It's not so much unavoidable as one of the things we're doing already with grey hydrogen (made from methane). It's about cleaning that up and using blue (grey with carbon capture) or green hydrogen, not finding new uses for ammonia (like using it as a fuel for e.g. shipping). Micheal Liebreich does a great job in his podcasts and articles explaining how that would be economically extremely unrealistic.
For ammonia specifically, cleaning that up requires energy that is equal to about 5% or so of global electricity production. A few petawatt hour basically. To produce around 190 million tonnes of ammonia. This setup in Minnesota is cute but it's a tiny little drop in the ocean in terms of what would be needed. It does about 1 tonne per day.
They haven't really solved or proved anything that we didn't already know. Yes you can make ammonia with electricity. Amazing. It's just that you need a ginormous amount of windmills to get to what is needed. It's doable but we're talking hundreds of thousands of windmills.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the other hydrogen based technologies up the same ladder that this website reports on / promotes, would need even more windmills, nuclear plants, perpetuum mobile machines, etc. to generate the stupendous amounts of power needed to produce all the hydrogen needed.
What Liebreich does with his ladder is making the simple point that even just converting what we currently do with grey hydrogen (i.e. mostly ammonia) to green hydrogen is going to be a decades long project.
It could probably work for arab countries as they have immense solar potential and are already big in fertilizer production and shipping. They know their natural gas is not going to last forever.
Liebreich hates green/hydrolysis because it's much more expensive (due to inefficiencies) and wasteful of green electrons compared to final consumption alternatives.
> A Minnesotan wind turbine shows that wind energy can produce more than just electricity.
No, it doesn't. It's just that electricity can be used to do lots of things, including splitting water as an input to ammonia production.
What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium), and the reason electrification is so important is because it allows faster replacement of fossil-fuel generation with carbon-free sources.
> with some small number of notable exceptions like helium
Helium is one of the not-exceptions. Helium gets trapped in the same pockets as natural gas and we get it by separating it, which is an energy-intensive process, which in turn means that we don't do it for the vast majority of natural gas that gets extracted. If energy was cheaper then it would be viable to separate more of it.
Pedantically speaking, a Farnsworth Fusor makes it from hydrogen and electricity. Not in useful quantities.
That's the well known fusion reactor design that can be built by motivated high school students. Basically just accelerates hydrogen ions towards the center of a low pressure chamber using an electric field. Dead end for fusion power, but it does fuse!
Right. It also makes it sound like they’re not using the Haber Bosch process… but then:
> Electrolyzers are located on-site. They use wind energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
> Additionally, nitrogen gas is directly harnessed from the atmosphere using an air-separation unit.
> Hydrogen and nitrogen are combined under pressure, resulting in carbon-free ammonia fertilizer.
That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me. So they’re just saying, rather than divert excess generation to a battery, you could instead build a micro H-B plant on site to produce ammonia.
I doubt this makes any sense in the grand scheme of things as you achieve major efficiencies at scale for chemical plants. Makes more sense to just electrify existing ammonia plants and ensure they use renewable electricity sources.
The green chemistry industry is full of penny-wise pound-foolish concepts like this and it drives me absolutely nuts.
From doing a bit of digging into this myself after hearing it being promoted on the radio, I both agree and disagree. Working through the $/acre for on-site produced ammonia using locally-generated electricity (I forget if I was looking at PV or Wind, doesn’t matter) the payback period was surprisingly quick, like 2 or 3 years. One of the big reasons is that you don’t actually need a very big system; you only need on-farm ammonia a few days a year but you have all year long to harvest and store enough for those few days.
>That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me.
Well, kinda. But Haber-Bosch uses an iron catalyst. This is cheap, but it requires very high temperatures and pressures. There has been some recent work on ruthenium catalysts (particularly a Japanese company Tsubame BHB) which are more expensive, but allow the reaction to proceed under milder conditions. A particular goal is to have smaller facilities which can then be colocated with power generation. So you are exchanging a higher fixed cost for hopefully lower variable costs. I don't know if that's actually what they're doing here, though.
