Green ammonia electrolysis breakthrough could finally kill Haber-Bosch

newatlas.com

11 pointsbschne3 comments

They would still need a source of pure nitrogen. That's not different from the Haber-Bosch process though, so that technically cancels out for comparison of the processes. It does add an extra requirements for small scale on-site production of ammonia as proposed in the article though.

Edit: here is a link to the paywalled paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg2371

Nitrogen is pretty cheap under normal circumstances, although there were talks about supply issues for fertilizers. Would this have an influence?

I don't know. I was referring to this part of the article by the way:

"They can be as small as a thick iPad," says MacFarlane, "and that could make a small amount of ammonia continuously to run a commercial greenhouse or hydroponics setup, for example."

It is certainly positive that they can miniaturize their device that much. It still requires nitrogen to run. They would either need to deliver nitrogen supply or need to produce it locally in which case they would need to separate it from air which requires an additional device and process.

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

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