The comments here are focused on how much energy it would take to turn this into fuel. The real story here is decentralized fertilizer production, buried at the end of the article:
> 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.
Rain will wash nitrogen away (down to streams, rivers, and then the ocean creating lots of problems) so you want to apply nitrogen with an eye on when it will rain so your fertilizer stays on the field where you want it. Your link doesn't specify what fertilizer is being applied, I would guess nitrogen is not one.
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
Farmers use anhydrous ammonia that bounds with water in the soil and then bonds to the soil.
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.
Farmers already do keep an eye when it will rain before applying fertilisers. So, this is already part of their calculation. Although, yes , this means they will not apply it everyday. Depending on their location this means that a lot of weeks are out of the picture.
Cows and chickens cannot fix nitrogen from the air. They eat the nitrogen-fixing plants. So in a sense they don't "generate" fertiliser, they only concentrate it.
Of course you can't have cows wandering through your corn or soybeans, they'll eat and/or crush it. But if you had fields that you could rotate between pasture and planted that could work.
ANFO is explosives made with ammonium nitrate(Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil), however ammonium nitrate is by itself rather energetic and will explode when store improperly. The most recent memorable incident would be 2020 Beirut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
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....
NGL, it would be an easy sell. You are just a hop/skip and a quack away from turning that decentralized fertilizer into a decentralized bomb making system.
A hop, skip, quack, jump, and fairly obvious high-energy distillation process away. The national security angle probably isn't a concern here for the same reason that this process doesn't produce good fuel.
Ammonium nitrate is made from ammonia and nitric acid (which is also made from ammonia). Therefore, ammonia is the only necessary direct precursor to ammonium nitrate, which is probably the most relevant oxidizer in improvised explosives today.
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.
It's not out of business. It merged with Bayer. It's a change in ownership, and to some degree a change in upper management, but large swathes of the company are unchanged.
Its assets were sold to Bayer and BASF and some former Monsanto workers may have begun working at those other businesses, that is true. That kind of scenario is true of all businesses that close down, though, at least unless they truly have no remaining assets to sell or workers wanting new jobs, both of which are unlikely for anything beyond the simplest of sole proprietorships. By your logic, there is almost no business in history that has ever gone out of business.
It's a recent use. I'm still not convinced it's a good use case. I think it's mostly greenwashig (bluewashing?) to avoid the explicit release of CO2, but probably biodiesel is a more ecological friendly alternative.
The article mentions "Traditional methods for ammonia production require high temperatures and pressures" in reference to the existing Haber-Bosch process for producing NH3 from thin air, an interesting historic story on its own.
+1 "alchemy of air" is a great read. The angle that would be most interesting to the HN crowd is that it exposed me to how much innovation was happening in chemistry in this pre-WWI era. Reminds me a bit of silicon valley.
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.
Are these really catalysts in the traditional definition of the word? Meaning that the catalyst is non-sacrificial? This appears to be suggesting that nitration can be done with atomospheric N2 simply with the right catalyst. But N2 is triple bonded, and the lowest theoretical threshold to react N2 with anything is by breaking at least one of those bonds, which is incredibly energy intensive even under theoretically optimal conditions.
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.
Soil nitrate fixation is also energy intensive. The nitrogenase enzyme takes about 27 ATPs to break a single N2 bond. Legumes feed about a third of their entire photosynthesis output to their nitrogen fixing nodules in order to generate significant amounts of nitrates.
Assuming the energy input is atmospheric warmth, then the real question is what volume of ammonia can you produce with this device per acre? Then how does that amount of captured energy compare with wind/solar in the same area?
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.
Sibling commenters mention industrial uses, sustainability means far more than just cars or electricity, part of why the focus on electric/cars is so short-sighted (never mind the issues electricity distribution brings to the table)...
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 is far to dangerous for cars. Household cleaning ammonia concentrate is 99% water. That is concentrate, you dilute it for use (generally 16:1), and it is still nasty stuff. No car with enough ammonia to use it for energy will be allowed in a tunnel. To work on a car that uses this for fuel will require extreme protective gear - a chemical breathing mask, and protective clothing covering the entire body. Working on machines in such gear is not easy.
