Hacker News Reader

Has anyone figured out how to reduce the energy demand for refining aluminum or manufacturing ammonium nitrate? Efficiency gains in things like lighting, heating, and ground transport are nice but those only go so far. Heavy industry will always require enormous energy inputs.

View on HN

Smelting recycled aluminum uses only about 3% of the energy as creating it from raw ore. So yes, recycling allows us to do that more efficiently.

Those are things that will be done where energy is cheaper. For example, making ammonia in Europe makes little sense when natural gas is so much more expensive there than in the US or the Mideast.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com