If you’ve noticed my work at all over the last eighteen months on DailyKos you’re aware that I’m involved in renewable ammonia both as a fertilizer and as a liquid fuel in its own right. Not yet modeled in any serious fashion is the idea that biological carbon sequestration can be facilitated using synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
If we’re going to turn and face climate change like the deadly peril that it is we’re going to mobilize our economy as we did during world war II, a time when we put eight million men in uniform, 300,000 planes in the sky, and filled the seas with Liberty ships to support our British allies.
Renewable ammonia infrastructure and some innovative uses for this common chemical are a purely renewable path that not only provides food and fuel, but may also be used to meet the goal of reducing carbon dioxide to a safe level of 350 parts per million.
Ammonia, chemical formula NH3, is something most people associate with pungent household cleaners, but it’s the most common industrial chemical made. The United states consumes twenty million tons a year with 90% of that being applied directly as fertilizer or used to make follow on fertilizer compounds such as ammonium phosphate or urea. The massive yields of corn and rice the world depends on have their root in this simple chemical.
The current production of ammonia is responsible for just under 2% of global CO2 emissions. About 70% of production is done with natural gas as the hydrogen source and the rest is almost entirely coal fired facilities. There isn’t a lot of demand elasticity here without wrenching dietary change for the western world; most of this is used for grain production and any cut back in this year flows right through to crop yield the next.
There are a variety of what I believe to be non-starter ideas heard here regarding how to simply reduce our use of our current fertilizer regime. "We’ll just go organic!" No, not if you expect to maintain yields, and one carefully manicured acre producing what one average fertilized acre produces annually if and only if it’s allowed to have a fallow crop of a nitrogen fixer such as hairy vetch does not prove that this idea will work.
We’re going to do more and more things organically, specifically due to peak oil driving people from our current activities back to agriculture, but large scale grain production is probably still going to be mechanized. This is a simple mass balance problem – grain protein and yield depend on biologically available nitrogen, and a feel good method of fixing nitrogen every other year will not likely produce the same output over time, although individual harvests may be impressive. I’m willing to adjust this view, but I have yet to see a solid study posted that refutes the ideas I’ve expressed here.
Another idea that would work is a tremendous adjustment to our diets, reducing use of meat from a main course to a condiment. This is a political non-starter in any country that’s had enough wealth to get acquainted with a western diet. Economy and environment might well force this one us, but we’re going to be dragged to it kicking and screaming.
So, we’re not only not getting rid of ammonia production, we actually have two good reasons to expand production above the current hundred forty million tons produced annually.
Ammonia, with three hydrogen atoms attached to a single nitrogen, is structurally similar to natural gas, which is four hydrogen atoms attached to one carbon. If you burn them you’ll find that by volume ammonia packs about 40% of the energy of hydrocarbons, with the difference being due to the fact that the nitrogen coming out during combustion forms a diatomic molecule rather than the carbon dioxide and additional energy that comes from a fossil fuel.
You can obtain a gasoline or diesel engine fitted for ammonia today, but they’re just in the proving stage. Emissions are a concern but a standard catalytic converter cleans their exhaust as well as a fossil fuel engine and if the ammonia was made renewable there are no carbon dioxide emissions anywhere in the process. Sounds far fetched? The Dutch ran their school buses on ammonia during World War II when petroleum was in short supply, and NH3 Car has taken a cross country road trip in their demonstration vehicle.
The natural first steps are turning existing peaker natural gas electricity generation to ammonia, then solving the need for liquid fuel in farm vehicles, which will never be hybrids due to the long term constant high horsepower requirements. The use of ammonia in standard over the road vehicles is a political mountain to climb, but the first steps will happen in farm utility vehicles. There is much action and research in this area; I commend the curious to the tender care of the Ammonia Fuel Network, who will be hosting their sixth annual meeting in Kansas City this October.
As there is no profit in the conventional sense of the word no one has examined what it might mean to have synthetic nitrogen as a component of a biological sequestration of carbon. Photosynthesis is the only proven means we have for taking CO2 from the air. Rendering an assist to Mother Nature’s method can mean plant growth will double or triple or quadruple.
Don’t imagine that I’m suggesting we expand row crop efforts. As the world becomes hotter, drier, and wilder ecosystems are going to change dramatically. One need only fly over Alaska and witness the massive spruce bark beetle kill, facilitated by warmer winters, to see that the potential for one lightning strike redrawing the landscape. The very ecosystems that might make use of the carbon we’ve exhumed over the last two centuries are baking under the same carbon dioxide blanket as everything else.
A far horizon for sequestration would be this: Renewably produced ammonia is used for crops, for much of our liquid fuel needs, and as a biological catalyst facilitating the sequestration of carbon dioxide. Dirigibles, floating on renewably produced hydrogen, fueled with renewable ammonia, and loaded with a mix of urea darts bearing the seeds of species that are drought and fire resistant crisscross areas laid bare by fire. This will be murder on biodiversity, but I’m not sure what that word actually means in the face of climate change, and the human enhanced seed distribution will speed the journey towards a new ecosystem equilibrium in denuded areas.
The ammonia used as a fertilizer, a fuel, or a biological sequestration catalyst must be renewably produced or we’ve gained nothing. The world’s existing coal and natural gas driven facilities must be converted to electrolysis based hydrogen rather than fossil fuels, and all new construction must at a minimum be electrolysis based, with a strong preference for one of the as yet unperfected second generation synthesis methods which are easier on both capital and cooling water.
There are individual arguments against our current industrial agriculture system, against the use of ammonia as a fuel, and against enhancing biological sequestration, but no single coherent argument can be made against this ‘triple point’ of food, fuel, and sequestration. Ammonia, a commonly made, easily handled chemical has several significant roles to play in any renewable future.
Our belief in this vision of the future is strong. Last fall we published a conceptual definition a National Renewable Ammonia Architecture and we followed it this spring with a more voluminous analysis that puts an analytical foundation under the concept. The next iteration of this effort will likely be a less visionary, more research oriented submission to a peer reviewed publication, most likely the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.
These are the works of the small band of visionaries that tolerate me as the front man. What we truly crave is a large scale analytical validation, most likely in the form of a Threshold 21 model by the Millennium Institute, starting with the research already done by Alan Drake on rail electrification and expanding to include the concepts we outlined in the National Renewable Ammonia Architecture. That won’t happen for free, and it won’t even be cheap.
The hour grows late. Scientific consensus was achieved long ago and we can’t, as a species, afford to wait for unanimity in our Congress regarding the need to address climate change on what amounts to a war footing. The economic development associated with the build out of the ammonia production and consumption systems adds up to jobs that can never be stolen away from us, and this is a path that involves known technologies rather than quantum leaps. There is already massive ammonia handling infrastructure to address the domestic ammonia market. Setting out in the direction of the National Renewable Ammonia Architecture makes a lot of winners economically, politically, and environmentally.
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