True, although this is a Red Herring of an argument.
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.)
Some quick research suggest, though, that the production of biodiesel is far more intensive (algae/oil farms are needed, then a process of procurement, production), and not without its own environmental concerns.
(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)
I'm vaguely amused by the headline of "requires no external power" right above the image of it sitting on top of (and plugged in to) a giant portable battery.
This is huge! The ability to create ammonia from scratch - provided it can be done in a way which is also safe in terms of storage of the generated ammonia, can be game changer as it can be used as a carrier for hydrogen for Hydrogen-powered vehicles, generators etc.
Yes? There's already a cottage industry trying to do exactly that?
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.
Most ammonia is produced via the Haber process. It takes nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from natural gas and combines them into ammonia. It uses an iron catalyst. This process emits significant CO2.
Currently hydrogen made from natural gas is the cheapest, but the Haber process could equally well use hydrogen made from water electrolysis using solar/wind energy.
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.
> but the Haber process could equally well use hydrogen made from water electrolysis using solar/wind energy.
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.
> The process can be powered simply by ambient wind to pass the water vapor through the mesh.
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.
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.
The was an article here a while back about the production of propane from water and CO2 (via a catalyst and electricity). I think "renewable fossil fuels" are the only way we can handle the fluctuating production of renewable energy and get the density of fuel we need for storage, especially mobile storage like fuel for cars & lorries.
I interpreted that causality as AI leading to deployment of carbon-neutral energy, then when the AI bubble bursts, we’ve pushed carbon-neutral electricity sources off the learning curve cliff and it is available for cheap without the original consumers needing it. From that perspective, it could be any carbon neutral electricity (fusion, fission, enhanced geothermal, super-deep geothermal etc.). I could be misinterpreting the parent comment.
"Researchers produce NH_3 fuel from N-gas-compound with H_2O vapor"
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.
In TFA the alternative methods for making ammonia are mentioned.
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.
Hopefully, one day they will turn large amounts of cheap energy into valuable chemical feed stock and fuels. When you think about it, aluminum producers are doing something similar.
This is under-explained, isn't it? The reaction has to be endothermic, so it must be taking in ambient heat. Would be useful if someone dug up the actual paper rather than the press release.
One aspect of these miracle solutions to watch out for: the catalyst is often very expensive and has a finite lifespan.
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.
At that point in the presentation, I'd probably sarcastically ask if they were accidentally measuring how many dogs mark their territory in a 100 foot radius of the device, per hour, via their collector.
They did attempt to control for the ammonia concentration in the collected water without their catalyst. But they did not try to calculate the equilibrium concentration of ammonia in water exposed to the atmosphere.
I find it surprising that the paper has no discussion whatsoever of the thermodynamics of the process. The overall reaction is very endothermic (you can burn ammonia in oxygen as fuel!), so the only way it’s happening at all is that it’s approaching equilibrium, presumably driven by the increase of entropy available by creating a low concentration of ammonia in whatever weird phase it’s created in. Getting high concentrations from a similar process is going to need some energy-consuming step to shift that equilibrium.
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.
I see what you're saying in the sense of passive energy collection, but perpetual motion strikes me as a terrible metaphor. Perpetual motion would imply so many thing about the universe that solar can't deliver.
For the purposes of anyone reading this, you can make a perpetual motion machine using solar power. I'm pretty sure modern engineering and materials are sophisticated to make a machine of some sort that collects energy during the day and stores it over night in order to continuously move for...I don't know, several hundred, several thousand years? Nothing overly sophisticated, since I wouldn't necessarily trust bearings or motors or hinges to last that long, but something that performs work without needing to be touched for multiple lifetimes.
The power could come from anything (solar, wind, wave) other than the dominant current source for all ammonia, the Haber Process. TFA mentions this in the headline? Could this be done before by just using water+air+solar, yes it could. Frankly, this is just a proof of concept and any commercial solution would be different for scaling reasons.
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.
Like you said, the energy comes from somewhere. If I had to guess, it's effectively solar powered (the catalyst lowering the activation energy enough that photons can actually do the work), plus indirectly solar powered in that you need wind to physically move the compounds around.