I assume what confused the article is that ammonia plants often use natural gas, but that's purely as a convenient energy source and a source of hydrogen, so they cover both angles. But that isn't remotely a necessity.
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.
Not to mention ammonia isn't the friendliest of chemicals and doesn't exactly beg for decentralized logistics.
I think, projects like these grew out of dunkelflaute moral panic regarding renewable energy. Meanwhile grid battery storage has becomes cheap enough to completely obliterate this concern.
And quite frankly, fertilizer needs in agriculture should be addressed by ecological means anyway. If we want to lower the impact of climate change, we need to get out of this "just throw more energy at it" technology mindset.
What I find funny is people that build machines that extract carbon from the atmosphere. None of the articles about it ever mention the energy cost in running the machine or howinell it could be scaled up to make a measurable difference.
But trees, for example, are 50% carbon, extracted from the atmosphere. And they're solar powered! And look nice.
Which is why I always advocate that countries should generate energy in abundance. You should have energy to waste. If you are burning fossil fuels, that should be considered a failure mode. Fossil fuels should be bottom of the barrel stuff, what you burn when you have no other options.
Otherwise, do whatever. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear. Do everything. Do batteries. Do geothermal. Have so much energy you can waste on silly things. Diversity is good here.
> What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium)
You're saying freshwater shortage is really just an energy shortage?
> This process is extremely heat-intensive and accounts for up to 2% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
> While it is highly unsustainable, it has doubled the Earth’s food-carrying capacity and still feeds almost 50% of the population.
2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What?
> The key is to create synthetic ammonia fertilizer by combining atmospheric nitrogen with natural gas or coal.
> Synthetic fertilizer is traditionally created in chemical plants that require continuous, high-volume power. This is why producers remain reliant on fossil fuel-powered grids.
What, again? Haber-Bosch process requires continuous power doesn't mean it's natural gas or coal. Where is nuclear? Is solar/wind disrupt that much that it can't compress/heat up some gas??
> 2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What?
Eventually you cook everybody and the population drops to 0. We want to maintain the "feed everybody" aspect while eliminating the "continually add excess carbon to the atmosphere and render the planet uninhabitable" aspect.
Haber-Bosch require continuous input of hydrogen, but aside from that it is a net source of power. The reaction is exothermic and can provide more than enough work to drive compressors that pressurize the reactants.
TIL the Red Pyramid looks remarkably like the Haber-Bosch ammonia production process. And the word "Amun" is the etymological root of the word Ammonia.
Some will criticize renewable energy because the power output is spiky. This sort of thing is why that doesn't matter. There are plenty of things you can do with excess power. There's been research in manufacturing gasoline from the air. It's not economical to do for its own sake but when we're talking about excess power, that's not really a factor. Fertilizer is a new one (to me). But it makes sense. You'll still need phosphorus (phosphate) from somewhere.
A loop where solar is converted to fertiliser using similar process , probably generating hydrogen as a side effect with some mechanism to probably capture some carbon for economically useful use when it reaches say an LCOE of 0.01 $/kwh and done on mind boggling scale might actually be the holy grail solution to a lot of problems at the same time. Might need quite a few breakthroughs in the material science scheme of things though. There are good reasons why hydrogen has never really taken off by itself even with so much scale, innovation thrown at it so far. The best hope is China doing to hydrogen now what it did to solar in 2010s.
I work with a company that produces ammonia from local waste streams. The current policies and war has really hurt farmers. Certain fertilizers and other inputs have more than doubled in price, if they can even be found anymore.
Sounds like an opportunity to scale up your business. If the competition suddenly gets expensive that is a market opportunity.
Of course it's never that simple. If the war ends tomorrow and fertilizer prices drop back to normal over the course of the next two years an expansion could find itself uncompetitive just as its coming online.
