Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

Posted by gritzko 2 days ago

Comments

Comment by epistasis 2 days ago

Perfect project for rural Minnesota, that needs the ammonia, but also has a surprising amount of solar colocated with farms. And a fair amount of wind in the southwest.

However there are far far larger projects going on over the world. China is building multiple GW of wind and solar to power a massive ammonia/green hydrogen site right now. I frequently hear of sites in Spain in the hundreds of MW range.

The US has been pivotal in the invention of these technologies, but hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests is preventing us from getting the benefits as quickly as we should.

Comment by strictnein 1 day ago

> hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests

The #1 state, by far, in terms of solar, wind, and energy storage is Texas. There is likely no other state that is also as pro-fossil fuels as Texas. It's also a state known for its conservative stance on almost everything.

But the market doesn't care and it flourished without government intervention or significant aid, simply because Texas let's you build things, and the market likes to make money.

Comment by thelastgallon 1 day ago

Its mostly because of this guy(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Osborne

"Renewable Energy Policy. In 1984 Osborne co-founded the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association (now Alliance) (TREIA)[1] with two partners and worked with other key individuals and organizations to bring the nascent renewable energy industry to the attention of policymakers on the state and federal level. "

This was a unplanned, unanticipated freak accident that gave Texas an early transmission for wind power. Because most of the farmers are republican, they built a transmission network for the farmers. This led to CREZ (Competitive Renewable Energy Zones), the goal of which is to integrate the wind supply regions with the large demand centers. Rich farmers are a much larger voting block than the dozens of fossil fuel billionaires.

The bragging by Texas about renewables is entirely accidental and is a side-effect of building a transmission network for the rich farmers. Not because Texas runs markets efficiently, pro-business or pro-efficiency or anything like that. Thats just nonsense.

Today, Texas tries very hard to limit renewables, but fails. They only want coal and natural gas, and use the legislation and state money to fund them: https://www.powermag.com/texas-moves-forward-with-5-38b-in-l...

(1) I think this is the guy, but am not entirely sure. I read an article about this curious case of renewables in Texas, a long time back. It is hard to find that article, I've been searching for an hour and most of what I find credits politicians for CREZ. But there was a private person who made this possible. I'm assuming its this guy.

Comment by Dibby053 1 day ago

So, synthesizing both comments: state-backed infrastructure funding + deregulated free-market buildout = rapid expansion

Comment by KaiserPro 1 day ago

> Spain in the hundreds of MW range.

Its got to the point where there is now so much solar, that during solar maximum, there is too much energy and plants are being told to turn off.

Natural gas was the main pricing predictor, but now that link has been pretty much severed. Given that spain is dependent on russian gas, its good that they are able to _try_ to lower their dependence.

Comment by epistasis 1 day ago

Spain has only started installing storage too; that will not only make energy cheaper but also increase reliability massively. California's grid is rock solid these days because of it, and it pays for itself with time arbitrage of solar.

Comment by aaron695 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by buckle8017 2 days ago

Fossil fuels remain more cost effective.

The US isn't a centrally planned economy (sort of) so the more economical option wins.

Comment by epistasis 2 days ago

For a very very long time, fracking was not economical, and only through massive government investment did it become cost effective.

Same goes for renewables, and electrolyzers. All evidence points to a future with renewable energy costing a small fraction of fossil fuels, and electrolyzers being cheaper than hydrogen from gas. But the future needs to be built. We can either lose out and buy the tech from others, or be leaders and reap the early rewards.

Comment by colechristensen 1 day ago

Where solar in particular really drops the cost of electricity is towards the end and beyond its design lifetime of 25-30 years. That's how a bunch of the costs are calculated and it's turning out systems are continuing to produce significantly beyond that. Paired with inflation, this makes old systems produce extremely low cost electricity.

It's not about tech now, it's just commodity install base making sure to ride the adoption curve at a healthy pace which people are more than happy to do just because of greed.

Comment by omgwtfbyobbq 2 days ago

The US is centrally planned to some degree, just in different ways and by different interests.