I have read the research paper and the energy appears to come mostly from the pump, because the flow of gas and vapor in the device causes contact electrification, which helps the redox reaction.
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.
I'm sure you can understand the difference of degree between something that is lethal in minutes and a gas (ammonia) and something that takes much higher and longer exposures to be deadly, plus is a liquid (gasoline).
I'm surmising that it could be a useful first step towards converting the atmospheric CO2 into something easier to store long-term.
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.
> 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.
Yeah, ammonia leaks are much more nasty than methane or hydrogen leaks. Methane, especially in LNG form, is quite safe compared to ammonia. LPG is even more stable than LNG and requires lower pressures. With that said, hydrogen leaks are "fun" because large ones usually self ignite and burn with a hot but mostly invisible flame. But hydrogen itself isn't toxic. Similarly, methane and propane aren't directly toxic.
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.
Those others are effectively asphyxiants: they'll kill you by displacing oxygen, leading to you collapsing and dying if not rescued, eg by being dragged clear or having ventilation improved. Ammonia is a caustic: airway constriction and oedema will get you at modest concentrations, weeping eyes may hamper your escape, and if rescued you may have lasting damage.
I'm guessing you have never gotten a snoutfull of ammonia? Relatively low concentrations in air feel like asphyxiation. It also hangs around near the ground rather than floating upward.
I think the concern here is somewhat misplaced...ammonia powered passenger vehicles are probably a bad idea.
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.
The comments here are focused on how much energy it would take to turn this into fuel. The real story here is decentralized fertilizer production, buried at the end of the article:
> 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.
Interesting idea.
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...
Rain will wash nitrogen away (down to streams, rivers, and then the ocean creating lots of problems) so you want to apply nitrogen with an eye on when it will rain so your fertilizer stays on the field where you want it. Your link doesn't specify what fertilizer is being applied, I would guess nitrogen is not one.
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
> I would guess nitrogen is not one.
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...
Farmers use anhydrous ammonia that bounds with water in the soil and then bonds to the soil.
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.
Farmers already do keep an eye when it will rain before applying fertilisers. So, this is already part of their calculation. Although, yes , this means they will not apply it everyday. Depending on their location this means that a lot of weeks are out of the picture.
A somewhat passive fertiliser generator scattered around your fields is also known as a "cow" and a "chicken".
Cows and chickens cannot fix nitrogen from the air. They eat the nitrogen-fixing plants. So in a sense they don't "generate" fertiliser, they only concentrate it.
And distribute it across acreage.
Of course you can't have cows wandering through your corn or soybeans, they'll eat and/or crush it. But if you had fields that you could rotate between pasture and planted that could work.
Until big fertilizer lobbies to make decentralized fertilizer illegal. Insert national security, wrong hands blah blah
> Insert national security, wrong hands blah blah
That isn't a big reach.
Ammonium nitrate is already controlled in several parts of the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO
ANFO is explosives made with ammonium nitrate(Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil), however ammonium nitrate is by itself rather energetic and will explode when store improperly. The most recent memorable incident would be 2020 Beirut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
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....
I'm no chemist so someone will have to explain to me how ammonia sitting around by itself, without water, just becomes ammonium nitrate.
NGL, it would be an easy sell. You are just a hop/skip and a quack away from turning that decentralized fertilizer into a decentralized bomb making system.
A hop, skip, quack, jump, and fairly obvious high-energy distillation process away. The national security angle probably isn't a concern here for the same reason that this process doesn't produce good fuel.
Ammonium nitrate is made from ammonia and nitric acid (which is also made from ammonia). Therefore, ammonia is the only necessary direct precursor to ammonium nitrate, which is probably the most relevant oxidizer in improvised explosives today.
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.
What happens when your decentralized fertilizer mixes with someone's copyrighted/trademarked fertilizer? Do you have to pay them their dues?
If you think this is outlandish, you must not be familiar with Monsanto
That is an exaggeration. The only time Monsanto did anything was cases of intentional mixing.
> 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?