We are expanding and we’ve ensured our loyal customers remain supplied! Because of our waste processing ability I’m not worried about competition, it’s a fundamentally different value prop than Haber Bosch.
the talk about "electricity can do things" misses whats actually interesting here. Working in the energy sector, the hard problem is rarely generating the power, it is getting it into the grid. connection queue runs for years and turbines regularly get curtailed when the grid c anncot absorb more. A flexible load behind the meter, like an electrolyzer making ammonia on site, monetizes energy that would otherwise be wasted or never get built at all. The fertilizer is almost a side effect, the real product is a use for stranded wind. i would also add that wind + battery would be much better both for stablization and also the same use as mentioned in the article.
A nice thing about the fertilizer is that it is only needed for a few weeks out of the year, which means it can be produced intermittently and stored without causing problems. If there are two weeks of non-production due to weather that isn't an issue so long as it averages out over the year. One could imagine a plant that only runs when the electricity is almost free.
Well, the problem of storage blew up Beirut. I wouldn't say it isn't a problem. It's manageable if you pay attention to storage conditions which they didn't for several years.
yeah and imagine you store the unregulated energy source in a battery so you can use it whenever you want OR you could also help stabilize the grid and or sell your energy from the battery if you want. wind + battery will become very popular in the comming years and is already being highly adopted in countries like spain
It's AI-generated dog shit, and I feel bad for getting roped in by it. Another commenter noticed there is another article on that site that's almost identical despite being about a different topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049204
Thought about something similar a few months ago, love seeing it in action. The article was terrible however, dunno why every other sentence is bold. Genuenly feels like I'm reading a middle schooler trying to fulfill a word usage/sentience structure quota.
I would prefer to have figures how this compares to the traditional Haber-Bosch-process, how much energy is put into this, and how much fertilizer do we get for it, if it's just a PoC without evaluation of how much energy is used. in this whole process we got nothing NB: to beat Haber-Bosch you don't need much. it isn't only about the produced carbon dioxide
To make sense, this has to compete with the cost and value of battery storage. That depends on location and energy and fertilizer needs at that location. So I guess it's possible that the cost makes sense, but it doesn't seem very likely compared to the ever falling cost of battery storage.
This is one of the "unavoidable" uses of clean hydrogen, in the Clean Hydrogen Ladder.
At the other end of the spectrum ("uncompetitive") you get things like fuel-cell cars.
https://liebreich.com/the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-updated-...
It's not so much unavoidable as one of the things we're doing already with grey hydrogen (made from methane). It's about cleaning that up and using blue (grey with carbon capture) or green hydrogen, not finding new uses for ammonia (like using it as a fuel for e.g. shipping). Micheal Liebreich does a great job in his podcasts and articles explaining how that would be economically extremely unrealistic.
For ammonia specifically, cleaning that up requires energy that is equal to about 5% or so of global electricity production. A few petawatt hour basically. To produce around 190 million tonnes of ammonia. This setup in Minnesota is cute but it's a tiny little drop in the ocean in terms of what would be needed. It does about 1 tonne per day.
They haven't really solved or proved anything that we didn't already know. Yes you can make ammonia with electricity. Amazing. It's just that you need a ginormous amount of windmills to get to what is needed. It's doable but we're talking hundreds of thousands of windmills.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the other hydrogen based technologies up the same ladder that this website reports on / promotes, would need even more windmills, nuclear plants, perpetuum mobile machines, etc. to generate the stupendous amounts of power needed to produce all the hydrogen needed.
What Liebreich does with his ladder is making the simple point that even just converting what we currently do with grey hydrogen (i.e. mostly ammonia) to green hydrogen is going to be a decades long project.
It could probably work for arab countries as they have immense solar potential and are already big in fertilizer production and shipping. They know their natural gas is not going to last forever.
Liebreich hates green/hydrolysis because it's much more expensive (due to inefficiencies) and wasteful of green electrons compared to final consumption alternatives.
Most recent dealflow in the space as well as national hydrogen strategies have been explicitly calling out fertilizer for almost a decade now.
Saudi's PIF has specifically been active on this thesis becuase becoming a lead fertilizer producer is part of Vision 2030.
