Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota
ammoniaenergy.orgPerfect 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.
> 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.
Its mostly because of this guy(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Osborne
"Renewable Energy Policy. In 1984 Osborne co-founded the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association (now Alliance) (TREIA)[1] with two partners and worked with other key individuals and organizations to bring the nascent renewable energy industry to the attention of policymakers on the state and federal level. "
This was a unplanned, unanticipated freak accident that gave Texas an early transmission for wind power. Because most of the farmers are republican, they built a transmission network for the farmers. This led to CREZ (Competitive Renewable Energy Zones), the goal of which is to integrate the wind supply regions with the large demand centers. Rich farmers are a much larger voting block than the dozens of fossil fuel billionaires.
The bragging by Texas about renewables is entirely accidental and is a side-effect of building a transmission network for the rich farmers. Not because Texas runs markets efficiently, pro-business or pro-efficiency or anything like that. Thats just nonsense.
Today, Texas tries very hard to limit renewables, but fails. They only want coal and natural gas, and use the legislation and state money to fund them: https://www.powermag.com/texas-moves-forward-with-5-38b-in-l...
(1) I think this is the guy, but am not entirely sure. I read an article about this curious case of renewables in Texas, a long time back. It is hard to find that article, I've been searching for an hour and most of what I find credits politicians for CREZ. But there was a private person who made this possible. I'm assuming its this guy.
So, synthesizing both comments: state-backed infrastructure funding + deregulated free-market buildout = rapid expansion
> "The bragging by Texas about renewables is entirely accidental and is a side-effect of building a transmission network for the rich farmers. Not because Texas runs markets efficiently, pro-business or pro-efficiency or anything like that. Thats just nonsense."
Farmers aren't business owners and the policy helping them isn't pro-business? And the state allowing things to actually be built, unlike California, doesn't make it more pro-business? I don't think that makes any sense at all.
So the only reason that tens or hundreds of billion dollars have flowed into Texas renewables is just a random coincidence and nothing has changed over the last 42 years and the state is actually against it? This is approaching a "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" type of thing.
> 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.
Spain has only started installing storage too; that will not only make energy cheaper but also increase reliability massively. California's grid is rock solid these days because of it, and it pays for itself with time arbitrage of solar.
Fossil fuels remain more cost effective.
The US isn't a centrally planned economy (sort of) so the more economical option wins.
For a very very long time, fracking was not economical, and only through massive government investment did it become cost effective.
Same goes for renewables, and electrolyzers. All evidence points to a future with renewable energy costing a small fraction of fossil fuels, and electrolyzers being cheaper than hydrogen from gas. But the future needs to be built. We can either lose out and buy the tech from others, or be leaders and reap the early rewards.
Where solar in particular really drops the cost of electricity is towards the end and beyond its design lifetime of 25-30 years. That's how a bunch of the costs are calculated and it's turning out systems are continuing to produce significantly beyond that. Paired with inflation, this makes old systems produce extremely low cost electricity.
It's not about tech now, it's just commodity install base making sure to ride the adoption curve at a healthy pace which people are more than happy to do just because of greed.
The US is centrally planned to some degree, just in different ways and by different interests.
I suspect the interests/actions of lobbyists for certain companies/sectors had significant influence on things like taxes, and is a type of central planning.
It's different than most central planned economies because there are two entities operating in parallel (a quasi-private corporate state in addition to the usual government state), but I'd say it's still centralized/planned, even if it's not the state/government doing the planning.
Fossil fuel being heavily subsidised kind of undermines both of your points.
Heavily directly subsidized and then additionally "subsidized" through massive military expenditures as well.
Not to mention indirectly subsidised by ignoring the externalities imposed on the health of ourselves and our environment.
Mostly because the carbon dioxide emission is not properly reflected in the fossil fuel pricing.
Basically, every single person on earth is subsiding the big oil by bearing the consequence/cost of the higher CO2 concentration.
No they don’t. They remain subsidized. Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago, and I don’t even LIKE solar. Fossil fuels have no redeeming qualities in the major energy sectors anymore, aside from ONE: the plants are VERY cheap to build.
