Perfect project for rural Minnesota, that needs the ammonia, but also has a surprising amount of solar colocated with farms. And a fair amount of wind in the southwest.
However there are far far larger projects going on over the world. China is building multiple GW of wind and solar to power a massive ammonia/green hydrogen site right now. I frequently hear of sites in Spain in the hundreds of MW range.
The US has been pivotal in the invention of these technologies, but hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests is preventing us from getting the benefits as quickly as we should.
For a very very long time, fracking was not economical, and only through massive government investment did it become cost effective.
Same goes for renewables, and electrolyzers. All evidence points to a future with renewable energy costing a small fraction of fossil fuels, and electrolyzers being cheaper than hydrogen from gas. But the future needs to be built. We can either lose out and buy the tech from others, or be leaders and reap the early rewards.
The US is centrally planned to some degree, just in different ways and by different interests.
I suspect the interests/actions of lobbyists for certain companies/sectors had significant influence on things like taxes, and is a type of central planning.
It's different than most central planned economies because there are two entities operating in parallel (a quasi-private corporate state in addition to the usual government state), but I'd say it's still centralized/planned, even if it's not the state/government doing the planning.
No they don’t. They remain subsidized. Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago, and I don’t even LIKE solar. Fossil fuels have no redeeming qualities in the major energy sectors anymore, aside from ONE: the plants are VERY cheap to build.
"Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago"
You are going to have to explain this. Because there is no measurement of efficiency in which solar PV in Minnesota in efficient in any way. To produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north. So it isn't even more environmentally friendly. And its far more expensive. It uses far more energy. So I have no idea at all what you are referring to. Cap Ex perhaps or cap cost...if that's what you mean, you have no idea what you are talking about.
> to produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north.
For the next watt, you need more natural gas which co-releases more CO2 .. or you can just use the same solar panel again - with its fixed up front CO2 cost already "paid for"
Over 25 or 30 years a panel keeps producing w/out additional CO2 release, during that same period natural gas extraction and consumption continue releasing CO2.
Solar and wind energy have been more economical than fossil fuel on a cost per unit energy basis for quite some time. The reasons we're still so tied to fossil fuel are largely political, not economic.
You are confusing capacity costs (capital outlay) with utilization costs (what you actually pay per watt). Its true that renewables have a very low cap cost. They are also several times the utilization cost. That's why electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago. And energy prices are basically the same as 10 years ago.
PS LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets, not a real market calculation that anyone pays.
> They are also several times the utilization cost
Prove it.
> electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago.
That has nothing to do with the cost of generation. The reason costs have gone up are 1/wildfire mitigation and liability, 2/replacement of aging grid infrastructure (plus a geographically diverse state - replacing infrastructure in mountains is costly), 3/rising demand and new fixed infrastructure cost (which is subsumed into everyone's bills), and 4/decommissioning of power plants (San Onofre and Diablo Canyon were both mothballed and haven't been replaced).
Also, California utilities are heavily regulated. Utility rates have to be approved by the government, making the rate-setting process highly politicized. For a very long time the regulators refused to let the utilities raise rates even though it was necessary. Eventually, though, that became unsustainable. The result was that instead of raising rates a percentage point or two per year, all of a sudden there was threat of the system going completely bankrupt and so prices shot up dramatically.
If you really want to understand the energy markets in CA, there's no better source than the Los Angeles Times. Or what's left of it, anyway.
> LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets
Let me get my popcorn while you explain it to us ignoramuses.
Like it or not every, non-failed-state, modern economy is a centrally-planned one. The economy never lives in a vacuum, it's always a product of the institutions that govern them (regulations, subsidies, taxes, etc.) Something is always “the most cost-effective option” because the institutions made it so.
If you're not accounting for all the wildfire smoke costing billions of dollars maybe your calculations for cost effectiveness have some adjustments to be made
There are press releases which link to other press releases. Found the technical paper from 2021.[1]
The ammonia plant is built for intermittent operation, so it can shut down or reduce output when there's no wind. No need to store much electrical energy. Storage tanks hold the ammonia.
It's a reasonable idea, but is it cost-effective? No numbers are given. Still, fertilizer independence alone is worth something. You can do this anywhere with wind or sun.
Its trying to complete with making ammonia from natural gas. So probably not. Natural gas is priced as a waste product and the industrial process we use there is about 120 years old. So its just about the hardest target on the board to beat on price.
I think I would need to know the capex cost to go any further, but my gut feel is this is really a technical demonstration rather than an instant goldmine.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK in times of high renewable production and low demand the electricity price goes negative. Sounds like a nice use for waste electricity, as well as your own renewables?
Would like to know the capex numbers though. Is it viable in todays market to have it stood idle?
So basically: wind generators power electrolysis to create hydrogen, the hydrogen is fed to a normal Haber-Bosch plant which is still powered by coal or gas. So basically the wind power is just replacing the carbon footprint of a single input (hydrogen) to a H-B plant?