It's not out of business. It merged with Bayer. It's a change in ownership, and to some degree a change in upper management, but large swathes of the company are unchanged.
Its assets were sold to Bayer and BASF and some former Monsanto workers may have begun working at those other businesses, that is true. That kind of scenario is true of all businesses that close down, though, at least unless they truly have no remaining assets to sell or workers wanting new jobs, both of which are unlikely for anything beyond the simplest of sole proprietorships. By your logic, there is almost no business in history that has ever gone out of business.
I mean, the extended headline suggests it is producing fuel, which is wrong.
Ammonia has a lot of uses, and fuel is one of them.
It's a recent use. I'm still not convinced it's a good use case. I think it's mostly greenwashig (bluewashing?) to avoid the explicit release of CO2, but probably biodiesel is a more ecological friendly alternative.
Would it be suitable for Mars atmosphere?
The article mentions "Traditional methods for ammonia production require high temperatures and pressures" in reference to the existing Haber-Bosch process for producing NH3 from thin air, an interesting historic story on its own.
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/turning-air-into-bread
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/73464/the-alchemy-o...
https://www.liquium.nz/ is working on reducing the energy (a lot) required for the Haber-Bosch process.
+1 "alchemy of air" is a great read. The angle that would be most interesting to the HN crowd is that it exposed me to how much innovation was happening in chemistry in this pre-WWI era. Reminds me a bit of silicon valley.
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.
Are these really catalysts in the traditional definition of the word? Meaning that the catalyst is non-sacrificial? This appears to be suggesting that nitration can be done with atomospheric N2 simply with the right catalyst. But N2 is triple bonded, and the lowest theoretical threshold to react N2 with anything is by breaking at least one of those bonds, which is incredibly energy intensive even under theoretically optimal conditions.
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.
Idk but soil micro-organisms do break N2 to make ammonia so there sure exists a pathway that just implies catalysis at low temperature.
Soil nitrate fixation is also energy intensive. The nitrogenase enzyme takes about 27 ATPs to break a single N2 bond. Legumes feed about a third of their entire photosynthesis output to their nitrogen fixing nodules in order to generate significant amounts of nitrates.
There is no free lunch.
Assuming the energy input is atmospheric warmth, then the real question is what volume of ammonia can you produce with this device per acre? Then how does that amount of captured energy compare with wind/solar in the same area?
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.
Sibling commenters mention industrial uses, sustainability means far more than just cars or electricity, part of why the focus on electric/cars is so short-sighted (never mind the issues electricity distribution brings to the table)...
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 is far to dangerous for cars. Household cleaning ammonia concentrate is 99% water. That is concentrate, you dilute it for use (generally 16:1), and it is still nasty stuff. No car with enough ammonia to use it for energy will be allowed in a tunnel. To work on a car that uses this for fuel will require extreme protective gear - a chemical breathing mask, and protective clothing covering the entire body. Working on machines in such gear is not easy.
True, although this is a Red Herring of an argument.
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.)
1/3 the energy density of diesel and way more dangerous to lives and property.
Some quick research suggest, though, that the production of biodiesel is far more intensive (algae/oil farms are needed, then a process of procurement, production), and not without its own environmental concerns.
Ammonia is very common in industrial applications.
True. Commonality of ammonia references ammonia demand whereas grandparent comment was referencing the supply capacity per acre.
Here is an overview I wrote of next generation methods for ammonia synthesis:
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)
I'm vaguely amused by the headline of "requires no external power" right above the image of it sitting on top of (and plugged in to) a giant portable battery.
So they invented a (chemical) bean plant/rhizobium? Or Nitrobacter. AKA atmospheric nitrogen fixer
No small feat!
This is huge! The ability to create ammonia from scratch - provided it can be done in a way which is also safe in terms of storage of the generated ammonia, can be game changer as it can be used as a carrier for hydrogen for Hydrogen-powered vehicles, generators etc.
this observation is present in the 3rd paragraph of TFA
If this is indeed possible, then it must also be possible to create simple hydrocarbons (CO2 + H2O => CxHx + O2) using a similar process.