Solar farms are even cheaper to build!
Surely the redeeming feature is that they are already here...
I thought the same thing, but actually, no. Fossil fuel plants are expensive to run. "That they are already here" is an argument for plants which are more advanced and thus, much more expensive to build, but much cheaper to maintain.
Which fossil fuel plants are cheap to build? Cheap compared to what?
>solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency
What does this even mean? What inputs and outputs are you comparing to get an apples-to-apples comparison between efficiency between fossil fuels and solar?
It's talking about the economic inputs required to create a unit of energy. Literally all you have to fathom is "can we add up what it takes to make a watt of energy from coal, vs. from solar power vs. some other plant, amortized over the lifetime of said plant?"
"Solar surpassed fossil fuels in efficiency ages ago"
You are going to have to explain this. Because there is no measurement of efficiency in which solar PV in Minnesota in efficient in any way. To produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north. So it isn't even more environmentally friendly. And its far more expensive. It uses far more energy. So I have no idea at all what you are referring to. Cap Ex perhaps or cap cost...if that's what you mean, you have no idea what you are talking about.
> to produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north.
For the next watt, you need more natural gas which co-releases more CO2 .. or you can just use the same solar panel again - with its fixed up front CO2 cost already "paid for"
Over 25 or 30 years a panel keeps producing w/out additional CO2 release, during that same period natural gas extraction and consumption continue releasing CO2.
And when we begin coupling solar to cheap sodium ion battery banks it gets very interesting. Sodium ion will even be compatible with a Minnesota winter!
> To produce a watt of electricity using natural gas actually produces less CO2 than a watt from solar that far north
What about the watt after that? I still got the solar panel for that next watt, and with natural gas I have... well I don't have anything, I need more natural gas!
What the bloody hell are you taking about. Minnesota is further south than the UK. Southern Minnesota is the same latitude as the Mediterranean coast.
Learn some facts before spouting bs.
The UK is in the same boat as Minnesota for solar PV. There isn't a solar panel in the UK that will ever make more power than it took to produce.
It takes 1 to 3 years to offset the energy used to manufacture a solar panel.
The only situation where you would have a point is micro wind generation, and that's basically no longer a thing because it doesn't work.
You keep getting downvoted because nearly everything you say is not only factually incorrect but contradicts common sense.
If you want people to take you seriously, start linking to facts and analyses by credible sources or showing your math.
>There isn't a solar panel in the UK that will ever make more power than it took to produce.
You're clearly and provably wrong, and looking at your comments shows me lots of clearly and provably wrong statements, and almost every single one of them pertains to energy.
..so I presume you have a dog in this race.
Like it or not every, non-failed-state, modern economy is a centrally-planned one. The economy never lives in a vacuum, it's always a product of the institutions that govern them (regulations, subsidies, taxes, etc.) Something is always “the most cost-effective option” because the institutions made it so.
well, just to add to that: you cant even have any kind of economy at scale without some central authority to enforce property rights or contract law etc anyways...
Solar and wind energy have been more economical than fossil fuel on a cost per unit energy basis for quite some time. The reasons we're still so tied to fossil fuel are largely political, not economic.
Technology Connections goes into this in exhaustive detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Also, you may not have heard that the Trump administration is actively stonewalling green energy projects, regardless of their economic prospects: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/06/29/87...
You are confusing capacity costs (capital outlay) with utilization costs (what you actually pay per watt). Its true that renewables have a very low cap cost. They are also several times the utilization cost. That's why electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago. And energy prices are basically the same as 10 years ago.
PS LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets, not a real market calculation that anyone pays.
> They are also several times the utilization cost
Prove it.
> electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago.
That has nothing to do with the cost of generation. The reason costs have gone up are 1/wildfire mitigation and liability, 2/replacement of aging grid infrastructure (plus a geographically diverse state - replacing infrastructure in mountains is costly), 3/rising demand and new fixed infrastructure cost (which is subsumed into everyone's bills), and 4/decommissioning of power plants (San Onofre and Diablo Canyon were both mothballed and haven't been replaced).
