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Comment by richardc323 | Hacker News Reader

I grew up on an organic orchard, so don't get excited about artificial sources of nitrogen for agriculture and horticulture. It is better than getting fertiliser from fossil fuels, but it is still not great.

My mind goes to energy storage. If it was a smart way to do that, people would probably be doing it, who knows. Well, someone wrote a paper about it in 2022: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...

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Our ability to artificially capture nitrogen and feed it to plants is why we are able to feed 8 billions souls and still suffer less hunger than our ancestors.

You are free to grow your plants however you want on your property. But just keep in mind that "no fertilizer" is a luxury belief not affordable to the rest of humanity.

Yes, the Green Revolution. I agree it's not black and white, which may well be an ironic turn of phrase.

The "organic" designation does not preclude using artificial fertilizer. Just no pesticides.

It depends who's definition of organic you are using. Demeter and Biogro, which are the certifications I am familiar with prohibit most conventional artificial fertilisers.

Demeter is full of superstitious quackery.

> It is better than getting fertiliser from fossil fuels, but it is still not great.

Please explain how there is anything even remotely bad about it.

Its horrendously inefficient...and inefficiency is usually bad for the environment. For example, the solar PV when sited in Minnesota is so inefficient just making the electricity from natural gas would produce less CO2 per watt. So there is that, and that's before you look at if all the equipment you use to build the plant was better used elsewhere. And then you could put the solar PV somewhere where it would actually been better than just burning natural gas for electricity.

("Reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32608160#32612544 )

"Copper nanoclusters: Selective CO2 to methane conversion beyond 1 A/cm²" (2024) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092633732... ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899914

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48953769 :

> [1] "Production of hydrogen and carbon nanotubes from methane using a multi-pass floating catalyst chemical vapour deposition reactor with process gas recycling" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-025-01925-3

>> A renewable feedstock process that yields Hydrogen and O-CNT would be yielding teal hydrogen.

What should or could be made out of natural gas (instead of just carbon black)?

Hydrogen, Helium, Oxidized Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene, Carbon Nanospheres. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48949089

Graphene and various other CO2-derived carbon products can be added to construction blocks.

> For example, the solar PV when sited in Minnesota is so inefficient just making the electricity from natural gas would produce less CO2 per watt.

How does electricity from solar PV ever make any CO2 whatsoever under any circumstances (never mind, somehow more than natural gas)?

Because the PV panel itself has to be manufactured. And under ideal conditions, the amount of power needed to make the panel is about 5 years of what the panel produces. Most of the power goes to purify the poli-silica that makes the bulk of the panel itself. If the PV panel is sited somewhere with less than 25% of the ideal amount of sun, then its manufacture makes more CO2 than the power it will replace on the grid. Minnesota is uniquely bad for site siting. Its at a low elevation with lots of cloud coverage and its far to the north of where the breakeven line for solar PV.

PS Did you think solar PV was made from unicorns or something? Making stuff requires power, unless you are making that power from hydro or nuclear, that's going to make a lot of CO2.

Okay, so you are indeed talking about total lifecycle footprint rather than marginal footprint (which is strange to me because discussion of fossil fuels rarely mentions the carbon footprint of building the plants). The electricity generation is not actually producing the CO2 here, of course, which was my point.

Regardless, I don't know where you're getting your information or arguments, but you're way off base. Mining and refinement are more like a quarter of the power input, and many parts of the process can be electrified and don't require high temperatures (i.e. can themselves run on clean power once you bootstrap it). Solar panels typically pay off the energy cost of manufacture within a few years, but are expected to last for 30 (and inverters for 15). IEA studies (e.g. https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Slides_IEA-P... ) show a similar story for carbon; amortized over the lifecycle, the carbon intensity is on the order of a few dozen grams/kW, where natural gas is an order of magnitude worse just counting the combustion (and coal is even worse, of course). And those numbers are from 2023; things have only improved (certainly in terms of cost per panel).

They have solar power working effectively across Europe, particularly in Germany (Wikipedia tells us it's about 1/6 of power generation there), despite significantly less sun than Minnesota. It's actually only slightly more cloudy or less sunny in Minneapolis than in Kansas City, MO (again per Wikipedia); cross-referencing a few things, we can easily find that, far from "less than 25%", Minnesota sees almost half the maximum solar yield. As for elevation, that's obviously irrelevant unless you happen to be right next to something taller.

The condescension is really not necessary.

We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia by now if fracking hadn't made natural gas so cheap. Natural gas is the largest variable-cost input to making most ammonia (it's processed with steam reforming to generate hydrogen), and in the United States it cost more 20 years ago than it does now:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DHHNGSP

The cost of wind power and solar power have fallen dramatically, but without accounting for the externalities of CO2 emissions, natural gas is still the cheaper way to make ammonia.

"We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia"

I seriously doubt that. Using natural gas to make ammonia is cost effective even if natural gas prices go up by a lot...and by that I mean they could go up 10x and it still makes sense. Its a really, really efficient industrial process.

Turns out the article is on the Ammonia Energy Association website, wake up Richard.

There are two camps: people who are fans of Haber Bosch because it feeds most of humanity, and absolute psychopaths.

That is a bit extreme. Wanting to preserve the environment isn't the same as wanting to let everyone starve, it's quite the opposite. Spend a minute or two looking up soil erosion, and extrapolate 100 years.

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