Yes? There's already a cottage industry trying to do exactly that?
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.
Didn’t a group from KAUST falsify Zare’s results about microdroplets a few years ago and show that they weren’t anything special
How do we create this right now?
What are the costs for the catalysts and how long do they last?
Those sorts of questions feel important to understand.
Most ammonia is produced via the Haber process. It takes nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from natural gas and combines them into ammonia. It uses an iron catalyst. This process emits significant CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Currently hydrogen made from natural gas is the cheapest, but the Haber process could equally well use hydrogen made from water electrolysis using solar/wind energy.
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.
> but the Haber process could equally well use hydrogen made from water electrolysis using solar/wind energy.
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.
Am I being trolled? Scale it up a trillion times and you still have nothing, not even compared to the current hourly production.
Do you think the first lab produced ammonia was also made at current hourly production rates?
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?
Ammonia is 1 Nitrogen bonded with 3 hydrogen.
The raw stuff is definitely there. Thought I'm sure there are easier ways of making it.
I wonder what are the side effects of extracting nitrogen out of air -- supposing this was developed and deployed at scale.
I doubt much. We've been pumping billions of tons of co2 and only slightly raised co2 and that's a small small portion of the air in the atmosphere.
It's 80% of the atmosphere. You're not going to run out. What might be a risk is dumping it, nitrogenation of rivers is already a problem in places.
We already make ammonia from the nitrogen in the air.
> The process can be powered simply by ambient wind to pass the water vapor through the mesh.
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 process can be powered simply by ambient wind
>the ultimate energy source appears to be the wind
Seems like you are agreeing that, that is how chemistry works.
Related: my personal wistful thinking is,
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.
The was an article here a while back about the production of propane from water and CO2 (via a catalyst and electricity). I think "renewable fossil fuels" are the only way we can handle the fluctuating production of renewable energy and get the density of fuel we need for storage, especially mobile storage like fuel for cars & lorries.
> Related: my personal wistful thinking is,
> AI -> safe deployable fusion
This reminds me of the recent HN referred article on Cargo Cults
I interpreted that causality as AI leading to deployment of carbon-neutral energy, then when the AI bubble bursts, we’ve pushed carbon-neutral electricity sources off the learning curve cliff and it is available for cheap without the original consumers needing it. From that perspective, it could be any carbon neutral electricity (fusion, fission, enhanced geothermal, super-deep geothermal etc.). I could be misinterpreting the parent comment.
"Researchers produce NH_3 fuel from N-gas-compound with H_2O vapor"
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.
> produce NH_3 fuel from N-gas-compound with H_2O vapor
At room temperature! That's the interesting bit.
In TFA the alternative methods for making ammonia are mentioned.
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.
There are a million ways to turn large amounts of energy into smaller amounts of energy.
And many of them are incredibly useful. Take, for example, the burning of fuel. Or eating and digesting.
Hopefully, one day they will turn large amounts of cheap energy into valuable chemical feed stock and fuels. When you think about it, aluminum producers are doing something similar.
I hear there is a small fortune to be made in this technology. First, start with a large fortune.
This fits with most VC backed companies. Back in 30 minutes with my showHN post!
Fractional Distillation is nothing new.
Take that ammonium, burn it, have heat, power a steam engine, infinite energy?
Where does that energy come from? 1st law of thermodynamics?
This is under-explained, isn't it? The reaction has to be endothermic, so it must be taking in ambient heat. Would be useful if someone dug up the actual paper rather than the press release.
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.
There is the smoking gun:
> 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).
At that point in the presentation, I'd probably sarcastically ask if they were accidentally measuring how many dogs mark their territory in a 100 foot radius of the device, per hour, via their collector.
They did attempt to control for the ammonia concentration in the collected water without their catalyst. But they did not try to calculate the equilibrium concentration of ammonia in water exposed to the atmosphere.
Direct solar energy output, perhaps. Seems potentially simple to boil it off with heat.
You can catalytically oxidize ammonia in water solution. The energy generated is more than enough to overcome the energy released during solvation.
