He's Creating A New Fuel Out Of Thin Air -- For 85 Cents Per Gallon

[NNadir]

23. I see you commented along similar lines above. The biggest issue I see with Haber-Bosch...

...as a huge industrial process - even without the scale up to make ammonia for cars, which must not be allowed to take place - is, in fact, nitrogen oxides, specifically nitrous oxide, N2O.

Your point is equally as important as mine, nitrogen oxides, an inevitable consequence of the distribution of ammonia based chemicals.

By the end of this century, the accumulation of this gas, N2O, in the atmosphere - it's rising fairly rapidly - is going to displace CFC's as the primary source of ozone depletion. Like the CFC's, it's also a climate forcing gas, but that's not the worst of it.

Since the early 20th century we have greatly shifted the nitrogen equilibrium on this planet as a whole. While the issues are broadly discussed in the primary scientific literature, they have not yet made it widely into public consciousness like, say, climate change has.

One could imagine easily, were ammonia to become a common fuel item - perish the thought - a huge political denial lobby being formed to announce that ammonia deaths, destruction of the ozone layer, destruction of almost all the fresh water supplies on earth, etc, etc, etc, are not worth the economic cost of shifting away from it.

This is rather the same thing we see with dangerous fossil fuels today, of course.

It's been a very long time since I was in the lab, by the way, but I certainly recall the risks of liquid ammonia, with which the lab in which I was working, was using on a small pilot scale. It was nothing exotic, simple sodium amide stuff. We had those (glass) reactors in a walk-in hood, and lots of acid traps in the line. Even so it was still very scary in a sense; not as scary as other liquified gases like phosgene - and less scary than HF - but still worthy of lots of respect for the danger.

I once had some guys working for me screw up with liquid HF. They weren't injured but came to my office to ask me what they should do. Liquid HF was spilled all over the hood - but since I had obviously failed to train them sufficiently (although I was relatively new in my position) I made them all leave the lab, and cleaned up the mess myself. That was the most frightening chemical event of my life. It was twenty or thirty gram quantities, maybe a little more, fuming, and I suited up (in record time), even though it was in the hood. I imagine though, that a broken reactor with a few kilos of liquid ammonia spilling out, might have been worse. It's easy to neutralize HF with excess calcium carbonate; but with ammonia, one has to have a sense of the stoichiometry, since strong acids are themselves corrosive and somewhat dangerous.

I really hope this scheme goes nowhere.