I suspect the interests/actions of lobbyists for certain companies/sectors had significant influence on things like taxes, and is a type of central planning.

It's different than most central planned economies because there are two entities operating in parallel (a quasi-private corporate state in addition to the usual government state), but I'd say it's still centralized/planned, even if it's not the state/government doing the planning.

Comment by zanecodes 2 days ago

Fossil fuel being heavily subsidised kind of undermines both of your points.

Comment by cmrdporcupine 1 day ago

Heavily directly subsidized and then additionally "subsidized" through massive military expenditures as well.

Comment by zanecodes 1 day ago

Not to mention indirectly subsidised by ignoring the externalities imposed on the health of ourselves and our environment.

Comment by yegle 2 days ago

Mostly because the carbon dioxide emission is not properly reflected in the fossil fuel pricing.

Basically, every single person on earth is subsiding the big oil by bearing the consequence/cost of the higher CO2 concentration.

Comment by bricss 2 days ago

[dead]

Comment by kulahan 1 day ago

No they don’t. They remain subsidized. Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago, and I don’t even LIKE solar. Fossil fuels have no redeeming qualities in the major energy sectors anymore, aside from ONE: the plants are VERY cheap to build.

Comment by otterley 1 day ago

Solar farms are even cheaper to build!

Comment by askvictor 1 day ago

Which fossil fuel plants are cheap to build? Cheap compared to what?

Comment by benj111 1 day ago

Surely the redeeming feature is that they are already here...

Comment by kulahan 23 hours ago

I thought the same thing, but actually, no. Fossil fuel plants are expensive to run. "That they are already here" is an argument for plants which are more advanced and thus, much more expensive to build, but much cheaper to maintain.

Comment by colechristensen 1 day ago

>solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency

What does this even mean? What inputs and outputs are you comparing to get an apples-to-apples comparison between efficiency between fossil fuels and solar?

Comment by kulahan 23 hours ago

It's talking about the economic inputs required to create a unit of energy. Literally all you have to fathom is "can we add up what it takes to make a watt of energy from coal, vs. from solar power vs. some other plant, amortized over the lifetime of said plant?"

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

"Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago"

You are going to have to explain this. Because there is no measurement of efficiency in which solar PV in Minnesota in efficient in any way. To produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north. So it isn't even more environmentally friendly. And its far more expensive. It uses far more energy. So I have no idea at all what you are referring to. Cap Ex perhaps or cap cost...if that's what you mean, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

> to produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north.

For the next watt, you need more natural gas which co-releases more CO2 .. or you can just use the same solar panel again - with its fixed up front CO2 cost already "paid for"

Over 25 or 30 years a panel keeps producing w/out additional CO2 release, during that same period natural gas extraction and consumption continue releasing CO2.

Comment by lebuffon 1 day ago

And when we begin coupling solar to cheap sodium ion battery banks it gets very interesting. Sodium ion will even be compatible with a Minnesota winter!

Comment by icehawk 1 day ago

> To produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north

What about the watt after that? I still got the solar panel for that next watt, and with natural gas I have... well I don't have anything, I need more natural gas!

Comment by benj111 1 day ago

What the bloody hell are you taking about. Minnesota is further south than the UK. Southern Minnesota is the same latitude as the Mediterranean coast.

Learn some facts before spouting bs.

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

The UK is in the same boat as Minnesota for solar PV. There isn't a solar panel in the UK that will ever make more power than it took to produce.

Comment by benj111 1 day ago

It takes 1 to 3 years to offset the energy used to manufacture a solar panel.

The only situation where you would have a point is micro wind generation, and that's basically no longer a thing because it doesn't work.

Comment by otterley 1 day ago

You keep getting downvoted because nearly everything you say is not only factually incorrect but contradicts common sense.

If you want people to take you seriously, start linking to facts and analyses by credible sources or showing your math.

Comment by serf 1 day ago

>There isn't a solar panel in the UK that will ever make more power than it took to produce.

You're clearly and provably wrong, and looking at your comments shows me lots of clearly and provably wrong statements, and almost every single one of them pertains to energy.

..so I presume you have a dog in this race.

