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from the good-thing-it's-all-around-us dept.
A nifty move with nitrogen has brought the world one step closer to creating a range of useful products—from dyes to pharmaceuticals—out of thin air.
The discovery comes from a team of Yale chemists who found a way to combine atmospheric nitrogen with benzene to make a chemical compound called aniline, which is a precursor to materials used to make an assortment of synthetic products.
[...] Holland said previous attempts by other researchers to combine atmospheric nitrogen and benzene failed. Those attempts used highly reactive derivatives of benzene that would degrade before they could produce a chemical reaction with nitrogen.
Holland and his colleagues used an iron compound to break down one of the chemical bonds in benzene. They also treated the nitrogen with a silicon compound that allowed the nitrogen to combine with benzene.
Journal Reference:
Sean F. McWilliams et al. Coupling dinitrogen and hydrocarbons through aryl migration, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2565-5
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:24PM (1 child)
The immediate use I can think of for this is nitrogen-containing fertilizers, and we are in serious need of these as the soils deplete. There are nitrogen-fixing plants (in symbiosis with bacteria) that do this, but I never expected to see a non-biological process; the problem is that nitrogen molecules, N2, are triple-bonded and therefore *extremely* stable, so breaking that bond to produce nitrates and such requires a lot of energy.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @02:21AM
A large chunk of Nitrogen fertilizer is Ammonium Nitrate and Urea. Urea is harvested from many places. However, most of the Ammonium Nitrate is artificially generated, thanks to Haber and another process that slips my memory. If possible, you order it as straight product (CAN) because that includes the lime for your fields too and is much cheaper than the purified stuff separately.