I'd recommend reading "Hydrogen Diplomacy" [0] to deep dive into this.
[0] - https://fupubco.com/books/index.php/fupub/catalog/book/2
This sentence really bugged me:
> A Minnesotan wind turbine shows that wind energy can produce more than just electricity.
No, it doesn't. It's just that electricity can be used to do lots of things, including splitting water as an input to ammonia production.
What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium), and the reason electrification is so important is because it allows faster replacement of fossil-fuel generation with carbon-free sources.
Even if carbon was a complete non-issue, electrification and a greater diversity of energy sources would still have immense value.
Electrification is a no-go when electricity prices keep going up up up.
13 replies →
> with some small number of notable exceptions like helium
Helium is one of the not-exceptions. Helium gets trapped in the same pockets as natural gas and we get it by separating it, which is an energy-intensive process, which in turn means that we don't do it for the vast majority of natural gas that gets extracted. If energy was cheaper then it would be viable to separate more of it.
Pedantically speaking, a Farnsworth Fusor makes it from hydrogen and electricity. Not in useful quantities.
That's the well known fusion reactor design that can be built by motivated high school students. Basically just accelerates hydrogen ions towards the center of a low pressure chamber using an electric field. Dead end for fusion power, but it does fuse!
Right. It also makes it sound like they’re not using the Haber Bosch process… but then:
> Electrolyzers are located on-site. They use wind energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
> Additionally, nitrogen gas is directly harnessed from the atmosphere using an air-separation unit.
> Hydrogen and nitrogen are combined under pressure, resulting in carbon-free ammonia fertilizer.
That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me. So they’re just saying, rather than divert excess generation to a battery, you could instead build a micro H-B plant on site to produce ammonia.
I doubt this makes any sense in the grand scheme of things as you achieve major efficiencies at scale for chemical plants. Makes more sense to just electrify existing ammonia plants and ensure they use renewable electricity sources.
The green chemistry industry is full of penny-wise pound-foolish concepts like this and it drives me absolutely nuts.
From doing a bit of digging into this myself after hearing it being promoted on the radio, I both agree and disagree. Working through the $/acre for on-site produced ammonia using locally-generated electricity (I forget if I was looking at PV or Wind, doesn’t matter) the payback period was surprisingly quick, like 2 or 3 years. One of the big reasons is that you don’t actually need a very big system; you only need on-farm ammonia a few days a year but you have all year long to harvest and store enough for those few days.
7 replies →
>That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me.
Well, kinda. But Haber-Bosch uses an iron catalyst. This is cheap, but it requires very high temperatures and pressures. There has been some recent work on ruthenium catalysts (particularly a Japanese company Tsubame BHB) which are more expensive, but allow the reaction to proceed under milder conditions. A particular goal is to have smaller facilities which can then be colocated with power generation. So you are exchanging a higher fixed cost for hopefully lower variable costs. I don't know if that's actually what they're doing here, though.
1 reply →
It is literally the Haber-Bosch process, without question. The school actually calls it that in their own paper, https://cbsi-asabe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Harvesting..., because that is what it is.
I assume what confused the article is that ammonia plants often use natural gas, but that's purely as a convenient energy source and a source of hydrogen, so they cover both angles. But that isn't remotely a necessity.
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.
4 replies →
What if the Ammonia is used locally? Potentially, in that Minnesota farm.
It eliminates the need to connect the turbine to the grid.
Not to mention ammonia isn't the friendliest of chemicals and doesn't exactly beg for decentralized logistics.
I think, projects like these grew out of dunkelflaute moral panic regarding renewable energy. Meanwhile grid battery storage has becomes cheap enough to completely obliterate this concern.
And quite frankly, fertilizer needs in agriculture should be addressed by ecological means anyway. If we want to lower the impact of climate change, we need to get out of this "just throw more energy at it" technology mindset.
3 replies →
What I find funny is people that build machines that extract carbon from the atmosphere. None of the articles about it ever mention the energy cost in running the machine or howinell it could be scaled up to make a measurable difference.