Comment by stymaar 2 days ago

Like it or not every, non-failed-state, modern economy is a centrally-planned one. The economy never lives in a vacuum, it's always a product of the institutions that govern them (regulations, subsidies, taxes, etc.) Something is always “the most cost-effective option” because the institutions made it so.

Comment by andrekandre 1 day ago

well, just to add to that: you cant even have any kind of economy at scale without some central authority to enforce property rights or contract law etc anyways...

Comment by otterley 1 day ago

Solar and wind energy have been more economical than fossil fuel on a cost per unit energy basis for quite some time. The reasons we're still so tied to fossil fuel are largely political, not economic.

Technology Connections goes into this in exhaustive detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

Also, you may not have heard that the Trump administration is actively stonewalling green energy projects, regardless of their economic prospects: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/06/29/87...

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

You are confusing capacity costs (capital outlay) with utilization costs (what you actually pay per watt). Its true that renewables have a very low cap cost. They are also several times the utilization cost. That's why electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago. And energy prices are basically the same as 10 years ago.

PS LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets, not a real market calculation that anyone pays.

Comment by otterley 1 day ago

> They are also several times the utilization cost

Prove it.

> electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago.

That has nothing to do with the cost of generation. The reason costs have gone up are 1/wildfire mitigation and liability, 2/replacement of aging grid infrastructure (plus a geographically diverse state - replacing infrastructure in mountains is costly), 3/rising demand and new fixed infrastructure cost (which is subsumed into everyone's bills), and 4/decommissioning of power plants (San Onofre and Diablo Canyon were both mothballed and haven't been replaced).

Also, California utilities are heavily regulated. Utility rates have to be approved by the government, making the rate-setting process highly politicized. For a very long time the regulators refused to let the utilities raise rates even though it was necessary. Eventually, though, that became unsustainable. The result was that instead of raising rates a percentage point or two per year, all of a sudden there was a real threat of the system going completely bankrupt and so prices shot up dramatically.

If you really want to understand the energy markets in CA, there's no better source than the Los Angeles Times. Or what's left of it, anyway.

> LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets

Let me get my popcorn while you explain it to us ignoramuses.

Comment by firsthummus 1 day ago

LCOE is helpful but only holds up to a certain point. Latest Lazard report has levelized cost of firming included as well. Dispatchability of power is an important part of the picture missed by LCOE for weather-dependent generation. Once grids are meaningfully composed of solar/wind, the cost of firming is significant and mostly comes from gas peaker plants these days.

Comment by colechristensen 1 day ago

>That's why electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago

No, CA electrical cost is about paying for PG&E's insurance liabilities and subsidizing the living situation in places which are de facto uninhabitable on account of wildfires.

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

Sorry, PG&E's accounting says otherwise.

Comment by otterley 1 day ago

What exactly does their accounting say?

Comment by colechristensen 1 day ago

PG&E is incentivized to spend more money on capex because the state guarantees a return on investment, a perverse incentive which causes them to make stupid money decisions to realize more profit. For example doubling the cost of energization by having a large proportion of it done by external contractors.

24% of PG&E's revenue (that is customer rate payments) goes to wildfire related costs.

Comment by otterley 1 day ago

The flip side of the incentive to spend more on capex is that rates are regulated by the PUC. So it’s not like the utilities get blank checks.

Comment by epistasis 1 day ago

Having watched CPUC in action, it's not quite a blank check, but damn close.

Utility comes in and says "we desperately need a rate hike to fund $X00 million" then CPUC gets them down to x-1 or x-2 and the whole thing could hav been avoided by better management from the start.

Comment by tancop 1 day ago

if pg&e was state owned (with good management, thats the hard part) it would operate at ~zero profit and pass through all savings to customers. that means rates as low as they can possible be at the current state of the grid and generation system.

most infra projects get taxpayer money through subsidies or partnerships anyway. taking it public would only kick out the investors with misaligned goals and replace them with fixed cost debt funding. you dont need to create incentives that hurt consumers when the state can invest directly.

Comment by otterley 1 day ago

I don’t follow. Taking what public? Most utility companies operating in CA are already publicly traded.

