Comment by richardc323
3 days ago
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.
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...
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.
Yes, the Green Revolution. I agree it's not black and white, which may well be an ironic turn of phrase.
The "organic" designation does not preclude using artificial fertilizer. Just no pesticides.
It depends who's definition of organic you are using. Demeter and Biogro, which are the certifications I am familiar with prohibit most conventional artificial fertilisers.
Demeter is full of superstitious quackery.
> It is better than getting fertiliser from fossil fuels, but it is still not great.
Please explain how there is anything even remotely bad about it.
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.
("Reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming" > [1] "Production of hydrogen and carbon nanotubes from methane using a multi-pass floating catalyst chemical vapour deposition reactor with process gas recycling" (2025)zahlman
2 days ago
> 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.
How does electricity from solar PV ever make any CO2 whatsoever under any circumstances (never mind, somehow more than natural gas)?
2 replies →
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:
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.
"We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia"
I seriously doubt that. Using natural gas to make ammonia is cost effective even if natural gas prices go up by a lot...and by that I mean they could go up 10x and it still makes sense. Its a really, really efficient industrial process.
Turns out the article is on the Ammonia Energy Association website, wake up Richard.
There are two camps: people who are fans of Haber Bosch because it feeds most of humanity, and absolute psychopaths.
That is a bit extreme. Wanting to preserve the environment isn't the same as wanting to let everyone starve, it's quite the opposite. Spend a minute or two looking up soil erosion, and extrapolate 100 years.