This morning on the Today Show, Exhibit Z in Another Version of "Why this country is such a mess" was shown, in the form of a suburban family of consumers who were asked to "do with less" for a week. Pedicures, manicures, the lawn service, going out for meals, and even the expensive Starbucks beverages were zipped out for a week. They saved $660 versus "normal", and then came the "I had no idea" phrase got uttered by the Ms.
Actually, she has not even seen the tip of the iceberg, the melting one. I pride myself on having a bit of a thick skin to such banalities....such illusions don't work that well in our cities, or at least a lot of parts of them, the "City of No Illusions" parts. Maybe I was vulnerable from lack of coffee (home-brewed)...it just struck me as being very symptomatic of....things that we need to improve upon. No, not the ignorance of the world and how we spend our money - we're doing fine in that category - ignorance aplenty. Way more....
Oh well, we can all afford to learn more...it is rumored that learning is supposed to be a lifelong process. One of my pet peeves is how supposedly smart people keep coming up with the "we're running out of water" or "we're running out of (nitrogen) fertilizer" or "we're running out of natural gas or coal to make nitrogen fertilizers"...Are these people brain dead, or are they just too numbed out by repeated exposure to the Today Show in caffeine deficit mode? Question, questions, questions.....
So, here goes....a Basic Chemistry learning experience. Ammonia has the formula:
NH3
That's one atom of nitrogen couple to three atoms of hydrogen. Notice: No carbon atoms there. So why are hydrocarbons needed to make NH3....? It probably has something to do with cheapness, and how hydrocarbons can be "strip-mined" of their hydrogen, especially methane (natural gas) which has the highest ratio of hydrogen to carbon. Of course, what happens when natural gas isn't so cheap anymore, and in fact, is getting as expensive as oil? And what about the byproduct, the CO2 air pollution?
Actually, the way that CH4 is used to make NH3 also involves water, and it goes something like this:
CH4 + H2O + 1/2 O2 ---> CO2 + 3 H2
It takes about 33.5 MBtu worth of CH4 (or 1491 lbs) to make 2000 lbs of NH3. It turns out that about 1.6 times as much methane is needed using the water shift reaction to make the hydrogen for ammonia - the rest is energy used to power this reaction to make purified hydrogen, and then react nitrogen from the air with the hydrogen to make NH3. That's because in a ton of NH3 there would be 353 lbs of hydrogen, but using 1491 lbs of CH4 in the water shift reaction makes 558 lbs of hydrogen. Obviously, part of the H made is converted back into water, releasing more energy. And also 4100 lbs of CO2 air pollutant.....
Maybe it's time to go with the ultimate cheapie, coal? Well, coal has tripled in price in that last 9 months, at least on the east coast, and much more CO2 is made per ton of ammonia made when coal is the raw material. Odds are, as oil and Ngas get scarcer, coal prices will become thermally equivalent, and monetarily equivalent. Plus, there is either sequestration or air pollution taxes that will need to be imposed, as sequestration, if even possible, won't work on a voluntary basis, and it is also anything but cheap.
And, at one time, we were all told that fertilizer prices nearing $1000/ton would make food....not affordable. Well, it turns out that at such a price for ammonia, the ammonia cost to make corn is about 67 cents/bushel, or about 1.2 cents/lb, versus about 0.6 c/lb back in the halcyon days of $500/ton ammonia. Since corn is now something like more than 12 c/lb in bulk, I'd say ammonia is not the main culprit in the corn price increases. It's a small one, that's all.
The thing is, there are other ways of making the hydrogen that is needed to make ammonia, and we all keep harping on using some of this nation's bounty of wind energy to do this. After all, ammonia was made with hydropower derived electricity for over 80 years, and that practice was only stopped because methane was so amazingly cheap - at one time, 50 cents/MBtu (it's now about $13/MBtu when in bulk, not including delivery). That's up by a factor of 26 in the space of 20 years, and it looks poised to double again by next year......
For example, it takes about 50 MW-hrs or less of delivered electricity to make a ton of hydrogen. If all of the 17 million tons/yr of ammonia (14 million for fertilizer) used each year in this country were made with electricity,we would need 3 million tons of H2 to do this. That would take 150 million MW-hrs of electricity each year, or an average of 17,120 MW of electricity (17.12 GW's), or about the average amount of electricity 49 GW of wind turbine capacity at an average of 35% output, or about 20,000 worth of 2.5 MW wind turbines. Granted, $200/ton NH3 will not come about from wind turbine derived ammonia, but those days are long gone for any ammonia, no matter what its source of energy/hydrogen (like coal). And besides, the customers for this food are unlikely to see this difference, anyway, since pricing a scarce commodity (like food) is on the basis of how much can be obtained, and not what it costs plus a decent profit. These days, its an obscene profit for someone in the food chain, and most likely, not farmers...
This week, came an announcement that an ammonia factory in Mississippi (400,000 tons/yr capacity) was going to start up. They will be using really pricey methane - probably $14 to $15/MBtu - to run this; ironic, because Terra shut it down with Ngas at $7/MBtu or less, put out of business by imports from countries like Trinidad and Russia with really cheap "stranded" Ngas derived NH3. This might ease this fall's ammonia price rise a bit, but that comes at the expense of natural gas that can't be used to heat millions of people's homes, since it went out the stacks at the ammonia factory. Or maybe Terra will just be cashing in on the bonanza of high food prices in spite of record or near record production, in this country or elsewhere.
How did Ben Franklin put it...."An ounce of Prevention weighs more than a pound of cure"....or something like that. Anyway, some planning with regards to renewable ammonia production would do wonders to ease the pricing grief headed our way in the near future, say, the next decade. So would nice policies and politics, but that may have to wait a few months. Easing back on the consumption rate of methane in the U.S. is in everybody's interest, and substituting coal for Ngas usage is like watching endless re-runs of "Dumb and Dumber", since that also will not provide for stable hydrogen and stable ammonia prices, especially once coal starts getting pricey to get and use. Only renewables can do that at minimal risk, and at a cost of huge increases in the number of people employed in manufacturing and construction jobs related to wind turbines. Aw shucks, can't have that, now, can we?