Device uses wind to create ammonia out of air
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
> this innovation could fundamentally reshape fertilizer manufacturing by providing a more sustainable, cost-effective alternative to centralized production
The high energy cost of Haber-Bosch, plus the additional cost of transportation from manufacturer to farmer could potentially be eliminated by distributed, passive fertilizer generators scattered around in the fields.
I'm no expert, but assuming sufficient local production, low concentration could potentially be overcome by continuous fertilization with irrigation throughout the growing season.
Let's find out. Some quick fiddling with a molarity calculator and an almanac:
-- 100 uM ammonia -> 1.7 mg / L ammonia
-- 82% nitrogen -> 1.4 mg / L nitrogen
-- My lawn needs around 1 lb / 1000 sq ft, or around 5 g / m2
-- So my lawn needs about 3500 L / m2 of fertilized irrigation total for the season
-- Ballpark farming irrigation is around 0.2 inches per day, or around 5L/m2
I would need to water my lawn about 700 days in the year, or more realistically up my irrigation rate by about a factor of 4, AND source all of the water from the fertilizer box.
I'm a little skeptical that I can allocate space for enough production and still have a lawn left to fertilize. The tech probably isn't ready for the big time on an industrial farm yet, but for research demo, this seems like a promising direction! Much more than concentrating it for fuel.
So, farms are definitely setup already to accomplish this. Most farms have moved to central pivots for irrigation, and they already inject fertilizer into the pivot [1]. If fertilization could be generated onsite, then you could theoretically have everything plumbed together to "just work" without much intervention or shipping of chemicals.
[1] https://www.farmprogress.com/farming-equipment/chemical-fert...
Ammonia should be applied to the soil - in the air it is a hazard that can kill people and harm the plants (farmers wear lots of protective gear when working with ammonia, with more other things they don't bother).
As such I'm not convinced that is the right answer. You want a system that will apply nitrogen
It's the main fertilizer applied.
Here's another site talking about common problems with this technique (from a farmer's perspective). [1]
[1] https://www.valleyirrigation.com/blog/valley-blog/2022/06/13...
I don't know that farmers wear anything special when applying it, but there are safety procedures. I work with a farmer and he was telling me about one time he forgot to switch one of the valves off and when he disconnected a hose, the fumes knocked him out. Luckily it was just the fumes from the hose and not the whole tank or he likely would have died instead of just being knocked out.
All in all, cows are around zero emissions when held outside and fed grass only.
That isn't a big reach.
Ammonium nitrate is already controlled in several parts of the world
Imagine one of these units left somewhere, slowly filling a tank that has not been sealed, water evaporating back out leaving a nice ammonium nitrate powder behind....
Not saying that it should be regulated on the basis of national security, but it’s not like there isn’t a potential security concern.
If you think this is outlandish, you must not be familiar with Monsanto
It has been out of business for almost seven years now. Who is putting any energy into remembering them at this point?
Also while I understand the local delivery aspect, why waste arable soil on this, use desert. Hm, do you need moist air? They were testing it near water. Maybe on the Pacific side of the Rockies? That air is moist enough to drop feet of snow at once.
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/turning-air-into-bread
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/73464/the-alchemy-o...
The also a fascinating look at how the inventors got heavily caught up in WWI and WWII due to being in Germany and how tied up their industry became with government. Interesting to reflect on in current times.
Truly a great book.
Some of the most promising research in replacing Haber-Bosch is actually plasma-assisted nitration, which is basically just as energy intensive as Haber-Bosch, but with drastically lower capital requirements...something that could be done in your backyard. I struggle to see how an ATP catalyst-only method could even do anything close to breaking an N2 triple bond.
There is no free lunch.
Otherwise, you’re just better off, producing electricity from one of those sources, or producing ammonia, using electricity from one of those sources, after accounting for losses in the various processes of course.
But for cars/electricity, this is potentially excellent news (assuming longevity and cost of the operating equipment). The distribution costs are much lower than Hydrogen, and it could be used easily to power existing Hydrogen fleets. I'd wager this even makes electricity distribution easier, as ammonia batteries could be relatively stable and easily distributed as well.
Ammonia batteries does not mean "Ammonia Cars", I never said it did nor meant it should.
They are, however, excellent in areas that likely already required a hazmat suit (generators, substations, hydrogen fuel pumps, fertilizer factories, etc.)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/climatetech-134-de-carbonizin...
(FWIW - there are many many promising lab results that turn out to be false positives because the researchers did a bad job of controlling potential contamination in their ammonia measurements. Low concentrations of ammonia are everywhere, and you have to do a really good job making sure you're not measuring background levels vs. what you think you're producing)
What are the costs for the catalysts and how long do they last?
Those sorts of questions feel important to understand.
In that case there will be no production of CO2.
The only reason why this is not done yet is because avoiding the production of CO2 would raise the cost of ammonia, then the costs of fertilizers and various other chemical substances, including explosives, which would trigger a cascade of price increases in food and in many other products.
You can also use methane pyrolysis, which outputs solid carbon instead of CO2. It's supposed to be somewhere in the middle of cost between steam methane reforming and water electrolysis.
That's not how chemistry works. You need to input external energy to produce ammonia out of water and nitrogen. It's the law of energy conservation.
