Deadly, dirty, indispensable: the nitrogen industry has changed the world | Hacker News Reader

Deadly, dirty, indispensable: the nitrogen industry has changed the world

economist.com

47 pointspseudolus21 comments

Why is nitrogen the headline? It's the H3 in NH3 that is causing the problem. Steam reforming natural gas to get H2 is the majority of the emissions. Fractional distillation of air to get nitrogen and the Haber Bosch process to combine the two are minor in comparison.

It's just easy terminology to understand. The H3 is what makes NH3 usable. Also, nitrogen is the element that the plants need.

I bet nitrogen oxides also shaped the world a lot: nitrates are both important fertilizers and key parts of various explosives.

'Nitrogen Industry' is the subject.

There’s no H3

Trihydrogen cation, H3+, is one of the most abundant ions in the universe.

Sure but that’s not it.

Because nitrogen fertilisers have an immense impact on the ecosystem.

They sure have, they keep 5 billion+ people alive.

They also kill rivers and lakes. In my country, a massive move to dairying has corresponded to a massive increase in eutrophication.

But that move to dairy from beef or sheep farming wasn't to feed the world, it was just to sell milk powder to China.

Isn’t selling milk powder to China feeding the world?

I get where you're coming from, folks like Vaclav Smil have talked about how the haber bosch process is arguably what's kept 2/3 of human population alive ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3013&v=5guXaWwQpe4&feature=y... ). The issues are also:

- Thinking beyond the anthropocentric and realize we've created many ocean dead zones: e.g. https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ . Think about what this'll mean in terms of ocean temperature in life within our lifetimes.

- Many farmsites simply use way too much nitrogen, possibly impacting human drinking water (one good person to follow in Iowa is Chris Jones ( https://mobile.twitter.com/RiverRaccoon/status/1541487782933... ) and Silvia Secchi ( https://mobile.twitter.com/ProfSecchi )

- Despite the above the predicament of deciding to use nitrogen inputs during adverse weather conditions (curious to hear about the alternatives here, from what I see even smallholder farmers that try to minimize nitrogen input still use a bit of it).

- The haber bosch process itself, and industries seeking to find alternatives to produce ammonia gas (iirc likely used in making diesel DEF fluid urea - https://newatlas.com/energy/green-ammonia-phosphonium-produc... ).

- The article also cites norman borlaug, of which there's plenty of questions to ask around the economic and ecological narratives around that work - e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-022-10325-2 and likely 'the violence of the green revolution' by vandana shiva, and 'the globalization of wheat' https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/

People need to reminded that before nitrogen fertilizers, famines and hunger were a regular feature of human existence.

And similarly, people need to reminded that after nitrogen fertilizers, famines and hunger are a regular feature of human existence.

If you want to understand how much reactive nitrogen you introduce into the waste stream through food consumption, transportation, and home heating, there is a handy calculator I’ve been working on here:

https://calc.nprint.org

The team of scientists who developed this calculator and authored the research include J. Galloway (University of Virginia) and A. Leach (University of New Hampshire) along with many others.

Your website doesn’t work on mobile safari (iphone). I can see some text (1. Introduction…) while the website is loading and then it disappears

Thanks! I’ll check it out. It’s older technology designed for classroom use and QA / UI for a phone experience wasn’t included the most recent update.

Antibiotics and nitrogen fertilizers together account for the 20th century human population explosion. Antibiotics (and to some extent vaccines) vastly reduced childhood mortality, and the increased human population got out of the famine cycle via increases in food production made possible with ammonium/nitrate fertilizers, which allow practices like double cropping. The breeding of crop strains capable of utilizing that extra nitrogen to maximize growth also had a significant effect.

However, it's undeniable that much of the vast quantities of nitrogen fertilizer applied to fields over the past 100 years never made it into food crops, and just ran off into rivers and oceans. The whole process could be made vastly more efficient, but in the past there was no strong argument to do so, as natural gas was cheap and the fertilizer industry was bent on increasing sales.

Technology wise, the robotic farmer might change everything - it can weed without herbicides, and also deliver precise amounts of fertilizer to individual plants, something 20th century mechanized agriculture was incapable of.

> ... under-consumption [was] So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the fixation of nitrogen — positively a crime against society. — MM

Every economic blessing is also a curse.

Plastic

Concrete

Fertilizer

Teflon and related products.

Fossil Fuels

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