Do you mean “nationalizing” (or whatever the state equivalent is)? There are already some municipally owned utilities like DWP in LA and Santa Clara Power, but those began as municipal services and weren’t converted from independent businesses. The tendency over the past century has been to spin off public entities, not to take them in.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by jamal-kumar 2 days ago

If you're not accounting for all the wildfire smoke costing billions of dollars maybe your calculations for cost effectiveness have some adjustments to be made

Comment by jimnotgym 1 day ago

Yeah I can see your problem

> owned by farmer cooperatives

No way for a Corp to benefit=communism

Comment by dkackman11 2 days ago

lol

Comment by avadodin 1 day ago

I don't support fossil fuels but wind works a small fraction of the time, it is awful to wildlife and it is an eyesore.

Instead of wasting the already wasteful energy by making fertilizer out of air, these farms could likely much more efficiently re–capture runoff from their waterways that is now being dumped into the sea harming humans and wildlife alike.

Comment by ElevenLathe 3 hours ago

Re-concentrating fertilizer from runoff sounds like an energy-intensive activity. Why wouldn't cheap wind power make it easier?

Comment by BigTTYGothGF 1 day ago

> awful to wildlife

I think this has been greatly exaggerated, but even if the claims are true it's as nothing compared to fossil fuel.

Comment by epistasis 1 day ago

Calling wind power "wasteful" is just silly. We need to be a bit more hard nosed when it comes to energy policy. Not only does wind save tons of money, t is hyper efficient, and anti-correlates with solar in most geographies. Meaning a small amount of cheap battery storage mixed with wind plus solar delivers extremely cheap, reliable energy, with amazing dispatch characteristics.

People get all emotional about views, but most people find it beautiful and a few people's visual aesthetics should not override one of the pillars of the future economy.

Additionally, the fix for runoff from farms into the gulf is mere regulation and fining, but that's not going to stop the need for ammonia! Plus, try to regulate these farmers, they are largely parasites in the country through the farm bill yet still remain one of the most potent political factions in the country.

Comment by avadodin 1 day ago

The same rare earths and quality steel could have been used on a water or vapor dynamo that runs 24/7 and doesn't have any additional harmful impact.

And even if wind wasn't wasteful at the outlet, you're still using it to turn air nitrogen into the same compounds that you are dumping into the seas, lakes and drinking water.

Comment by undersuit 1 day ago

How are you going to recapture fertilizer runoff.

Comment by avadodin 1 day ago

There are techniques both at origin and downstream.

I have not reviewed every method but, even if they are energy intensive, they probably beat blasting a carburetor and dumping the compounds.

Comment by undersuit 1 day ago

I mentioned removing the excess nutrients from the water because removing them "works a small fraction of the time, it is awful to wildlife and it is an eyesore." not to mention the energy requirements which you think shouldn't include wind.

Comment by strictnein 1 day ago

The runoff from farms in rural Minnesota is being dumped into the sea? There's almost no place farther from the sea in North America than upper midwest rural farms.

Comment by epistasis 1 day ago

It causes massive algeal growths in the Gulf of Mexico. This sucks massive amounts of oxygen out of the water leading to so-called "dead zones".

Comment by anyonecancode 1 day ago

It runs into the Mississippi river, which runs into the sea.

Comment by Animats 2 days ago

There are press releases which link to other press releases. Found the technical paper from 2021.[1]

The ammonia plant is built for intermittent operation, so it can shut down or reduce output when there's no wind. No need to store much electrical energy. Storage tanks hold the ammonia. It's a reasonable idea, but is it cost-effective? No numbers are given. Still, fertilizer independence alone is worth something. You can do this anywhere with wind or sun.

[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1838620

Comment by laughing_man 1 day ago

The press release says they use the wind energy to produce hydrogen. Seems like you could store the hydrogen and always have the plant running at capacity as long as the average power produced by the wind turbine(s) was enough.

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

Built infrastructure for hydrogen storage and transport is always a challenge, it's a slippery little molecule that's expensive to contain in human built stuff.

