The Ammonia Economy and Virginia Tech

Last week I described how a Danish company has designed a stable hydrogen source which releases the gas by catalyzing ammonia with magnesium chloride. The material is recharged with ammonia and can be used again-and-again. (Picture from History of the Universe.)

All of which led me to wondering what an ammonia economy might look like. (That there is your ammonia molecule, one happy nitrogen and three little hydrogen.)

The answer is, not too good. Natural gas is the main feedstock for current ammonia production. In fact, such gases first produce hydrogen before producing ammonia, so the production barrier to both is the same. Ammonia itself is composed of only nitrogen and hydrogen.

The modern ammonia production process is improved through a 1992 innovation from M.W. Kellogg, using a more expensive catalyst, ruthenium, but resulting in a process that can be done under less pressure. Some 8 years later, Haldor – Topsøe of Denmark announced they had created new catalysts, tertiary hydrides, which could replace the ruthenium and lower the cost.

The big hope, however, is to get closer to nature, to replicate how plants fix nitrogen using the enzyme nitrogenase, which could result in the synthesis of ammonia at normal temperatures and normal pressures, eliminating the need for natural gas.

All of which brings us (in a good way) back to Virginia Tech.

Like many land grant schools (such as Texas A&M and Auburn) VT has
a massive agriculture program. One of the big problems they’re dealing
with is ammonia pollution,
one of the biggest sources of big farm pollution, caused by
high-nitrogen animal feeds which winds up in their manure. When
anti-environmentalists talk about farms being the main source of
pollution in the world, they’re absolutely right, and ammonia is the
pollutant.

Collecting more ammonia from these natural processes should be
possible. Most of it comes in the piss and shit of the animals, which
is pretty shelf stable stuff. It’s smelly, in part because it contains
ammonia and that’s what we need to capture for the ammonia economy.

What we need to do here is merge aspects of energy and veterinary
science. If we can capture all the ammonia being given off by animals,
then use that for power, the resulting manure is safer for the soil.

This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking we need. Stop thinking of
organic and inorganic chemistry as being two separate realms. They are,
in fact, the same. We are all chemical factories, producing such things
as methane and ammonia.  There’s plenty out there to make a dent in our
energy problem, to win The War Against Oil, if what we call pollution can be harnessed as raw
materials, and processed correctly.