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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @02:00PM
Reminds me of my senior design project: we had numerous alternative reactions available for one critical stage of our process but threw most of them out over things like "takes 34 hours to make 1 kilogram of product."