That said, there's almost always a 'cheat' and for bulk hydrogen storage:

  Using salt caverns (cavities leached from salt deposits in the subsurface) for gas storage is an established technology. Salt caverns are good for storing gas because they have a very low permeability and cracks or fractures can re-seal to prevent leakage. The UK has salt deposits that are suitable for cavern storage and that have been used store natural gas since the 1960s. Hydrogen, used as a chemical feedstock, has been stored in salt caverns in Teesside since the 1970s.

~ https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68aebcef3a052...

Currently there are a few geological structures in Australia being tested for suitability and pilot storage.

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

Its trying to complete with making ammonia from natural gas. So probably not. Natural gas is priced as a waste product and the industrial process we use there is about 120 years old. So its just about the hardest target on the board to beat on price.

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

It's providing an alternative to middle east sourced fertiliser from plants that can no longer ship or, in some cases, can no longer operate due to war damage.

US states aren't the only places on the globe building out renewable powered green hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, etc.

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

The US doesn't get oil from the ME anymore. And there isn't a single functioning plant that uses any of the processes you describe anywhere on the planet after 45 years of trying. There are only a couple of pilot plants and most of those have been abandon.

Comment by c1ccccc1 1 day ago

I mean, I guess the answer there would be to build the usual kind of Haber-Brosch process plants that run continuously, and feed them with hydrogen derived from natural gas. But just build them in the US.

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

> But just build them in the US.

Sorry, that's not going to work out for myself, the 8.5+ million hectares of grain growing about my location, nor for the billion+ tonne per annum of mineral resource shifted in my state.

We're interested in producing fertilisers and fuel from non fossil sources.

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

The laws of physics don't like your politics. Also, last time you played around with this stuff, the outcome was very very bad and lots of people died. So before you start trying to mess around with industrial infrastructure, maybe learn physics and chemistry first. Because you keep trying to do things that simply don't work.

Comment by 20after4 1 day ago

WTF are you even talking about? Be specific rather than spewing vague political smears.

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

We already have quite a few of them.

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by possiblyburrito 2 days ago

The catch is that the electrolyzer is most of the capex, so intermittency cuts both ways. Tanks are cheap, which makes flexibility nearly free on the storage side, but every hour the stack sits idle the hydrogen coming out of it gets more expensive. That is why these projects obsess over capacity factor and usually want a mix of wind and solar rather than wind alone. Agreed on wanting numbers, the whole question lives in how many hours per year the stack actually runs.

Comment by cyberax 2 days ago

Ammonia production is more-or-less a synonym for "hydrogen production" chemically. The NH3 formation happens at a high temperature and pressure, but it doesn't use a lot of energy. Technically, it's even energetically favorable, but with the enthalpy of just -46kJ/mol. For comparison, water is -300 kJ/mol.

In other words, to split 1 mole (18 grams) of water into constituent parts (molecular hydrogen and oxygen), you need to invest at least 300 kJ of energy. If you then use 1 mole of hydrogen to produce ammonia, you can get back 30 kJ of energy.

This is chemically pretty much the best case from the thermodynamic efficiency standpoint (especially when you also factor in the entropy changes) with almost zero potential waste.

The kicker is, of course, that you need extremely high temperature and pressure for the reaction to work. And this is just hard to do on small scale. But that's not a theoretical barrier, but "just" a question of clever engineering! It's great to hear that we're solving these issues.

Comment by Alien1Being 1 day ago

China operates a massive green hydrogen and ammonia facility in Chifeng, which is powered entirely by off-grid wind and solar. The site already produces 320,000 tonnes of green ammonia annually.

This is going to be the century of China...

In contrast, this Minnesotan plant aims to scale up to 300 tonnes a year some day.

Comment by ChrisArchitect 2 days ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819

Comment by jimnotgym 1 day ago

For those trying to work out the economics.

1 ton of urea is apparently worth $451

I think I would need to know the capex cost to go any further, but my gut feel is this is really a technical demonstration rather than an instant goldmine.

Comment by Gibbon1 1 day ago

You need about 50-55kwh to produce a kg of hydrogen.

