{"id":62460,"date":"2022-04-17T08:06:29","date_gmt":"2022-04-17T13:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62460"},"modified":"2022-04-17T08:06:29","modified_gmt":"2022-04-17T13:06:29","slug":"is-ammonia-from-green-hydrogen-a-false-prophet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62460","title":{"rendered":"Is ammonia from green hydrogen a false prophet?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Is ammonia from green hydrogen a false prophet?<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n
Defra has just launched a package of measures to help farmers facing huge increases in the price of fertiliser. The cost of nitrogen fertiliser is currently three times higher than it was last year. This makes it an appropriate moment to consider the dependence of intensive agriculture on synthetic nitrogen and whether the prospect of green hydrogen to make fertiliser with a lower environmental footprint offers a long term solution.<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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A brief history of nitrogen fertiliser<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since the Second World War, synthetic fertilisers, especially those made from ammonia, have played a major role in agriculture on almost all farms except those using organic methods. These have driven a dramatic increase in production through higher yields, but that has come at\u00a0a high environmental cost<\/a>\u00a0in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution from ammonia, water pollution from high levels of nitrate and biodiversity decline in terms of delicate wild flowers and plants outcompeted by ranker vegetation better able to ulitise nitrogen.<\/p>\n

Today, the UK uses just over\u00a0one million tonnes of nitrogen<\/a>\u00a0every year, in over three million tonnes of nitrogen fertiliser, with different products containing different proportions of nitrogen. Ammonia is produced by the Haber-Bosch process \u2013 named after German scientists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch who developed a method to produce synthetic ammonia in 1911. This\u00a0process<\/a>\u00a0turns the inert nitrogen in the air we breathe into reactive nitrogen, by breaking the triple bond which holds nitrogen atoms together in pairs, then forcing them to combine with hydrogen. This requires a temperature of\u00a0 500\u00b0C, 250 atmospheres of pressure (approximately 120 times the pressure in a typical car tyre) and an iron catalyst.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Is ammonia from green hydrogen a false prophet? Defra has just launched a package of measures to help farmers facing huge increases in the price of fertiliser. The cost of nitrogen fertiliser is currently three times higher than it was last year. This makes it an appropriate moment to consider the dependence of intensive agriculture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[31912,32839,1912,32151,6867],"class_list":["post-62460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-ammonia","tag-fertilisers","tag-food-production","tag-green-hydrogen","tag-sustainable-food-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62461,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62460\/revisions\/62461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}