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- Hacker News
- Cool, hope this is successful. I've commented previously about doing exactly this more as a form of alternative energy storage or just to use 'free' energy. Good to know I wasn't speaking completely out of my arse.by benj111
- I don't know about the US, but in the UK in times of high renewable production and low demand the electricity price goes negative. Sounds like a nice use for waste electricity, as well as your own renewables?
Would like to know the capex numbers though. Is it viable in todays market to have it stood idle?
by jimnotgym - I think this is a [dup] of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819by ajdude
- Good for Morris!
40 years ago I was exiting the US Air Force and selected the University of Minnesota at Morris as my college. It’s a tiny campus, they advertised themselves as a ‘small college, like a mini Ivy League school’.
I went, and enjoyed a semester there, but then fate intervened when my father died. I went home, got sidetracked a while and eventually returned to school at the University of Minnesota at Mankato, chosen because they had an active bowling team. ( I wanted to go pro, but later found out I probably wouldn’t make much money at it. Reality set in. )
by RickJWagner - Use Solar/Wind and convert it to green hydrogen or green ammonia. We've reached the limits of pumped hydro and batteries are not dirt cheap yet. Green hydrogen and ammonia solve multiple problems. Both are fossil fuel products now.
Hydrogen is corrosive and explosive, next to impossible to store/transport safely. Green Hydrogen for immediate consumption at industries that require high heat and electricity is not an option.
Green ammonia for fertilizer and as energy storage.
With abundant oversupply of solar, we can start building alternatives to all fossil fuels.
- So basically: wind generators power electrolysis to create hydrogen, the hydrogen is fed to a normal Haber-Bosch plant which is still powered by coal or gas. So basically the wind power is just replacing the carbon footprint of a single input (hydrogen) to a H-B plant?by umvi
- Why would the HB plant be powered with fossil fuels? You can power that with wind power as well.by WJW
- The only chemical inputs a Haber-Bosch plant needs are nitrogen and hydrogen. The nitrogen always comes from air and in this plant the hydrogen comes from electrolysis. The plant also needs electrical power to run compressors, but that can also be supplied by wind and it's minor compared to the embodied energy of the hydrogen input.by philipkglass
- For those trying to work out the economics.
1 ton of urea is apparently worth $451
I think I would need to know the capex cost to go any further, but my gut feel is this is really a technical demonstration rather than an instant goldmine.
by jimnotgym - You need about 50-55kwh to produce a kg of hydrogen.
Urea molar mass is 60. And the formula is CO(NH2)2. 4 moles of hydrogen per mole. So 6.6% hydrogen by weight.
1000kg of urea needs then 66.6kg of hydrogen. At 55khw per kg of hydrogen you need 3666 kwh per ton of urea. (not counting other energy inputs).
At $0.05/kwh that's $183 for the hydrogen input.
Worth mentioning the internet says fertilizer is about 7% of an average farm budget and only 1% of the cost of food at the store.
I'm on the side of sure no problem really when it comes to green nitrogen fertilizer.
by Gibbon1 - [dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819
- China operates a massive green hydrogen and ammonia facility in Chifeng, which is powered entirely by off-grid wind and solar. The site already produces 320,000 tonnes of green ammonia annually.
This is going to be the century of China...
In contrast, this Minnesotan plant aims to scale up to 300 tonnes a year some day.
by Alien1Being - Ammonia production is more-or-less a synonym for "hydrogen production" chemically. The NH3 formation happens at a high temperature and pressure, but it doesn't use a lot of energy. Technically, it's even energetically favorable, but with the enthalpy of just -46kJ/mol. For comparison, water is -300 kJ/mol.
In other words, to split 1 mole (18 grams) of water into constituent parts (molecular hydrogen and oxygen), you need to invest at least 300 kJ of energy. If you then use 1 mole of hydrogen to produce ammonia, you can get back 30 kJ of energy.
This is chemically pretty much the best case from the thermodynamic efficiency standpoint (especially when you also factor in the entropy changes) with almost zero potential waste.
The kicker is, of course, that you need extremely high temperature and pressure for the reaction to work. And this is just hard to do on small scale. But that's not a theoretical barrier, but "just" a question of clever engineering! It's great to hear that we're solving these issues.
by cyberax - There are press releases which link to other press releases. Found the technical paper from 2021.[1]
The ammonia plant is built for intermittent operation, so it can shut down or reduce output when there's no wind. No need to store much electrical energy. Storage tanks hold the ammonia. It's a reasonable idea, but is it cost-effective? No numbers are given. Still, fertilizer independence alone is worth something. You can do this anywhere with wind or sun.
by Animats - The catch is that the electrolyzer is most of the capex, so intermittency cuts both ways. Tanks are cheap, which makes flexibility nearly free on the storage side, but every hour the stack sits idle the hydrogen coming out of it gets more expensive. That is why these projects obsess over capacity factor and usually want a mix of wind and solar rather than wind alone. Agreed on wanting numbers, the whole question lives in how many hours per year the stack actually runs.
- The press release says they use the wind energy to produce hydrogen. Seems like you could store the hydrogen and always have the plant running at capacity as long as the average power produced by the wind turbine(s) was enough.by laughing_man
- Its trying to complete with making ammonia from natural gas. So probably not. Natural gas is priced as a waste product and the industrial process we use there is about 120 years old. So its just about the hardest target on the board to beat on price.by hunterpayne
- Perfect project for rural Minnesota, that needs the ammonia, but also has a surprising amount of solar colocated with farms. And a fair amount of wind in the southwest.
However there are far far larger projects going on over the world. China is building multiple GW of wind and solar to power a massive ammonia/green hydrogen site right now. I frequently hear of sites in Spain in the hundreds of MW range.
The US has been pivotal in the invention of these technologies, but hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests is preventing us from getting the benefits as quickly as we should.
by epistasis - I don't support fossil fuels but wind works a small fraction of the time, it is awful to wildlife and it is an eyesore.
Instead of wasting the already wasteful energy by making fertilizer out of air, these farms could likely much more efficiently re–capture runoff from their waterways that is now being dumped into the sea harming humans and wildlife alike.
by avadodin - Fossil fuels remain more cost effective.
The US isn't a centrally planned economy (sort of) so the more economical option wins.
by buckle8017 - > Spain in the hundreds of MW range.
Its got to the point where there is now so much solar, that during solar maximum, there is too much energy and plants are being told to turn off.
Natural gas was the main pricing predictor, but now that link has been pretty much severed. Given that spain is dependent on russian gas, its good that they are able to _try_ to lower their dependence.
by KaiserPro - > hyper-conservatism to protect fossil fuel interests
The #1 state, by far, in terms of solar, wind, and energy storage is Texas. There is likely no other state that is also as pro-fossil fuels as Texas. It's also a state known for its conservative stance on almost everything.
But the market doesn't care and it flourished without government intervention or significant aid, simply because Texas let's you build things, and the market likes to make money.
by strictnein