Look ma, no Haber-Bosch Process! In the latest bid to greenify ammonia production, researchers at Stanford University and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals have come up with a portable device to produce ammonia wherever it's needed by simply using air at room temperature and standard atmospheric pressure.
If the team can commercialize this breakthrough worldwide, it could have a huge impact on the planet. Ammonia is plenty useful as a fertilizer ingredient and a means of energy storage, but its production currently accounts for around 2% of energy consumption around the globe. The aforementioned Haber-Bosch process, which is the most widely used method for making ammonia with high temperature and high pressure, uses fossil fuels and contributes about 1.2% of all carbon dioxide emissions.
In a paper published last week in Science Advances, the researchers detailed how their device worked to produce ammonia outside of a lab setting. As wind blew air through a mesh coated with catalysts to extract nitrogen and hydrogen from water vapor, the device produced enough ammonia with a sufficiently high concentration for use as a hydroponic fertilizer – all without the need for additional electricity or radiation.
Describing the impact of this innovation, Stanford professor Richard Zare (who was the senior author on this study) said, "it’s a significant step toward a decentralized and eco-friendly approach to agriculture.” Indeed, this method will not only reduce emissions during production, but if it scales to meet farmers' needs locally, it could also negate the need to store and ship ammonia – lowering the compound's carbon footprint. The process itself is also said to be inexpensive.
Zare has been working on eco-friendly ammonia production processes for a few years now. A big part of this new production method is the catalyst mesh the team developed. It's composed of magnetite and Nafion polymer. Once air passes through this catalyst-coated mesh, microdroplets of atmospheric water vapor and nitrogen from said air combine to form ammonia in usable concentrations within as little as an hour.
According to the researchers, they're still two to three years from bringing their production method to the market. There's scope to scale up ammonia production in the process, by further increasing the size of the mesh in the device, and coupling it with a microporous stone filter.
"Green ammonia represents a new frontier in sustainability," Zare noted. "This method, if it can be scaled up economically, could drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels across multiple sectors.” Between this, and other efforts to clean up ammonia production, it looks like we could make a dent in both the associated enormous figures of emissions and energy consumption in the next few years.
Source: Stanford