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posted by
martyb
on Monday February 13 2017, @12:18PM
from the when-you-REALLY-want-to-clear-your-sinuses dept.
from the when-you-REALLY-want-to-clear-your-sinuses dept.
https://unews.utah.edu/ammonia/
Nearly a century ago, German chemist Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a process to generate ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gases. The process, still in use today, ushered in a revolution in agriculture, but now consumes around one percent of the world's energy to achieve the high pressures and temperatures that drive the chemical reactions to produce ammonia.
Today, University of Utah chemists publish a different method, using enzymes derived from nature, that generates ammonia at room temperature. As a bonus, the reaction generates a small electrical current. The method is published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition [DOI: 10.1002/anie.201612500] [DX].
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New Ammonia Production Method Generates Electricity
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You can't have your cake and let your neighbor eat it too.
-- Ayn Rand
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @12:51PM
Needs ATP. 26% Faradaic efficiency. Lame.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Monday February 13 2017, @01:14PM
What does this mean? It seems informative, in a way, but I can't quite understand how Adenosine Triphosphate makes a reaction lame.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @01:19PM
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/IPod [wikiquote.org]
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod [slashdot.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday February 13 2017, @01:31PM
Aside from the obvious ipod comment the deal is you can convert some rather expensive enzymes and energetically expensive ATP into a small low efficiency electric current and some ammonia.
You can't cheat mother nature so it still costs great piles of energy to make ammonia its just abstracted to far away from where the reaction happens. The old process is you use really cheap stuff and great steaming piles of energy at the point where the reaction happens. So its kinda the opposite of the old process in a way.
Its not a replacement for bulk production but it might have weird side uses. For example plants need nitrogen mostly constantly and the idea of putting a full scale Haber plant at the end of each row of corn or over each weed plant is pretty ridiculous but this is "well sorta maybe" so if this is 50% more expensive energetically but old fashioned ammonia is less than 75% efficient then I guess the new thing wins. Plus the small amount of generated energy could cooperate with solar power to make some kind of internet-of-dumb-things network that monitors the plants 24x7. Think of it like drip irrigation but for fertilizer, or N fertilizer anyway, not a mere source of individualized water.
Or maybe it'll fail who knows.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @03:32PM
The very defining property of enzymes is that they are not consumed by the process. They are not converted or used up. Think of them as machines.
About the ATP, yes that certainly gets used up. It's basically how cells transfer energy to their processes. However the question is how the energy going into ATP production compares to the energy put into the Haber process.
The actual process is exothermic [nawabi.de] so any energy you put in is purely energy required to make the process happen, not energy you actually need for the reaction itself to happen (or rather, to happen fast enough). So you don't need to "cheat mother nature".
Since you already proved your uninformedness, why should I believe you in this case? I have no idea whether this process may be suitable for bulk production, but I don't see a fundamental reason why not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @04:06PM
The actual process is exothermic [nawabi.de] so any energy you put in is purely energy required to make the process happen, not energy you actually need for the reaction itself to happen (or rather, to happen fast enough). So you don't need to "cheat mother nature".
Still need to spend energy to cool the reaction vessel, exothermic processes have a tendency to run away from you if you don't keep them cool. Even with cooling towers it still costs energy to drive the fans and pump the water.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @05:46PM
The actual process is exothermic so any energy you put in is purely energy required to make the process happen, not energy you actually need for the reaction itself to happen (or rather, to happen fast enough). So you don't need to "cheat mother nature".
So, basically they found a way to convert ATP to electricity with ammonia as side product... but that wouldn't have sound as awesome.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 14 2017, @01:56PM
The very defining property of enzymes is that they are not consumed by the process. They are not converted or used up. Think of them as machines
Thats extremely optimistic. Its like catalysts in a car catconv or at a refinery. To a first approximation if a reaction takes a tiny fraction of a second they never wear out, but in practice due to impurities and contamination blah blah you replace every decade or so.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 13 2017, @07:32PM
So, it's like the smug metrosexuals who are so proud of the electric buses in their city that "don't pollute."
Yeah man, totally pollution free - at your front door, but killing the planet overall twice as fast as a standard diesel model.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @01:39PM
We make ammonia so that we can have fixed nitrogen without having to grow nitrogen-fixing crops such as legumes or clover. ATP is an energy-rich biological molecule. It's been made artificially but not, AFAIK, on an industrial scale like we make hydrogen or nitrogen. Mostly it exists inside cells. If it would be made in a bio-reactor then it would be simpler to grow nitrogen-fixing bacteria in a bio-reactor, if they can be coaxed to do so. They're perfectly happy to grow in the roots of certain plants. Why isn't it better to do that? Because farmers want to grow a single crop year after year? Monocultures are lame.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 13 2017, @08:44PM
>Monocultures are lame!
Absolutely, they are an arrogance against nature, an ignorance of the big biological picture, and they're easy for accountants, investors, and commodities traders to understand - so, we've got lots of them because: money.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @10:45PM
I'm not quite a permaculturalist, but I definitely am no fan of monocultures. There are no monocultures on my farm, in fact.
That said, there are lots of valid, technical reasons why monocultures can make a lot of sense, given some limiting assumptions. Bear in mind that farming is really biological engineering; you're engaging in a design exercise with every choice you make for running your farm.
As for growing legumes for nitrogen, sure, you're right, that does work. However, it doesn't work to the same degree that other sources of nitrogen do. It's just one part of a bigger picture, and if you're trying to grow an astonishing amount of corn in one field over one season, you're not going to do it with a few clovers or soy plants. You're not even going to do it with manure knifed in, and clovers grown in that.
And that doesn't even touch on the mechanical efficiencies introduced by combine harvesters on monoculture fields. It's not even close, comparing that to a gang of skilled labourers harvesting an integrated crop.
I mean, I'm all there for changing farming practices, but while you're pushing your glasses up your nose, adjusting your fedora and sneering at monocultures, it helps to come up with concrete, alternative proposals that solve the very real design and engineering problems around farming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14 2017, @04:12AM
"it helps to come up with concrete, alternative proposals that solve the very real design and engineering problems around farming."
One example of a flexible system: https://farmbot.io/ [farmbot.io]
Another: http://openag.media.mit.edu/about/ [mit.edu]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_robot [wikipedia.org]
"Agricultural robots: Fields of automation"
http://www.economist.com/node/15048711 [economist.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14 2017, @04:15AM
https://remineralize.org/ [remineralize.org]
"REMINERALIZATION utilizes finely ground rock dust and sea-based
minerals to restore soils and forests, produce higher yields and more
nutritious food, and store carbon in soils to stabilize the climate."
It works for the same reason people risk volcanoes to grow lush crops near them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14 2017, @04:28AM
Why it works: https://www.elsevier.com/books/towards-holistic-agriculture/widdowson/978-0-08-034211-5 [elsevier.com]
Essentially, as "Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach" by R.W. Widdowson explained (in 1987!), soil rich in organic matter holds a diversity of nutrients, but when you pour a lot of ammonia on soil, the electrostatic charges change in the clay micelles and carbon equivalents and most nutrients are leached out of the soil and then lost. Then your crops suffer various diseases from micronutrient starvation -- similar to how most US Americans are suffering from micronutrient starvation from eating highly processes SAD foods i.e. as discussed by Dr. Joel Fuhrman).