But trees, for example, are 50% carbon, extracted from the atmosphere. And they're solar powered! And look nice.
5 replies →
The whole article is trash.
Every sentence its own paragraph.
Every second word bold.
Who writes like that?
Is this some kind of stupid SEO/AI crawler optimization?
Reads like a hallucinated writeup to me.
Just wait until you hear about the underwater turbine that can do far more than generate electricity!
https://energiesmedia.com/texas-turbine-under-water-more-tha...
Thanks. Ugh, now I feel bad for wasting time on this AI-generated slop.
Which is why I always advocate that countries should generate energy in abundance. You should have energy to waste. If you are burning fossil fuels, that should be considered a failure mode. Fossil fuels should be bottom of the barrel stuff, what you burn when you have no other options.
Otherwise, do whatever. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear. Do everything. Do batteries. Do geothermal. Have so much energy you can waste on silly things. Diversity is good here.
> What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium)
You're saying freshwater shortage is really just an energy shortage?
Yes, absolutely. Look at places like Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East that run on desalinization plants. It's energy, all the way down.
3 replies →
Unless you're in the middle of the Atacama or on the moon or something, yes.
1 reply →
With desalinization, in most places that is the case.
2 replies →
We have near perfect processes for saltwater filtering.
Are you saying it isn’t?
> No, it doesn't.
Also it doesn’t need to, wind energy was used to produce things before electricity was harnessed in the first place.
Sailboats are harnessed wind energy and some 10kY old. Windmills and wind pumps were invented some time between 700 and 900.
> This process is extremely heat-intensive and accounts for up to 2% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
> While it is highly unsustainable, it has doubled the Earth’s food-carrying capacity and still feeds almost 50% of the population.
2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What?
> The key is to create synthetic ammonia fertilizer by combining atmospheric nitrogen with natural gas or coal.
> Synthetic fertilizer is traditionally created in chemical plants that require continuous, high-volume power. This is why producers remain reliant on fossil fuel-powered grids.
What, again? Haber-Bosch process requires continuous power doesn't mean it's natural gas or coal. Where is nuclear? Is solar/wind disrupt that much that it can't compress/heat up some gas??
> 2% greenhouse gas emissions to feed 50% population is unsustainable? What?
Eventually you cook everybody and the population drops to 0. We want to maintain the "feed everybody" aspect while eliminating the "continually add excess carbon to the atmosphere and render the planet uninhabitable" aspect.
Haber-Bosch require continuous input of hydrogen, but aside from that it is a net source of power. The reaction is exothermic and can provide more than enough work to drive compressors that pressurize the reactants.
TIL the Red Pyramid looks remarkably like the Haber-Bosch ammonia production process. And the word "Amun" is the etymological root of the word Ammonia.
From "Brawndo Plasma Thermos Makes What Plants Crave [video]" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793495 about hot plasma treatment turning water into fertilizer;
> [Magnesium-doped geotextile water bags yield Struvite fertilizer (at lower cost but with Pb contamination risk)]
Is that true in practice or just in theory?
1 reply →
Once wind and solar is routinely overproducing what the grid and grid storage can consume, lots of things like this start to become economic. Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas to help manage seasonal fluctuations in demand (e.g. windless winter nights) since gas is cheap to store for long periods.
It's even possible to synthesize airline fuel this way - https://syntholene.com/
Some will criticize renewable energy because the power output is spiky. This sort of thing is why that doesn't matter. There are plenty of things you can do with excess power. There's been research in manufacturing gasoline from the air. It's not economical to do for its own sake but when we're talking about excess power, that's not really a factor. Fertilizer is a new one (to me). But it makes sense. You'll still need phosphorus (phosphate) from somewhere.
