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Comment by hvb2 | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of places in the world where there's room for wind but the grid can't transport it to a user. In that case consuming it locally would make sense, and especially fertilizer is a very energy heavy product.

So it might be easier to pipe the ammonia to wherever it's needed? When it's in ammonia form the energy is essentially stored for a long time.

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I don’t think this is true, but it’s not my forte.

Pure ammonia is toxic to animals. At normal outdoor temperatures it also only becomes a liquid at ~100 PSI (it’s like 150 at 80F). The boiling point at STP is like -27F.

I’m doubtful running a power transmission line to these places is harder than maintaining pipes that transport either a toxic gas, or a toxic pressurized liquid.

If you could turn it into ammonium nitrate, that’s a solid at room temp and easier to transport. It’s explosive but insensitive so it shouldn’t without another explosion first. Even if it does, this sounds remote enough that it shouldn’t matter and ammonium nitrate is a no -toxic fertilizer. Wildlife shouldn’t even notice.

I didn't realize this previously but straight anhydrous ammonia can be used directly in the field as a fertilizer - specialized trucks just inject it directly into the soil where it dissolves in soil moisture.

Yes, it needs to be stored as a "toxic pressurized liquid" in steel tanks, but we store and use lots of toxic pressurized liquids all the time. Lots of people run all their energy needs off propane tanks, after all.

I think bacteria will convert it to ammonia nitrate, but I could be wrong. I do some hydro and the guidance is not to do it with hydro because the bacteria don’t grow as well so they won’t convert it into something plants can eat.

> we store and use lots of toxic pressurized liquids all the time. Lots of people run all their energy needs off propane tanks, after all.

That’s stored at rest, not being pumped through pipes. We could probably store it locally and send people to collect it, that might be cheaper than power lines.

I would be surprised if maintaining pipes to transport pressurized liquid or gas was cheaper than power lines. Power lines aren’t free, but super cheap relative to pipes that can leak everywhere.

Probably not pipes. Unless you have a huge flow, pipelines in general don't make sense. You'd fill up some kind of container and haul it away when it's nearly full. What kind of container stores ammonia, I don't really know - which is why ammonium nitrate is often used, as it's a solid at room temperature and pressure.

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