Haber Process Alternatives?

Delta Force

Banned
How does nitrogen derived from natural guano and nitratine deposits and alternative chemical processes compare to the Haber Process?

Also, how much electricity does the Haber Process require compared to alternative technologies? Apparently that was a large issue with some of the alternative technologies, but the Haber Process still seems to consume a significant amount of electricity. For example, it takes 12 MWh of hydroelectricity to produce a ton of ammonia using the Haber Process with electrolysis vs. 15 MWh of electricity to produce a ton of nitric acid using the Birkeland–Eyde process, and ammonia is a precursor product to nitric acid.
 
The problem is that natural nitrate deposits are relatively limited, especially in geographic distribution. Once you start getting the industrial scale use of nitrates in fertilizer and weapons and plastics, the natural product is just not enough.

Besides, for Germany at war, they were totally cut off from nitrate imports, so the Haber process was a god-send.

As for electricity consumption, you don't get hydrogen from electrolysis for industrial purposes, so that figure is irrelevant.
 

Insider

Banned
As Thorfinnsson mentioned, they used first coal gas, and natural gas latter as a source of Hydrogen.
 
Nitrogen from natural deposits is peachy-keen, but as Dathi Thorfinnson points out, those deposits are quite limited. And, on top of that, guano harvesting is devastating to the usually fairly fragile ecologies of the small, isolated islands that tend to accumulate it.

There are some other minerals that work well for manufacture of ammonia - in particular, sal ammoniac - but, again, we run into the problem of deposits that have limited size and often inconvenient location - for example, one of the larger reserves of sal ammoniac is located in Tajikistan. Like many minerals, sal ammoniac isn't rare per se, as it can be found near most volcanoes, but deposits that are large enough and pure enough to be economical are.

The Haber Process is super convenient. The ingredients - nitrogen and hydrogen - are almost universally available (most factories use natural-gas derived hydrogen, but with even more electricity input, water could do the trick through electrolysis). Where electricity is cheap - which is, more or less, everywhere, depending on the definition of "cheap" - Haber ammonium is awfully handy. Plus, you can build the factory wherever you like, removing the need to ship tons and tons of rock or guano to a processing plant, or build the processing plant in some god-forsaken place and then still ship the tons of ammonia to your transport network somehow.

As far as I'm aware, there aren't really any "alternative processes" for fixing atmospheric nitrogen on an industrial scale. I mean, there are some weird little reactions that predate Haber, but the Haber process is efficient, cheap, and clean, and requires and creates nothing poisonous that needs to be handled with care or disposed of properly.

One idea would be to try and make bioreactors using nitrogen fixing bacteria, like those found in the roots of certain plants, but I suspect that this is somehow unfeasible or it would have been done by now. But who knows? Especially with modern genetic technologies...

Another thing that could help is attempting to recover ammonia from wastewater. Probably the biggest use of ammonia today is in fertilizer, and plants aren't so efficient at taking it up, leading to vast amounts of ammonia in runoff from agriculture. This is terrible for the environment, leading to algal blooms and whatnot, but also represents a major source of waste. Unfortunately, I can't think of any good way to recover that aside from distillation, since ammonia has physical properties quite similar to water and ammonium is a very soluble ion. And while I don't know if distilling ammonia from water is more expensive than production by Haber, it would still take a lot of energy. Plus, we're talking neutral ammonia (very toxic) and not ammonium salts (much less so), so the plant would be pretty dangerous and probably subject to NIMBYism by nearby farmers.
 

Delta Force

Banned
As Thorfinnsson mentioned, they used first coal gas, and natural gas latter as a source of Hydrogen.

There were several major ammonia production sites at hydroelectric facilities, including Vermork. Pipeline infrastructure wasn't well developed in most countries until the 1980s and largely reserved for heating, so natural gas might not have been available for large scale industrial use. Some cities in the United States were still using coal gas into the 1960s.
 
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