The only chemical inputs a Haber-Bosch plant needs are nitrogen and hydrogen. The nitrogen always comes from air and in this plant the hydrogen comes from electrolysis. The plant also needs electrical power to run compressors, but that can also be supplied by wind and it's minor compared to the embodied energy of the hydrogen input.
Sort of, but there are important details you miss. First the nitrogen triple bond is one of the strongest in nature so it takes a lot of energy to break it. So we don't actually do that in the way you think in a real ammonia plant. Instead we heat (usually) Magnesium and that extracts Nitrogen from the air (actually a pure nitrogen atmosphere). That's not what is happening in this plant. And the difference in the effectiveness of those two different methods is probably pretty big. This seems more like a PR stunt to get investment.
Typically the natural gas is the source of the hydrogen. Usually natural gas is burned to form steam to split more natural gas (CH4) into carbon and hydrogen. That’s traditionally cheaper than electrolysis.
40 years ago I was exiting the US Air Force and selected the University of Minnesota at Morris as my college. It’s a tiny campus, they advertised themselves as a ‘small college, like a mini Ivy League school’.
I went, and enjoyed a semester there, but then fate intervened when my father died. I went home, got sidetracked a while and eventually returned to school at the University of Minnesota at Mankato, chosen because they had an active bowling team. ( I wanted to go pro, but later found out I probably wouldn’t make much money at it. Reality set in. )
I grew up on an organic orchard, so don't get excited about artificial sources of nitrogen for agriculture and horticulture. It is better than getting fertiliser from fossil fuels, but it is still not great.
Our ability to artificially capture nitrogen and feed it to plants is why we are able to feed 8 billions souls and still suffer less hunger than our ancestors.
You are free to grow your plants however you want on your property. But just keep in mind that "no fertilizer" is a luxury belief not affordable to the rest of humanity.
Its horrendously inefficient...and inefficiency is usually bad for the environment. For example, the solar PV when sited in Minnesota is so inefficient just making the electricity from natural gas would produce less CO2 per watt. So there is that, and that's before you look at if all the equipment you use to build the plant was better used elsewhere. And then you could put the solar PV somewhere where it would actually been better than just burning natural gas for electricity.
We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia by now if fracking hadn't made natural gas so cheap. Natural gas is the largest variable-cost input to making most ammonia (it's processed with steam reforming to generate hydrogen), and in the United States it cost more 20 years ago than it does now:
The cost of wind power and solar power have fallen dramatically, but without accounting for the externalities of CO2 emissions, natural gas is still the cheaper way to make ammonia.
It's just electrolysing water into hydrogen and then using the hydrogen in a Haber-Bosch reactor with nitrogen from the air to make ammonia. Electrolysis is easy enough to do on a small scale.
Fritz Haber initially demonstrated his process producing 125 milliliters per hour of ammonia in a "tabletop machine", so it's obviously technically possible. Typical process parameters are about 200 bars and 500 degrees C, so it's not trivial but also not outside of what a dedicated hobbyist could reach. I'm pretty sure it's not economically feasible at small scales though. Even the earliest industrial plants in the 1920s made 20 tons of ammonia per day. It will be vastly cheaper to just buy the stuff in bulk from a plant churning out hundreds of tons per day than it will be to make it yourself at a rate of 2 liters per day.
That said, go for it! A factory is just a room, and similarly a chemical reactor is basically just a steel drum.
On a smaller scale plasma electrolytic cells look more economical than Haber-Bosch but are still new tech. I don't remember the company trying to commercialize it but their target is on farm nitrate production.
you might be thinking of https://www.greenlightning.ag/ - seems really cool tech. combined with variable cheap power source like solar or wind, seems like a good way to give ai bit more control over inputs for farmers.
Ammonia production is more-or-less a synonym for "hydrogen production" chemically. The NH3 formation happens at a high temperature and pressure, but it doesn't use a lot of energy. Technically, it's even energetically favorable, but with the enthalpy of just -46kJ/mol. For comparison, water is -300 kJ/mol.
In other words, to split 1 mole (18 grams) of water into constituent parts (molecular hydrogen and oxygen), you need to invest at least 300 kJ of energy. If you then use 1 mole of hydrogen to produce ammonia, you can get back 30 kJ of energy.
This is chemically pretty much the best case from the thermodynamic efficiency standpoint (especially when you also factor in the entropy changes) with almost zero potential waste.
The kicker is, of course, that you need extremely high temperature and pressure for the reaction to work. And this is just hard to do on small scale. But that's not a theoretical barrier, but "just" a question of clever engineering! It's great to hear that we're solving these issues.
However there are far far larger projects going on over the world. China is building multiple GW of wind and solar to power a massive ammonia/green hydrogen site right now. I frequently hear of sites in Spain in the hundreds of MW range.
The US has been pivotal in the invention of these technologies, but hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests is preventing us from getting the benefits as quickly as we should.
The US isn't a centrally planned economy (sort of) so the more economical option wins.
Same goes for renewables, and electrolyzers. All evidence points to a future with renewable energy costing a small fraction of fossil fuels, and electrolyzers being cheaper than hydrogen from gas. But the future needs to be built. We can either lose out and buy the tech from others, or be leaders and reap the early rewards.
