Today over lunch I broke out my notebook & pencil, called a farmer friend, and made a first order estimate of what it would take to convert all of Iowa’s agriculture to ammonia for both fertilization and fuel.
There are some challenges in both the production and the use of ammonia, but this seems to be a very worthwhile pursuit. The particulars are below the fold.
The state of Iowa, 310 miles across, 199 miles north to south, and 56,272 square miles total is the 26th largest state in the union. The acre is the standard measure of land in the U.S. and there are 640 of them per square mile. The whole state of Iowa is right at 36 million acres and 75% or 27 million acres are under cultivation. If you’re not from farm country you can easily envision how big such a space is – the standard football field covers just a bit more than an acre.
Iowa Wind Energy Map
If we do a worst case estimate in order to size the system properly we’ll assume corn on corn production on all of those 27 million acres, rather than the corn/soy rotation I recall from my childhood. It takes a bit less than one pound of ammonia per bushel of corn with our current cultivation methods and we average 182 bushels per acre. I chose 150 pounds per acre fertilization to make the math easy.
27 million acres requiring 150 pounds ammonia per acre means we’d need about two million tons of ammonia for fertilization.
The fuel side of the calculation took a bit more digging. I called my friend that I helped with harvest last fall and quizzed him. He has 675 acres total, 620 are actually under cultivation with the rest being roads, driveways, pasture lands, and farmsteads. His diesel fuel requirements are just less than a gallon an acre for planting with a twelve row planter and he thinks the harvest requires just over two gallons per acre. Oh, and I’m officially forgiven for having hit that small tree and if I can just manage to keep the corn head on straight I'll be back in the driver's seat again this fall.
So, 620 times one plus two is 1860 gallons. He estimates the fertilization and herbicide application, which he hires someone else to do, takes about two and a half gallons an acre. We’re going to use an estimate of six gallons per acre to keep things neat. The whole state would require 162 million gallons of diesel for a crop.
Ammonia has about 40% of the energy of diesel fuel so replacing it would mean 405 million gallons of ammonia at 5.15 pounds per gallon or just about a million tons for fuel use.
We determined a while back that using the century old Haber Bosch process and hydroelectric power that we could make about 1,000 tons of ammonia yearly with a commitment of a megawatt of power on a continuous basis. This is discussed in some detail in the National Renewable Ammonia Architecture update published in the spring of 2009.
So producing three million tons of ammonia annually needs 3,000 megawatts continuously through a year. Wind turbines have a capacity factor of about 33% and three megawatts is a common sized unit. 9,000 wind turbines would do the trick if the wind were steady, which it is not. Please trust us that we’ve thought long and hard about wind variability and there are solutions, some covered by the patents of others, and some that we’re pursuing ourselves.
Those 9,000 turbines will cost about $45 billion and create 1,800 ongoing union wage maintenance jobs along with the manufacturing and construction employment which is considerable. The ammonia plants, assuming 30 locations producing 100,000 tons each annually would employ another 1,500 at a similar wage. The capital cost on the ammonia plants would be about $6 billion and that number could be slashed by half if we moved one of the second generation synthesis methods off the bench and into commercial production. This would result in a massive infusion of property tax dollars for roads, schools, and so forth.
The farming fleet would need to be upgraded. If we assume that my friend’s farm is the average size there would be 45,000 of them statewide. Each would require a $200,000 combine, a $100,000 tractor, and a $50,000 grain truck, or $15 billion in locally manufactured machines made by John Deere, Caterpillar, and others.
Those 27 million acres produce 4 billion bushels of corn annually. Assuming our rough estimate above is only 75% of the capital expenditures required we’d be spending $90 billion and that equipment ought to last twenty years or 80 billion bushels. $1.10/bushel cost seems very high when corn is $3.38/bushel, but consider exactly what this conversion would mean.
Half of our ammonia comes from overseas. Producing a million tons locally keeps $250 million a year in the state at the current depressed prices or $5 billion over the twenty year timeframe we’re using. And no one thinks ammonia isn’t going to shoot right back up to the $1,000/ton price at the farm gate before too much longer. The supply would be assured, its price would be based on debt service rather than a combination of debt service plus commodity cost in the form of the natural gas input used today, and this would be entirely carbon free production.
Twenty years of six gallons of diesel per acre is 77 million barrels of light sweet crude. As I write this upstreamonline reports about $60/bbl or a cost of $4.6 billion over that timeframe. Anyone think that price is going to stay stable? The men and women of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil sure don’t. As much as it scares me, their peer reviewed science is in the same vein as the reporting found at Real Climate.
We’ve lost our position as the guarantor of global oil supplies, in part due to the foreign policy incontinence of the Bush administration but in equal measure due to the fact that no amount of military muscle can protect something that simply isn’t there any more. Oh, and those casinos on the southern tip of Manhattan supplanting the manufacturing economy that made us strong for most of the 20th century didn’t help the situation.
Think a little deeper on this point. Water will be the oil of the 21st century ... and exportable grain is virtual water. We’re the Saudi Arabia of corn, the Saudi Arabia of wind, and melding these two would revitalize our crashing economy as well as our crashing empire.