Sadly I suspect crypto mining may be more profitable
A loop where solar is converted to fertiliser using similar process , probably generating hydrogen as a side effect with some mechanism to probably capture some carbon for economically useful use when it reaches say an LCOE of 0.01 $/kwh and done on mind boggling scale might actually be the holy grail solution to a lot of problems at the same time. Might need quite a few breakthroughs in the material science scheme of things though. There are good reasons why hydrogen has never really taken off by itself even with so much scale, innovation thrown at it so far. The best hope is China doing to hydrogen now what it did to solar in 2010s.
I work with a company that produces ammonia from local waste streams. The current policies and war has really hurt farmers. Certain fertilizers and other inputs have more than doubled in price, if they can even be found anymore.
Sounds like an opportunity to scale up your business. If the competition suddenly gets expensive that is a market opportunity.
Of course it's never that simple. If the war ends tomorrow and fertilizer prices drop back to normal over the course of the next two years an expansion could find itself uncompetitive just as its coming online.
We are expanding and we’ve ensured our loyal customers remain supplied! Because of our waste processing ability I’m not worried about competition, it’s a fundamentally different value prop than Haber Bosch.
the talk about "electricity can do things" misses whats actually interesting here. Working in the energy sector, the hard problem is rarely generating the power, it is getting it into the grid. connection queue runs for years and turbines regularly get curtailed when the grid c anncot absorb more. A flexible load behind the meter, like an electrolyzer making ammonia on site, monetizes energy that would otherwise be wasted or never get built at all. The fertilizer is almost a side effect, the real product is a use for stranded wind. i would also add that wind + battery would be much better both for stablization and also the same use as mentioned in the article.
A nice thing about the fertilizer is that it is only needed for a few weeks out of the year, which means it can be produced intermittently and stored without causing problems. If there are two weeks of non-production due to weather that isn't an issue so long as it averages out over the year. One could imagine a plant that only runs when the electricity is almost free.
Well, the problem of storage blew up Beirut. I wouldn't say it isn't a problem. It's manageable if you pay attention to storage conditions which they didn't for several years.
yeah and imagine you store the unregulated energy source in a battery so you can use it whenever you want OR you could also help stabilize the grid and or sell your energy from the battery if you want. wind + battery will become very popular in the comming years and is already being highly adopted in countries like spain
you guys made the case better in 2 comments - the original article is bloated and misses these key aspects.
I read that article. I don't know why. It was a difficult read.
Nearly every sentence has a bold-face phrase. There are no paragraphs, only sentences. It is borderline incoherent and very off-putting.
That style article needs to eliminated. Surely there is a better information source for this site and process than this online rag.
It's AI-generated dog shit, and I feel bad for getting roped in by it. Another commenter noticed there is another article on that site that's almost identical despite being about a different topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049204
Kinda looks like a low-quality executive summary of a longer text. I agree, it's garbage.
Thought about something similar a few months ago, love seeing it in action. The article was terrible however, dunno why every other sentence is bold. Genuenly feels like I'm reading a middle schooler trying to fulfill a word usage/sentience structure quota.
Found this cool PBS video on the Western Minnesota researchers working on this. If you'd like to ingest this info in the form of a nine-minute PBS piece, here you go: https://pbswisconsin.org/watch/prairie-sportsman/fertilizer-...
I would prefer to have figures how this compares to the traditional Haber-Bosch-process, how much energy is put into this, and how much fertilizer do we get for it, if it's just a PoC without evaluation of how much energy is used. in this whole process we got nothing NB: to beat Haber-Bosch you don't need much. it isn't only about the produced carbon dioxide
This setup uses the Haber-Bosch process. It’s different because it’s not tied to the grid (it’s not actually different at all)
To make sense, this has to compete with the cost and value of battery storage. That depends on location and energy and fertilizer needs at that location. So I guess it's possible that the cost makes sense, but it doesn't seem very likely compared to the ever falling cost of battery storage.
In other news, wind mills have been used to produce lots of other things that require electricity.
As well as tons of other things without electricity involved at all! Don Quixote was never in fear of being electrocuted.
In other news, no whales were bothered by this windmill, either.
[flagged]
We need to hurry and kill this tech before environmentalists try to make other fertilizers illegal and cause mass famine.