Basically, every single person on earth is subsiding the big oil by bearing the consequence/cost of the higher CO2 concentration.
I suspect the interests/actions of lobbyists for certain companies/sectors had significant influence on things like taxes, and is a type of central planning.
It's different than most central planned economies because there are two entities operating in parallel (a quasi-private corporate state in addition to the usual government state), but I'd say it's still centralized/planned, even if it's not the state/government doing the planning.
You are going to have to explain this. Because there is no measurement of efficiency in which solar PV in Minnesota in efficient in any way. To produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north. So it isn't even more environmentally friendly. And its far more expensive. It uses far more energy. So I have no idea at all what you are referring to. Cap Ex perhaps or cap cost...if that's what you mean, you have no idea what you are talking about.
For the next watt, you need more natural gas which co-releases more CO2 .. or you can just use the same solar panel again - with its fixed up front CO2 cost already "paid for"
Over 25 or 30 years a panel keeps producing w/out additional CO2 release, during that same period natural gas extraction and consumption continue releasing CO2.
Technology Connections goes into this in exhaustive detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Also, you may not have heard that the Trump administration is actively stonewalling green energy projects, regardless of their economic prospects: https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/renewable-energy-...
PS LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets, not a real market calculation that anyone pays.
Prove it.
> electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago.
That has nothing to do with the cost of generation. The reason costs have gone up are 1/wildfire mitigation and liability, 2/replacement of aging grid infrastructure (plus a geographically diverse state - replacing infrastructure in mountains is costly), 3/rising demand and new fixed infrastructure cost (which is subsumed into everyone's bills), and 4/decommissioning of power plants (San Onofre and Diablo Canyon were both mothballed and haven't been replaced).
Also, California utilities are heavily regulated. Utility rates have to be approved by the government, making the rate-setting process highly politicized. For a very long time the regulators refused to let the utilities raise rates even though it was necessary. Eventually, though, that became unsustainable. The result was that instead of raising rates a percentage point or two per year, all of a sudden there was threat of the system going completely bankrupt and so prices shot up dramatically.
If you really want to understand the energy markets in CA, there's no better source than the Los Angeles Times. Or what's left of it, anyway.
> LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets
Let me get my popcorn while you explain it to us ignoramuses.
> owned by farmer cooperatives
No way for a Corp to benefit=communism
The ammonia plant is built for intermittent operation, so it can shut down or reduce output when there's no wind. No need to store much electrical energy. Storage tanks hold the ammonia. It's a reasonable idea, but is it cost-effective? No numbers are given. Still, fertilizer independence alone is worth something. You can do this anywhere with wind or sun.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1838620
1 ton of urea is apparently worth $451
I think I would need to know the capex cost to go any further, but my gut feel is this is really a technical demonstration rather than an instant goldmine.
Would like to know the capex numbers though. Is it viable in todays market to have it stood idle?
40 years ago I was exiting the US Air Force and selected the University of Minnesota at Morris as my college. It’s a tiny campus, they advertised themselves as a ‘small college, like a mini Ivy League school’.
I went, and enjoyed a semester there, but then fate intervened when my father died. I went home, got sidetracked a while and eventually returned to school at the University of Minnesota at Mankato, chosen because they had an active bowling team. ( I wanted to go pro, but later found out I probably wouldn’t make much money at it. Reality set in. )
My mind goes to energy storage. If it was a smart way to do that, people would probably be doing it, who knows. Well, someone wrote a paper about it in 2022: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
You are free to grow your plants however you want on your property. But just keep in mind that "no fertilizer" is a luxury belief not affordable to the rest of humanity.
Please explain how there is anything even remotely bad about it.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DHHNGSP
The cost of wind power and solar power have fallen dramatically, but without accounting for the externalities of CO2 emissions, natural gas is still the cheaper way to make ammonia.
Fritz Haber initially demonstrated his process producing 125 milliliters per hour of ammonia in a "tabletop machine", so it's obviously technically possible. Typical process parameters are about 200 bars and 500 degrees C, so it's not trivial but also not outside of what a dedicated hobbyist could reach. I'm pretty sure it's not economically feasible at small scales though. Even the earliest industrial plants in the 1920s made 20 tons of ammonia per day. It will be vastly cheaper to just buy the stuff in bulk from a plant churning out hundreds of tons per day than it will be to make it yourself at a rate of 2 liters per day.
That said, go for it! A factory is just a room, and similarly a chemical reactor is basically just a steel drum.
In other words, to split 1 mole (18 grams) of water into constituent parts (molecular hydrogen and oxygen), you need to invest at least 300 kJ of energy. If you then use 1 mole of hydrogen to produce ammonia, you can get back 30 kJ of energy.
This is chemically pretty much the best case from the thermodynamic efficiency standpoint (especially when you also factor in the entropy changes) with almost zero potential waste.
The kicker is, of course, that you need extremely high temperature and pressure for the reaction to work. And this is just hard to do on small scale. But that's not a theoretical barrier, but "just" a question of clever engineering! It's great to hear that we're solving these issues.