Also, California utilities are heavily regulated. Utility rates have to be approved by the government, making the rate-setting process highly politicized. For a very long time the regulators refused to let the utilities raise rates even though it was necessary. Eventually, though, that became unsustainable. The result was that instead of raising rates a percentage point or two per year, all of a sudden there was a real threat of the system going completely bankrupt and so prices shot up dramatically.
If you really want to understand the energy markets in CA, there's no better source than the Los Angeles Times. Or what's left of it, anyway.
> LCOE is a BS stat used to confuse those that don't understand energy markets
Let me get my popcorn while you explain it to us ignoramuses.
LCOE is helpful but only holds up to a certain point. Latest Lazard report has levelized cost of firming included as well. Dispatchability of power is an important part of the picture missed by LCOE for weather-dependent generation. Once grids are meaningfully composed of solar/wind, the cost of firming is significant and mostly comes from gas peaker plants these days.
>That's why electricity in CA is 2-3x what it was just 10 years ago
No, CA electrical cost is about paying for PG&E's insurance liabilities and subsidizing the living situation in places which are de facto uninhabitable on account of wildfires.
Sorry, PG&E's accounting says otherwise.
PG&E is incentivized to spend more money on capex because the state guarantees a return on investment, a perverse incentive which causes them to make stupid money decisions to realize more profit. For example doubling the cost of energization by having a large proportion of it done by external contractors.
24% of PG&E's revenue (that is customer rate payments) goes to wildfire related costs.
The flip side of the incentive to spend more on capex is that rates are regulated by the PUC. So it’s not like the utilities get blank checks.
Having watched CPUC in action, it's not quite a blank check, but damn close.
Utility comes in and says "we desperately need a rate hike to fund $X00 million" then CPUC gets them down to x-1 or x-2 and the whole thing could hav been avoided by better management from the start.
if pg&e was state owned (with good management, thats the hard part) it would operate at ~zero profit and pass through all savings to customers. that means rates as low as they can possible be at the current state of the grid and generation system.
most infra projects get taxpayer money through subsidies or partnerships anyway. taking it public would only kick out the investors with misaligned goals and replace them with fixed cost debt funding. you dont need to create incentives that hurt consumers when the state can invest directly.
I don’t follow. Taking what public? Most utility companies operating in CA are already publicly traded.
Do you mean “nationalizing” (or whatever the state equivalent is)? There are already some municipally owned utilities like DWP in LA and Santa Clara Power, but those began as municipal services and weren’t converted from independent businesses. The tendency over the past century has been to spin off public entities, not to take them in.
What exactly does their accounting say?
If you're not accounting for all the wildfire smoke costing billions of dollars maybe your calculations for cost effectiveness have some adjustments to be made
Yeah I can see your problem
> owned by farmer cooperatives
No way for a Corp to benefit=communism
lol
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.
> awful to wildlife
I think this has been greatly exaggerated, but even if the claims are true it's as nothing compared to fossil fuel.
Calling wind power "wasteful" is just silly. We need to be a bit more hard nosed when it comes to energy policy. Not only does wind save tons of money, t is hyper efficient, and anti-correlates with solar in most geographies. Meaning a small amount of cheap battery storage mixed with wind plus solar delivers extremely cheap, reliable energy, with amazing dispatch characteristics.
People get all emotional about views, but most people find it beautiful and a few people's visual aesthetics should not override one of the pillars of the future economy.
Additionally, the fix for runoff from farms into the gulf is mere regulation and fining, but that's not going to stop the need for ammonia! Plus, try to regulate these farmers, they are largely parasites in the country through the farm bill yet still remain one of the most potent political factions in the country.
The same rare earths and quality steel could have been used on a water or vapor dynamo that runs 24/7 and doesn't have any additional harmful impact.
And even if wind wasn't wasteful at the outlet, you're still using it to turn air nitrogen into the same compounds that you are dumping into the seas, lakes and drinking water.
