“Laser-induced nitrogen fixation” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41441-0
This is Open Access, and mentions how that is also a leap forward in Nitrogen fixation
“Abstract: For decarbonization of ammonia production in industry, alternative methods by exploiting renewable energy sources have recently been explored. Nonetheless, they still lack yield and efficiency to be industrially relevant. Here, we demonstrate an advanced approach of nitrogen fixation to synthesize ammonia at ambient conditions via laser–induced multiphoton dissociation of lithium oxide. Lithium oxide is dissociated under non–equilibrium multiphoton absorption and high temperatures under focused infrared light, and the generated zero–valent metal spontaneously fixes nitrogen and forms a lithium nitride, which upon subsequent hydrolysis generates ammonia. The highest ammonia yield rate of 30.9 micromoles per second per square centimeter is achieved at 25 °C and 1.0 bar nitrogen. This is two orders of magnitude higher than state–of–the–art ammonia synthesis at ambient conditions. The focused infrared light here is produced by a commercial simple CO2 laser, serving as a demonstration of potentially solar pumped lasers for nitrogen fixation and other high excitation chemistry. We anticipate such laser-involved technology will bring unprecedented opportunities to realize not only local ammonia production but also other new chemistries.”
It isn't clear to me how they're pricing the H-B process there, industrial HB uses hydrogen from hydrocarbons. An apples to apples comparison would at least add the energy you could get from burning the hydrogen instead, but arguably should compare with H-B where the hydrogen comes from electrolysis of water.
> "subsequent hydrolysis"
As far as I can tell, you just add water. zap rinse repeat. I'm a little skeptical that their yield figures were for Li2O though the repeated process has you cycling through LiOH after the first pass.
This could enable fertilizer production with no CO2 emissions. The numbers in the paper suggest that it might prove cheaper than natural gas based production which is common today. Fertilizer production is 2.1% of all CO2 emissions right now.
"In addition to its use in the fertilizer and chemical industries, ammonia is currently seen as a potential replacement for carbon-based fuels and as a carrier for worldwide transportation of renewable energy."
Long-term grid storage?
Publication: 22 July 2022
Anyone know if maybe some pilot / small scale production facility has been set up in the mean time?
I've read about a farm that produced its own fertilizer, but dunno whether that uses this or some older / unrelated process.
Would be a huge breakthrough in any case.
They're trying to avoid using the stuff in industrial refrigeration it's so nasty, and yet here we are gleefully considering rolling down the highway with it in the cheapest vessel industry can lobby for strapped to our bum.
I guess the notion has passed so quickly we haven't had time for the media to program us with corporate agendas...
N2 + 3H2 -> 2NH3
https://about.bnef.com/blog/japans-ammonia-coal-co-firing-st...
which I just can't imagine being clean when I consider that nitrogen oxides are also a concern with combustion fuels, not to mention it being an inefficient "battery" if you're making ammonia from green hydrogen and then burning it and spinning a turbine.
Fertilizer production via this method might be a good fit for times when rates are low or even negative due to wind energy overproduction during off peak.
So I'm not exactly holding my breath. It's a big improvement over previous methods, but there's still a long way to go.
Switching to carbon free ammonia would be no great task, just a price hike and some minor retrofitting.
Could you explain exactly why you would say this?
Working past their fake news headlines like 100%. Hydrogen is almost 100% and that's not big if true.
We are decades away for renewable electricity only for our electric needs.
Then you have oil and many other things electric can replace which are worse than gas.
What about this is big? In a dream world of unlimited electricity everything is easy, like synth fuel and fertilizer and climate control. Today, burning coal to make fertilizer doesn't seem good, if this is true.
We’re decades away from 100%, but how long away are we nationally from 50%, 65%, 90%, 99%?
As solar production ramps up to higher percentages there is going to be more and more peak power in excess of demand. Industrial scale electrochemistry is going to be one of the alternatives to batteries that’s going to be developed.
Already nitrogen fixation requires a huge amount of energy, this process at scale could very well require less energy than the modern haber process.
Also, we need a fuel for long distance transport like ships when batteries won’t work. Ammonia will always be cheaper than synthetic fuel because no carbon doesn’t have to come from air, and it stores better than hydrogen.
There may be lots of surplus electricity in the future but there will also be a lot of demands for carbon capture, hydrogen, long term storage, and chemical processes.
The main challenge is building cheap electrolysers without so much regard to efficiency, in order to use all the power when available. Most commercially available electrolysers today are expensive and cannot ramp up and down quickly.