Urea molar mass is 60. And the formula is CO(NH2)2. 4 moles of hydrogen per mole. So 6.6% hydrogen by weight.

1000kg of urea needs then 66.6kg of hydrogen. At 55khw per kg of hydrogen you need 3666 kwh per ton of urea. (not counting other energy inputs).

At $0.05/kwh that's $183 for the hydrogen input.

Worth mentioning the internet says fertilizer is about 7% of an average farm budget and only 1% of the cost of food at the store.

I'm on the side of sure no problem really when it comes to green nitrogen fertilizer.

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

Another PoV is not the profit from producing home ground fertiliser but the risk of not having fertiliser at "just the right time".

Locally (Western Australia) there are some 8.3 (ish) million hectares of grain planted annually; that's a high spike demand for both fertiliser and fuel that can be interrupted by supply chain issues (eg: war) leading to extensive losses wrt expected harvests.

Comment by jimnotgym 1 day ago

Oh I'm in that camp. I live in a country that didn't produce its own fertilizer. Sounds like a terrific risk to me

Comment by umvi 2 days ago

So basically: wind generators power electrolysis to create hydrogen, the hydrogen is fed to a normal Haber-Bosch plant which is still powered by coal or gas. So basically the wind power is just replacing the carbon footprint of a single input (hydrogen) to a H-B plant?

Comment by philipkglass 2 days ago

The only chemical inputs a Haber-Bosch plant needs are nitrogen and hydrogen. The nitrogen always comes from air and in this plant the hydrogen comes from electrolysis. The plant also needs electrical power to run compressors, but that can also be supplied by wind and it's minor compared to the embodied energy of the hydrogen input.

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

Sort of, but there are important details you miss. First the nitrogen triple bond is one of the strongest in nature so it takes a lot of energy to break it. So we don't actually do that in the way you think in a real ammonia plant. Instead we heat (usually) Magnesium and that extracts Nitrogen from the air (actually a pure nitrogen atmosphere). That's not what is happening in this plant. And the difference in the effectiveness of those two different methods is probably pretty big. This seems more like a PR stunt to get investment.

Comment by philipkglass 1 day ago

The reaction N2 + 3 H2 => 2 NH3 is thermodynamically spontaneously but kinetically forbidden by the strength of the N-N bond. That's why the key breakthrough of the Haber-Bosch process is the use of a doped iron oxide (magnetite -- is that what you meant?) catalyst that allows the reaction to proceed at an industrially useful rate. This wind powered ammonia plant gets the hydrogen from water electrolysis instead of steam-reformed methane; the plant is otherwise using a conventional Haber-Bosch process.

Using electrolytic hydrogen to make ammonia was fairly common in the first half of the 20th century, because a lot of remote hydroelectric plants didn't immediately have uses for all of the electricity they could generate. They turned low cost electricity into pure hydrogen and used it to make ammonia and derivatives, which were easier-to-transport high value products.

Comment by WJW 2 days ago

Why would the HB plant be powered with fossil fuels? You can power that with wind power as well.

Comment by ch4s3 2 days ago

Typically the natural gas is the source of the hydrogen. Usually natural gas is burned to form steam to split more natural gas (CH4) into carbon and hydrogen. That’s traditionally cheaper than electrolysis.

Comment by WJW 1 day ago

TFA literally states "Wind energy powers the electrolysers that supply hydrogen to a Haber Bosch plant." First paragraph.

Comment by jimnotgym 1 day ago

Unless your electricity is 'free', presumably?

Comment by ch4s3 1 day ago

Free has a habit of changing the economics. This is good news, decoupling ammonia from natural gas would make agriculture more resilient to Middle East disruptions.

Comment by kulahan 1 day ago

It’s mot powered with fossil fuels. It uses fossil fuels as an ingredient.

Comment by WJW 1 day ago

No it doesn't. It electrolyses water and combines the resulting hydrogen with nitrogen from the air.

Comment by kulahan 23 hours ago

Wrong. Natural gas is the most common catalyst, but plenty of plants use oil, coal, and other hydrocarbons.

