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].
(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.
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