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posted by martyb on Monday February 13 2017, @12:18PM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @04:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @04:06PM (#466629)

    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.