BRANDON – The air we breathe is 78 percent nitrogen.
Wind, which is nothing more than moving air, can generate electricity to extract hydrogen from water. Marry free hydrogen to free nitrogen and the result is free anhydrous ammonia.
Well, almost free. The cost of the equipment to create the product has to be considered, although it can be amortized over time.
Still, harnessing the air can give farmers a cheap source of fuel in hydrogen and a cheap source of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, according to Mike Reese, renewable energy director at the University of Minnesota at Morris.
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He said the technology to convert air into anhydrous ammonia has been available since 1909, when a hydro electric plant in Norway used electricity to create anhydrous ammonia fertilizer out of water and air.
Reese said the North American fertilizer industry views anhydrous ammonia as a product of fossil fuel. Manufacturers here are slow to accept that it can be locally produced without natural gas.
Reese said anyone with access to water and wind can produce anhydrous ammonia.
“The world already has a well-developed infrastructure for handling, storing and transporting NH3 to the farm site, and farmers have excellent systems for putting it into the ground to grow crops, but from our point of view, the system is backwards,” he said.
“We should be producing low-cost anhydrous ammonia on the North American continent and exporting it to users elsewhere. All those massive storage facilities at the ports should be geared for export.”
Worldwide production and consumption of ammonia is more than 150 million tonnes with 82 percent sold as fertilizer, according to international energy giant Halliburton.
Anhydrous ammonia is in demand around the world and prices have reflected the supply and the high underlying energy cost required for its production.
Demand for ammonia fertilizer is expected to increase as the world’s population increases and world food requirements grow.
Reese said most of North America’s storage is at port. It handles imports from low-cost producing regions and some exports. Little mass storage is located near farms. That can be a positive, if the system flowed in the other direction.
If smaller scale, decentralized production was developed at a farm or on a regional scale from renewable sources, it would create new economic realities for North American agriculture.
Producers would have access to cheaper nitrogen fertilizer not tied as tightly to global energy and fertilizer prices. Farmers would also see lower transportation costs because anhydrous ammonia would not be imported from off shore.
Reese’s research is examining farm scale production of hydrogen and ammonia.
He said locally produced anhydrous ammonia made with green power from the wind depends on the general acceptance of hydrogen as fuel for transportation in all sectors.
For that to happen, North America needs enough hydrogen-fueled cars, trucks, railways, ships and heavy machinery to give hydrogen a commercial value.
Once hydrogen has that value, wind and sun can produce it at a low material cost.
Bob Piere of North Dakota State University is working to make hydrogen fuel a reality for farm equipment. He hopes his research leads to a 90 percent hydrogen-10 percent diesel internal combustion engine machine.
Engineers at universities in North Dakota, Utah and Europe are connecting the dots between wind, solar and farm generated energy.
The next step is low-cost anhydrous ammonia.
Reese said local plants producing hydrogen and anhydrous would spring up quickly in states like Minnesota, where co-operatives are major suppliers of electricity and farm inputs.
“If we can speed up the development and acceptance of hydrogen so it’s produced in rural areas, then agriculture can produce its own hydrogen fuel for machinery,” he said.
NDSU is powering an Agco Challenger tractor with hydrogen on university fields this summer, and in Europe a nearly silent tractor is powered exclusively by a hydrogen-fed fuel cell. The New Holland 106 horsepower tractor’s only other output beyond energy is water.
New Holland also feels locally produced hydrogen may be the way forward for long-term farm sustainability.
This futuristic sounding hydrogen-powered economy may not be as far off as it seems. Allis-Chalmers tested the first commercial tractor powered by hydrogen in 1959, as well as a fuel-cell-powered machine.
Reese said farmers may hold the keys to developing future solutions for two of their largest input costs.
“Once we produce our own hydrogen fuel, next we produce our own anhydrous ammonia locally rather than buy it offshore or from sources thousands of miles away. We may want to go back to 28 percent nitrogen, because it’s cheaper to store, but the technology to do all this is here today.”
Reese said the basic equipment used to make anhydrous ammonia is employed in NASCAR stock car race pits every weekend.
“NASCAR teams use nitrogen in their tires instead of atmospheric air. Our atmospheric air is comprised of 78 percent nitrogen, so all you have to do is grab it.
“The NASCAR teams have their own air separation units right on site in the pits. They just grab nitrogen from the air. It’s not a big deal.”
He said anhydrous ammonia is created by combining hydrogen molecules with nitrogen molecules. The resulting compound has one hydrogen molecule and three nitrogen molecules.
In the ideal scenario, this cheap hydrogen is removed from water with electricity generated by wind or solar panels. The nitrogen is taken from the air with a NASCAR-style air separation device.
Reese said the first patents on the technology were issued in 1909, a century ago.
“In the early 1900s, the global demand for nitrogen fertilizer outpaced the supply of organic N sources. That’s what prompted the development of anhydrous ammonia as a fertilizer,” he said.
“Governments, researchers and industry people of the day realized they needed a form of synthetic fertilizer. Norway naturally took the lead because their abundance of hydro-electric power gave them the opportunity to create the necessary hydrogen.”
When natural gas became abundant and cheap, the world turned to this new energy source as the basis for anhydrous ammonia. Reese thinks a lot of people believe natural gas is an essential element in producing anhydrous ammonia fertilizer.
“It’s not. You do not need natural gas to produce anhydrous ammonia. And now that natural gas has become expensive, the world is waking up to the need for a clean, renewable energy source for fertilizer production. This is something that could be done using wind and in agricultural communities.”
While wind generated hydrogen meets the criteria as a green power source, Reese said safety is a concern.
“Hydrogen has an explosive flash point ranging from four percent volume to 90 percent volume. It’s a very wide, wide range.
“If you have only four percent hydrogen in a room along with normal oxygen levels, and then you add a spark, the statistical probability of the hydrogen igniting is one. Probability of one means that it’s a certainty. It will ignite.”
NDSU feels the issues surrounding handling and storing hydrogen can be dealt with for farm use because producers have decades of experience with ammonia and propane.
Reese said gasoline is also dangerous, but society has learned to manage the risk to the extent that nobody questions the safety of gasoline-powered cars.
If gasoline was coming to market today for the first time, it too might raise a lot of safety concerns.
For more information, visit renewables.morris.umn.edu/, www.ndsu.nodak.edu, www.newholland.com/.