A quick refresher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Process

Comment by WJW 8 hours ago

Yes I know how the usual process works. The plant in the article is different, because it uses electrolysis to make hydrogen for the HB plant. You'd have known this if you'd read even the first paragraph of the article.

Comment by thelastgallon 1 day ago

Use Solar/Wind and convert it to green hydrogen or green ammonia. We've reached the limits of pumped hydro and batteries are not dirt cheap yet. Green hydrogen and ammonia solve multiple problems. Both are fossil fuel products now.

Hydrogen is corrosive and explosive, next to impossible to store/transport safely. Green Hydrogen for immediate consumption at industries that require high heat and electricity is not an option.

Green ammonia for fertilizer and as energy storage.

With abundant oversupply of solar, we can start building alternatives to all fossil fuels.

Comment by ajdude 2 days ago

I think this is a [dup] of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819

Comment by jimnotgym 1 day ago

I don't know about the US, but in the UK in times of high renewable production and low demand the electricity price goes negative. Sounds like a nice use for waste electricity, as well as your own renewables?

Would like to know the capex numbers though. Is it viable in todays market to have it stood idle?

Comment by richardc323 2 days ago

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...

Comment by pibaker 1 day ago

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.

Comment by richardc323 1 day ago

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

Comment by analog31 1 day ago

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

Comment by richardc323 1 day ago

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.

Comment by avhception 1 day ago

Demeter is full of superstitious quackery.

Comment by zahlman 1 day ago

> 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.

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

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.

Comment by zahlman 1 day ago

> 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)?

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

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.

Comment by zahlman 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by westurner 1 day ago

("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.

Comment by philipkglass 2 days ago

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.

Comment by hunterpayne 1 day ago

"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.

Comment by richardc323 2 days ago

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

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by oconnore 2 days ago

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

Comment by richardc323 1 day ago

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.

Comment by daliusd 2 days ago

It would be interesting to get details what’s the process behind. Can you reproduce it on personal level?

Comment by WJW 2 days ago

It's just electrolysing water into hydrogen and then using the hydrogen in a Haber-Bosch reactor with nitrogen from the air to make ammonia. Electrolysis is easy enough to do on a small scale.

Fritz Haber initially demonstrated his process producing 125 milliliters per hour of ammonia in a "tabletop machine", so it's obviously technically possible. Typical process parameters are about 200 bars and 500 degrees C, so it's not trivial but also not outside of what a dedicated hobbyist could reach. I'm pretty sure it's not economically feasible at small scales though. Even the earliest industrial plants in the 1920s made 20 tons of ammonia per day. It will be vastly cheaper to just buy the stuff in bulk from a plant churning out hundreds of tons per day than it will be to make it yourself at a rate of 2 liters per day.

That said, go for it! A factory is just a room, and similarly a chemical reactor is basically just a steel drum.

Comment by tastyfreeze 2 days ago

On a smaller scale plasma electrolytic cells look more economical than Haber-Bosch but are still new tech. I don't remember the company trying to commercialize it but their target is on farm nitrate production.

Comment by allannienhuis 2 days ago

you might be thinking of https://www.greenlightning.ag/ - seems really cool tech. combined with variable cheap power source like solar or wind, seems like a good way to give ai bit more control over inputs for farmers.

Comment by cyanlimetea 1 day ago

I can produce all those by pissing, shitting, and farting, respectively.

Comment by benj111 1 day ago

Cool, hope this is successful. I've commented previously about doing exactly this more as a form of alternative energy storage or just to use 'free' energy. Good to know I wasn't speaking completely out of my arse.

Comment by RickJWagner 1 day ago

Good for Morris!

40 years ago I was exiting the US Air Force and selected the University of Minnesota at Morris as my college. It’s a tiny campus, they advertised themselves as a ‘small college, like a mini Ivy League school’.

I went, and enjoyed a semester there, but then fate intervened when my father died. I went home, got sidetracked a while and eventually returned to school at the University of Minnesota at Mankato, chosen because they had an active bowling team. ( I wanted to go pro, but later found out I probably wouldn’t make much money at it. Reality set in. )