In this case, the ultimate energy source appears to be the wind. It tears off microdroplets of water from larger water bodies, so the energy is stored in the surface tension of microdroplets.
>the ultimate energy source appears to be the wind
Seems like you are agreeing that, that is how chemistry works.
AI -> safe deployable fusion -> power for desalination and exactly this sort of thing.
In particular I daydream about use of "free" power to perform carbon sequestration back into liquid hydrocarbon fuels for existing ICE etc. infrastructure...voila, no delay to retool civilization while getting down to the business of bringing carbon back under 400 ppm.
> AI -> safe deployable fusion
This reminds me of the recent HN referred article on Cargo Cults
Doesn't sound so exciting.
But, sniping aside - is there a potential for cheap enough production in abundant enough amounts to use safely in machine engines? Or as grid-level storage medium for solar energy? The very transformation is neat, but the application is what would be interesting.
At room temperature! That's the interesting bit.
One such method, which already works at room temperature for combining hydrogen with nitrogen into ammonia, uses electricity together with a platinum-gold catalyst and it has a 13% energetic efficiency.
The methods described here uses cheaper materials and the authors hope that some time in the future it might reach a better energetic efficiency.
The problem is getting enough co2, as it's not particularly concentrated in our atmosphere. So the main ways they go about it are big fans, which is tons of energy, capturing at the source (in smokestacks, etc) which requires complex transport and management, or growing plants and pyrolysing the biomass.
The fundamental theory behind it is quite simple, it's really more of a logistics problem.
Alternatively, you are looking at a scale model and asking, "what is this, a school for ants?!"
Maybe we should learn to do things in a new way then spend a few decades rolling them out?
The raw stuff is definitely there. Thought I'm sure there are easier ways of making it.
This fits with most VC backed companies. Back in 30 minutes with my showHN post!
Where does that energy come from? 1st law of thermodynamics?
One aspect of these miracle solutions to watch out for: the catalyst is often very expensive and has a finite lifespan.
Edit: actual paper https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.ads4443
Edit: got to the bit in the paper where they describe the process; "contact electrification". This appears to be an electrostatic phenomenon like tribocharging (the old "rub a balloon on your hair" trick). Water droplets hitting the catalyst generates enough potential at the surface to trigger a reaction. So I suppose the energy input is actually in the spray+pump of the experiment, or wind in the outdoor example.
The resulting output is extremely dilute. Raising the concentration is likely to consume more energy for generating an actually useful output.
> resulting in ammonia concentrations ranging from 25 to 120 μM in 1 hour
Not usable as fuel. You'd need to separate the ammonium from the water using a energy intensive process (cooking or such).
Worse, they seem to be using some chilled object to condense ammonia solution from the air, so you’re also paying the energy cost of keeping it cold, which means you’re paying the full cost of producing a lot of water from atmospheric water vapor. Maybe a future improvement could start with liquid water.
Professor Aldo Rossa started popularizing a lot of this in the 80s. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4107277A/en
Having something other than a fossil fuel source for the most common fertilizer in the world seems useful. Also, it's easier, cheaper and safer to ship ammonia around than Hydrogen since it's a low pressure liquid and more energy dense. People have been talking about using it as a shipping fuel for decades.
They have not given any numbers about the energy consumed by the pump, but at least in this experimental devices it is likely that the amount of ammonia that is produced is very small for the energy consumed by the pump, in comparison with other synthesis methods.
For now, the ammonia is produced as a solution in water with very low ammonia concentration. Perhaps this could be usable directly as a fertilizer for plants. For any other uses, concentrating the ammonia produced in this way would require a large amount of additional energy.
In the form presented now, this method of ammonia synthesis would be too inefficient, but the authors hope that the efficiency can be improved some orders of magnitude.
So the ammonia doesn't need to be useful in itself, but only to be able to be converted on-site to something more storable (more stable, liquefaction at lower pressure or higher temperature, and so on), or alternatively something more useful that could displace other standard CO2-intensive industrial processes.
Ammonia is NH3, there's no CO2 to store.
> alternatively something more useful that could displace other standard CO2-intensive industrial processes.
Except they are talking about using it as a fuel. If you want to displace CO2 at least use methanol, it's a liquid that's more energy dense and easier to handle safely.
In this case the environmental significance of producing ammonia is much less impressive...
Basically, an ammonia leak will kill you. By itself. The others are only a problem if they're the right concentrations to ignite. That's a relatively high concentration and a larger leak. Much smaller leaks of ammonia are deadly.
It's still a good solution for some things, but it's a bad solution for consumer vehicles like cars for that reason.
But there's no reason that needs to be true for e.g. automated shipping industries. The danger to the water seems relatively low as well, as water dilution seems to be one of the best ways to deal with spillages. I'm uncertain the environmental repercussions, however it does seem to be the case that aquatic mammals and humans have natural methods of elimination, making it a game of concentration and dispersion vs e.g. an oil spill that is both highly toxic and nearly impossible to properly clean up.
The majority of other applications are industrial (fertilizer, energy storage): there are major issues with our current distribution systems, cheap ammonia batteries could be the key to efficient electricity and hydrogen production and distribution.