How are you going to recapture fertilizer runoff.
There are techniques both at origin and downstream.
I have not reviewed every method but, even if they are energy intensive, they probably beat blasting a carburetor and dumping the compounds.
I mentioned removing the excess nutrients from the water because removing them "works a small fraction of the time, it is awful to wildlife and it is an eyesore." not to mention the energy requirements which you think shouldn't include wind.
The runoff from farms in rural Minnesota is being dumped into the sea? There's almost no place farther from the sea in North America than upper midwest rural farms.
It causes massive algeal growths in the Gulf of Mexico. This sucks massive amounts of oxygen out of the water leading to so-called "dead zones".
It runs into the Mississippi river, which runs into the sea.
Sure, some small amount of it may go down the 2000+ mile trek from rural MN to the gulf, but that's not what anyone imagines when someone uses the term "dumped into the sea".
Re-concentrating fertilizer from runoff sounds like an energy-intensive activity. Why wouldn't cheap wind power make it easier?
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.
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.
It's providing an alternative to middle east sourced fertiliser from plants that can no longer ship or, in some cases, can no longer operate due to war damage.
US states aren't the only places on the globe building out renewable powered green hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, etc.
The US doesn't get oil from the ME anymore. And there isn't a single functioning plant that uses any of the processes you describe anywhere on the planet after 45 years of trying. There are only a couple of pilot plants and most of those have been abandon.
I mean, I guess the answer there would be to build the usual kind of Haber-Brosch process plants that run continuously, and feed them with hydrogen derived from natural gas. But just build them in the US.
> But just build them in the US.
Sorry, that's not going to work out for myself, the 8.5+ million hectares of grain growing about my location, nor for the billion+ tonne per annum of mineral resource shifted in my state.
We're interested in producing fertilisers and fuel from non fossil sources.
The laws of physics don't like your politics. Also, last time you played around with this stuff, the outcome was very very bad and lots of people died. So before you start trying to mess around with industrial infrastructure, maybe learn physics and chemistry first. Because you keep trying to do things that simply don't work.
WTF are you even talking about? Be specific rather than spewing vague political smears.
We already have quite a few of them.
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.
Built infrastructure for hydrogen storage and transport is always a challenge, it's a slippery little molecule that's expensive to contain in human built stuff.
That said, there's almost always a 'cheat' and for bulk hydrogen storage:
~ https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68aebcef3a052...Using salt caverns (cavities leached from salt deposits in the subsurface) for gas storage is an established technology. Salt caverns are good for storing gas because they have a very low permeability and cracks or fractures can re-seal to prevent leakage. The UK has salt deposits that are suitable for cavern storage and that have been used store natural gas since the 1960s. Hydrogen, used as a chemical feedstock, has been stored in salt caverns in Teesside since the 1970s.Currently there are a few geological structures in Australia being tested for suitability and pilot storage.
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.
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.
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.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819
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.
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.
Another PoV is not the profit from producing home ground fertiliser but the risk of not having fertiliser at "just the right time".
Locally (Western Australia) there are some 8.3 (ish) million hectares of grain planted annually; that's a high spike demand for both fertiliser and fuel that can be interrupted by supply chain issues (eg: war) leading to extensive losses wrt expected harvests.
Oh I'm in that camp. I live in a country that didn't produce its own fertilizer. Sounds like a terrific risk to me
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?
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.
Sort of, but there are important details you miss. First the nitrogen triple bond is one of the strongest in nature so it takes a lot of energy to break it. So we don't actually do that in the way you think in a real ammonia plant. Instead we heat (usually) Magnesium and that extracts Nitrogen from the air (actually a pure nitrogen atmosphere). That's not what is happening in this plant. And the difference in the effectiveness of those two different methods is probably pretty big. This seems more like a PR stunt to get investment.
