> with some small number of notable exceptions like helium

Helium is one of the not-exceptions. Helium gets trapped in the same pockets as natural gas and we get it by separating it, which is an energy-intensive process, which in turn means that we don't do it for the vast majority of natural gas that gets extracted. If energy was cheaper then it would be viable to separate more of it.

Even if carbon was a complete non-issue, electrification and a greater diversity of energy sources would still have immense value.

Right. It also makes it sound like they’re not using the Haber Bosch process… but then:

> Electrolyzers are located on-site. They use wind energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.

> Additionally, nitrogen gas is directly harnessed from the atmosphere using an air-separation unit.

> Hydrogen and nitrogen are combined under pressure, resulting in carbon-free ammonia fertilizer.

That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me. So they’re just saying, rather than divert excess generation to a battery, you could instead build a micro H-B plant on site to produce ammonia.

I doubt this makes any sense in the grand scheme of things as you achieve major efficiencies at scale for chemical plants. Makes more sense to just electrify existing ammonia plants and ensure they use renewable electricity sources.

The green chemistry industry is full of penny-wise pound-foolish concepts like this and it drives me absolutely nuts.

The whole article is trash.

Every sentence its own paragraph.

Every second word bold.

Who writes like that?

Is this some kind of stupid SEO/AI crawler optimization?

Just wait until you hear about the underwater turbine that can do far more than generate electricity!

https://energiesmedia.com/texas-turbine-under-water-more-tha...

Which is why I always advocate that countries should generate energy in abundance. You should have energy to waste. If you are burning fossil fuels, that should be considered a failure mode. Fossil fuels should be bottom of the barrel stuff, what you burn when you have no other options.

Otherwise, do whatever. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear. Do everything. Do batteries. Do geothermal. Have so much energy you can waste on silly things. Diversity is good here.

> What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium)

You're saying freshwater shortage is really just an energy shortage?

> No, it doesn't.

Also it doesn’t need to, wind energy was used to produce things before electricity was harnessed in the first place.

Sailboats are harnessed wind energy and some 10kY old. Windmills and wind pumps were invented some time between 700 and 900.

It's not so much unavoidable as one of the things we're doing already with grey hydrogen (made from methane). It's about cleaning that up and using blue (grey with carbon capture) or green hydrogen, not finding new uses for ammonia (like using it as a fuel for e.g. shipping). Micheal Liebreich does a great job in his podcasts and articles explaining how that would be economically extremely unrealistic.

For ammonia specifically, cleaning that up requires energy that is equal to about 5% or so of global electricity production. A few petawatt hour basically. To produce around 190 million tonnes of ammonia. This setup in Minnesota is cute but it's a tiny little drop in the ocean in terms of what would be needed. It does about 1 tonne per day.

They haven't really solved or proved anything that we didn't already know. Yes you can make ammonia with electricity. Amazing. It's just that you need a ginormous amount of windmills to get to what is needed. It's doable but we're talking hundreds of thousands of windmills.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the other hydrogen based technologies up the same ladder that this website reports on / promotes, would need even more windmills, nuclear plants, perpetuum mobile machines, etc. to generate the stupendous amounts of power needed to produce all the hydrogen needed.

What Liebreich does with his ladder is making the simple point that even just converting what we currently do with grey hydrogen (i.e. mostly ammonia) to green hydrogen is going to be a decades long project.

Most recent dealflow in the space as well as national hydrogen strategies have been explicitly calling out fertilizer for almost a decade now.

Saudi's PIF has specifically been active on this thesis becuase becoming a lead fertilizer producer is part of Vision 2030.

I'd recommend reading "Hydrogen Diplomacy" [0] to deep dive into this.

[0] - https://fupubco.com/books/index.php/fupub/catalog/book/2

> 2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What?

Eventually you cook everybody and the population drops to 0. We want to maintain the "feed everybody" aspect while eliminating the "continually add excess carbon to the atmosphere and render the planet uninhabitable" aspect.

Haber-Bosch require continuous input of hydrogen, but aside from that it is a net source of power. The reaction is exothermic and can provide more than enough work to drive compressors that pressurize the reactants.

Sounds like an opportunity to scale up your business. If the competition suddenly gets expensive that is a market opportunity.

Of course it's never that simple. If the war ends tomorrow and fertilizer prices drop back to normal over the course of the next two years an expansion could find itself uncompetitive just as its coming online.

It's AI-generated dog shit, and I feel bad for getting roped in by it. Another commenter noticed there is another article on that site that's almost identical despite being about a different topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049204

Kinda looks like a low-quality executive summary of a longer text. I agree, it's garbage.

A nice thing about the fertilizer is that it is only needed for a few weeks out of the year, which means it can be produced intermittently and stored without causing problems. If there are two weeks of non-production due to weather that isn't an issue so long as it averages out over the year. One could imagine a plant that only runs when the electricity is almost free.

This setup uses the Haber-Bosch process. It’s different because it’s not tied to the grid (it’s not actually different at all)

Sadly I suspect crypto mining may be more profitable

As well as tons of other things without electricity involved at all! Don Quixote was never in fear of being electrocuted.

In other news, no whales were bothered by this windmill, either.