The abstract doesn't go into detail on energy efficiency and a comparison to the old method using gas. For instance, would this method result in less CO2 emissions using regular grid electricity, or would it need to be 100% low-carbon electricity? If, say, the electricity came from a CCGT plant, how would that compare? Etc etc
Who cares? This is about electricity to ammonia.
Given: a very efficient way to make ammonia (as an energy store) using electricity, this becomes a storage mechanism. So then, make ammonia and money whenever the grid is in a 'pay to take power' state, and (up to a point) even if you have to pay. End source is irrelevant.
Alternate process: run a solar farm, produce ammonia whenever that's cheaper than paying someone to take the power (or curtail), then sell the stored power when prices are high. Or, sell the ammonia directly.
To know the energy efficiency, besides the current efficiency, which is close to 100%, we need to know how big is the overvoltage needed for electrolysis.
Yeah, someone would have to get access to the paper to see if they state the energy efficiency. I assume that b/c they don't mention it, it is abysmal. There's pressure to put good results into the abstract.
This is not all that different from the production of hydrogen. Hydrogen is most economically produced from natural gas nowadays. You can produce it from water, with (just like here) an almost 100% current-to-hydrogen efficiency. But it's still twice as expensive, if not more.
Most hydrogen produced today is consumed very close to where it is produced. Also energy storage and fuel type use cases rank very low on Michael Liebreich's hydrogen ladder. That's a nice tool that ranks different uses of hydrogen by their economic feasibility and overhead. Chemically binding it to something else to store it works of course. Ammonia (NH3) is common for this; and in fact the biggest use case for hydrogen. People have speculated about using that as a fuel. It's much easier to store and transport. And of course these chemical transformations also have an energy cost.
Do we know if this process is burstable (i.e. the devices for running it are likely cheap enough compared to the energy requirement that they don't need to run 24/7, and could use excess renewable energy when available)?
1. https://nh3fuelassociation.org/2018/12/07/performance-of-amm....
This system involves ethanol as a sacrificial hydrogen donor: "The amount of ammonia produced in the 96 h experiments (3.9 ± 0.1 mmol) was around four times higher than the amount of ethanol present (1 mmol), indicating that it is not a completely sacrificial reactant but can also operate as a proton carrier."
https://www.enginelabs.com/engine-tech/engine/corrosion-of-c...
If I, the consumer, had unlimited access to cheap, unregulated liquid ammonia (as common as gasoline), how many precursor-steps am I away from having access to like... a LOT of high explosives?
-asking for your friendly neighborhood crazy person with a vendetta against... whoever.
As far as I can see, it's a very similar problem to hydrogen. It doesn't matter how safe you can make it, it matters how dangerous a random nutjob can make it.
This always bothers me. People freak out about LiIon battery failures, or hydrogen, or ammonia, or nuclear power. But here we are with an entire economy riding on an explosive, firey, dirty fuel that is already causing global climate problems.
Safety concerns should be kept on-par with what we have today. Let’s not throw out a good solution because it can be dangerous in some cases. Any high-energy-dense thing we switch to after fossil fuels is going to release that energy if handled improperly. That concern should be quite low on the list.
And also flammable/explosive.
And if someone really was bent on mayhem, well, anhydrous ammonia is nasty toxic stuff as is. You don’t need to do anything chemically to it to kill or injure a lot of people. On the other hand, it isn’t a chemical that sneaks up on you. If you are being exposed to dangerous levels, you’ll know it.
Or I could just purchase actual explosives at the sporting good store, like tannerite.
Isn't this miniscule? Is this commercially viable?
Edit: The molecular mass of nitrogen is 28, so 1 mol is 28 grams, so 150 nmol is 28 x150 nano grams = 4.2 micro grams. How much gas is this?
It's rate of production over the area of the catalyst. Put another way, that's 1.5 ± 0.2 mmol/m²s or 25.5 ± 3.4 mg/m²s.
24 hours of production over a catalyst with an area of 1000 m² would create 25 ± 3.4 t. That's about the product weight of a typical full cold / cool towed trailer tank sent to large-scale customers. A commercial ammonia refinery would need many multiples of this area to be economically viable.
https://alliancetruckandtank.com/products/transport-trailers...
> ammonia production is energy-intensive, accounting for 1% to 2% of global energy consumption, 3% of global carbon emissions,[23] and 3% to 5% of natural gas consumption
Big if we can improve this.
For more on the Haber process and its impact on the world, I highly recommend this book: "The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler" by Thomas Hager.