been told Thorium reactors were the stopgap between Fusion which was always 'just around the corner' by Nuclear proponents, while many anti-nuclear people (like myself) were helping install PV, smart meters and volunteering where ever possible to decentralize the power grid in order to avoid what has happened in the last 2-3 years in CA with it's repeated outages due to climate change.

I've lived in an anti-nuclear border town in Germany along Alsace, where the roofs are covered in state subsidized PV (it's where I got my first experience with installing it) which is still a net importer of French electricity so I'm well aware of the hypocrisy in some of these cases; what I'm afraid is that with agencies like the NRC and it's poor storage solutions (pay to bury in NV, until they refuse and we have leave it on site in decommissioned plants) it's more a repulsion towards the lack of insight when it comes to regulating and maintaining these plants.

Just Solar alone is a larger part of the energy market share than nuclear from SONGS and DC combined in CA at it's peak [0], and they are having to turn off production (foolish decision) due to having a larger supply than demand. What I think is needed is an entire paradigm shift as to what and how to utilize the energy sources we do have, and consider Nuclear an option of last resort due to the heavy costs, time, and resources it requires. But it should be an option where coal, gas, or other harmful sources are being used and cannot be recaptured. CA is not one of these places given it's wide array of solar, wind and hopefully soon wave energy like in Scotalnd.

0: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/solar/c...

1. That you've overstated the extent to which activism has been ineffective.

2. That your post doesn't have a valid logical structure (in the syllogistic logic sense) and you're not justifying your claims with evidence.

3. That the mathematics of learning combined with the complexity of reality lead to a situation wherein the diversity of ideas and agendas which you're opposing is our chief advantage and the entire reason that we're smarter than other species.

The first two points are suggestive that you might want to question your own confidence in your statements or re-word to better support your case.

The third though is a direct refutation of the core idea.

Getting into things:

> Meanwhile neither the wars have stopped nor did the climate change.

Yes, there have been wars that have been stopped. To use an example, we are not currently at war with Vietnam. Moreover, there are events like the destruction of the ozone layer which have been stopped. There are currently tax breaks and incentives designed to encourage our market forces to adopt renewable energy. You're trying to make the case that activism is ineffective, but nuclear power adoption isn't widespread as many wish in part due to activism. Slavery isn't legal anymore, but once was. Civil rights are more universally applied than they were in formed years as well. I'm certain there are more examples of activist success.

> But problem is every new generation thinks they are the only revolutionaries to have suddenly discovered activism.

You seem like you are claiming that new generations are so stupid they know nothing at all about history pertaining to the activities they engage in. but it isn't true hat modern activists don't know about other activists. Modern activists have attended history classes and activist activities, when popular, are more likely to be covered in history classes than events which weren't noteworthy. Education has become more common, not less common, as time has gone on. Moreover, when people are effective, they generally have learned from others. Since former activism is a potential source of learning, effective activists are almost certain to have learned lessons from former efforts.

Notice that my first sentence made a claim. Then my following sentences provided justification for that claim. Contrast that with your own post. Lets move to your next sentence:

> For previous to previous generation it was about stopping wars and killing nuclear power.

This point doesn't logically follow your previous point. Your previous point made the case that you consider activists to be stupid. This statement doesn't build credibility for that claim by providing evidence. It instead switches to a new topic. That new topic, summarized without any sentiment attached is: different people at different times cared about different things.

It is perfectly reasonable for different people to care about different things. This is all the more true when you consider you don't even need to have different people in order to have different cares. Time alone is sufficient. Even over the course of a single day time alone can make a person care about different things: a person in the morning cares about getting up out of bed, but the person in the evening flip flops and now cares about getting into bed. Time, even over the course of the day, can completely invert desires. So how much more so is it appropriate for time over the course of a generation to lead to different desires? Especially when the person who is doing the desiring is different?

> The result is meaningless placard holding protests and pulling in a million directions.

You've failed to establish a link between different people wanting different things and the results of that being a bad thing rather than a good thing. There are many many reasons to expect that different people wanting different things is good.

In ML an ensemble of models which are good for different reasons tends to outperform any single model in the ensemble. This reality of mathematics isn't just a reality of mathematics, but manifests in practical ways. There is a phenomenon known to statisticians and referred to as the wisdom of crowds wherein groups of diverse people giving an estimate of an unknown quantity like the number of jelly beans in a jar have a better estimate than any one person. The practical consequence of this most people will see very frequently is that top-performing organizations often prioritize diversity.

But let's dig deeper, because you're just wrong here, and I want to drill down into the math so you can see that you're wrong.

There is a tension when learning: you have to get data in order to learn but you also have to do the thing that is in your best interest. In literature you'll find this discussed in the context of multi-armed bandit problems. This core tension is discussed in terms of explore versus exploit tradeoffs. Our best ML systems like MuZero are explicitly designed so as to balance these twin concerns.

Reality is incredibly complicated. From a logistics perspective it isn't actually possible for a single person to fully explore the solution space. There is a fundamental need to trade off against exploration and exploitation, but the complexity of the world is so exceedingly vast that it isn't actually tractable to do this for a single individual.

Since we have to explore and we have to exploit, but we also don't have the capacity to explore everything ourselves we should therefore be very unintelligent. Except we aren't, because we are social. While one person explores one area, another person explores a different area, and the sum of our knowledge is now better than it was before even though we both took different actions because we update our update functions such that the next explorer gets a new plan to build off.

So rather than diversity being an example of nothing get done it's actually absolutely essential and one of the most defining and important aspects of what makes humans more intelligent than other species.

The biosphere will always be a resource we exploit. Yes we are part of it, but as true as it might be, it is not very helpful. I think it is more important to think of nature as a kind of machine that you have to maintain. Kind of like a car engine: regular oil change, proper fuel, make sure parts stay clean, don't red zone and let it cool when it needs to. Otherwise your car will not get you where you want to go.

One can admit the existence of Climate Change while thinking the proposed solutions are too far and just power-hungry bunk.

Also, what's with the insulting tone?

Your comment would be fine without the first sentence, and even better if you had added one or two sentences more to explain why it could not realistically be converted to legume production.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Edit: having looked at your comment history, it's painfully clear that you're using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's the line at which we ban accounts*, regardless of what they're battling for, so I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

* https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Also, open price fixing could be legalized to move bargain power to manufacturing of base products.