I find it surprising that the paper has no discussion whatsoever of the thermodynamics of the process. The overall reaction is very endothermic (you can burn ammonia in oxygen as fuel!), so the only way it’s happening at all is that it’s approaching equilibrium, presumably driven by the increase of entropy available by creating a low concentration of ammonia in whatever weird phase it’s created in. Getting high concentrations from a similar process is going to need some energy-consuming step to shift that equilibrium.
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.
The droplet size appears to be critical here.
The energy comes from the sun, without it the atmosphere would freeze and this device wouldn't work.
For our purposes solar power is effectively perpetual motion.
I see what you're saying in the sense of passive energy collection, but perpetual motion strikes me as a terrible metaphor. Perpetual motion would imply so many thing about the universe that solar can't deliver.
For the purposes of anyone reading this, you can make a perpetual motion machine using solar power. I'm pretty sure modern engineering and materials are sophisticated to make a machine of some sort that collects energy during the day and stores it over night in order to continuously move for...I don't know, several hundred, several thousand years? Nothing overly sophisticated, since I wouldn't necessarily trust bearings or motors or hinges to last that long, but something that performs work without needing to be touched for multiple lifetimes.
And how does the presented device make use of solar power? Wind movement?
If you consider solar only working for 50% of the day on average, "perpetual".
The power could come from anything (solar, wind, wave) other than the dominant current source for all ammonia, the Haber Process. TFA mentions this in the headline? Could this be done before by just using water+air+solar, yes it could. Frankly, this is just a proof of concept and any commercial solution would be different for scaling reasons.
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.
You didn't read the article? "The process requires no external power" right after the headline.
Like you said, the energy comes from somewhere. If I had to guess, it's effectively solar powered (the catalyst lowering the activation energy enough that photons can actually do the work), plus indirectly solar powered in that you need wind to physically move the compounds around.
I have read the research paper and the energy appears to come mostly from the pump, because the flow of gas and vapor in the device causes contact electrification, which helps the redox reaction.
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.
If it requires no external power what's that bigass battery pack at the base for?
For Science!
Ammonia as a fuel is an absurdly stupid idea. It is trading the lives and safety of crews and passengers for a bit of money.
Gasoline as a fuel is an absurdly stupid idea, dangerous to handle, toxic, and has a tendency to burst into flame!
I'm sure you can understand the difference of degree between something that is lethal in minutes and a gas (ammonia) and something that takes much higher and longer exposures to be deadly, plus is a liquid (gasoline).
Gasoline is not nearly as dangerous, toxic or as likely to burst into flame.
I'm surmising that it could be a useful first step towards converting the atmospheric CO2 into something easier to store long-term.
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.
> into something easier to store long-term.
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.
Oops, you're right...
In this case the environmental significance of producing ammonia is much less impressive...
What is so dangerous about it compared to lets say a gasoline engine converted to use LPG or Methane? There are many of those in Europe where I live.
Ammonia is much more caustic, toxic, and explosive than LPG and incidents involving it like the Minot derailment tend to be significantly worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment
You mean aside from being a colorless toxic gas that will kill you in as little as 5 minutes?
Yeah, ammonia leaks are much more nasty than methane or hydrogen leaks. Methane, especially in LNG form, is quite safe compared to ammonia. LPG is even more stable than LNG and requires lower pressures. With that said, hydrogen leaks are "fun" because large ones usually self ignite and burn with a hot but mostly invisible flame. But hydrogen itself isn't toxic. Similarly, methane and propane aren't directly toxic.
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.
Just like propane, nitrogen, laughing gas, and methane ... I don't follow?
Those others are effectively asphyxiants: they'll kill you by displacing oxygen, leading to you collapsing and dying if not rescued, eg by being dragged clear or having ventilation improved. Ammonia is a caustic: airway constriction and oedema will get you at modest concentrations, weeping eyes may hamper your escape, and if rescued you may have lasting damage.
I'm guessing you have never gotten a snoutfull of ammonia? Relatively low concentrations in air feel like asphyxiation. It also hangs around near the ground rather than floating upward.
I think the concern here is somewhat misplaced...ammonia powered passenger vehicles are probably a bad idea.
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.