The Nitrogen Problem

[NNadir]

16. Spark fixation of nitrogen was never a viable process.

It never will be a viable process.

Your history is also wrong, very wrong.

The Haber-Bosch process was fully industrialized in Germany by the time of the First World War. If Germany had depended on electrolytically fixed nitrogen, it would have lost the war within six months, because it was not, is not, and never will be economic. At the time, most of the world's nitrates were supplied by Chilean mines; the British naval blockade was designed to deplete Germany's access to fixed nitrogen as much as anything else.

The tale of the development of the Haber Bosch process is told beautifully and with the great sophistication that is his wont, by Vaclav Smil, one of the world's most important and knowledgeable thinkers on the subject of sustainability - although he is not prone to tell people what they want to hear - in his book, Enriching the Earth.

Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of the process; even though many people wanted him tried as a war criminal:

Haber is also famous for having been the initiator of gas warfare in the First World War. He was a rabid German nationalist, who was, ironically, expelled from Germany in 1938 because of his Jewish heritage, and died in Switzerland.

Smil's book is often cited in scientific papers on the subject of dinitrogen fixation through catalysis; I personally became aware of Smil's famous and much cited work when he was cited in this paper on the subject of zirconium catalysts designed to avoid some of the energy requirements of the Haber Bosch process, which currently consumes about 1% of the world energy supply. (Fixing nitrogen on the order of the hundred million tons now produced each year by a spark process would easily deplete the world's electricity supply.)

The real problem with nitrogen fixation is not that we need energy to make it or that it is difficult to achieve, now that we live in the Golden Age of Chemistry, notably catalysis. The real problem is that artificial nitrogen fixation is increasing the concentration of nitrous oxide, N₂, in the atmosphere, a gas that is both a powerful ozone depleting agent, and a potent greenhouse gas, now being the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane.

Nitrous Oxide (N2O): The Dominant Ozone-Depleting Substance Emitted in the 21st Century (A. R. Ravishankara*, John S. Daniel, Robert W. Portmann, Science 02 Oct 2009: Vol. 326, Issue 5949, pp. 123-125)

No one has come up with a way to ban food, however, and there is no way in hell we could feed the world's current population without Haber Bosch nitrogen. One reason that China was willing to establish relations with the United States during the Nixon administration was that China (at the time) needed American technology to establish its own Haber Bosch plants.