The reaction N2 + 3 H2 => 2 NH3 is thermodynamically spontaneously but kinetically forbidden by the strength of the N-N bond. That's why the key breakthrough of the Haber-Bosch process is the use of a doped iron oxide (magnetite -- is that what you meant?) catalyst that allows the reaction to proceed at an industrially useful rate. This wind powered ammonia plant gets the hydrogen from water electrolysis instead of steam-reformed methane; the plant is otherwise using a conventional Haber-Bosch process.
Using electrolytic hydrogen to make ammonia was fairly common in the first half of the 20th century, because a lot of remote hydroelectric plants didn't immediately have uses for all of the electricity they could generate. They turned low cost electricity into pure hydrogen and used it to make ammonia and derivatives, which were easier-to-transport high value products.
Why would the HB plant be powered with fossil fuels? You can power that with wind power as well.
Typically the natural gas is the source of the hydrogen. Usually natural gas is burned to form steam to split more natural gas (CH4) into carbon and hydrogen. That’s traditionally cheaper than electrolysis.
Unless your electricity is 'free', presumably?
Free has a habit of changing the economics. This is good news, decoupling ammonia from natural gas would make agriculture more resilient to Middle East disruptions.
TFA literally states "Wind energy powers the electrolysers that supply hydrogen to a Haber Bosch plant." First paragraph.
It’s mot powered with fossil fuels. It uses fossil fuels as an ingredient.
No it doesn't. It electrolyses water and combines the resulting hydrogen with nitrogen from the air.
Wrong. Natural gas is the most common catalyst, but plenty of plants use oil, coal, and other hydrocarbons.
A quick refresher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Process
Yes I know how the usual process works. The plant in the article is different, because it uses electrolysis to make hydrogen for the HB plant. You'd have known this if you'd read even the first paragraph of the article.
Right, and if you read the first paragraph, you’d see it’s meant to increase and decrease power consumption based on demand.
How are they gonna turn up the damn wind, WJW? Is this a plant that shuts down every time there’s a calm day? Is it a plant for funsies or meant to be a reliable station? Either this is a gigantic art project, or it has hydrocarbon inputs for running on days when the wind is calm.
My brother! This too is literally addressed in the article already!
"In order to somehow absorb the fluctuations in wind availability, you need to have a significant storage of hydrogen to be able to absorb these fluctuations, which is very costly. On the other hand, if you allow the plant to operate dynamically, you minimize the demand for storing hydrogen or storing power and hence, you can have a much tighter design, a much, much more economical design."
This plant is NOT meant to be operating 24/7. It does indeed reduce production when there's less wind, and has been designed to be efficient even at less than 100% capacity. If you look at the project page the University of Minnesota is pretty clear that the goal of the project is to make ammonia without needing any fossil fuel inputs, as Minnesota doesn't have any fossil fuel deposits but plenty of wind power potential.
You seem to be quite keen to keep making the false dichotomy that a project can be either "economically viable with fossil fuel inputs" or "just for fun", but that is obviously not true for research projects. In a world where renewables are becoming cheaper than coal it may not be true for production facilities either, and that is without the added risks of supply chain disruptions for fossil fuels. Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a region where natural gas is plentiful.
> You seem to be quite keen to keep making the false dichotomy that a project can be either "economically viable with fossil fuel inputs" or "just for fun", but that is obviously not true for research projects.
Buddy, they literally built a factory that does not work without one of the dirtiest technologies we can build (batteries), which are still incredibly primitive in general, and which like… 9 industries are banking on a magical breakthrough in the next ten years. It’s definitely for funsies.
It’s almost exclusively true for research projects. 99.9% of them, including this, are purely for funsies. Nobody is gonna build a million of these. Nobody is going to rely on these. Maybe some nation will build a couple as a fun project, but if you’re trying to reduce your reliance on other nations (why?? The whole point of the global economy is not to produce everything at home, it’s to trade what you’ve got for what you need, and we already have more than enough supplies to grow enough food for all with plenty of surplus) for a very specific fertilizer input, a factory with variable inputs and outputs that you don’t actively control is a fun project at best and worthless at worst.
Of all the green energies, wind is by far the most baffling to try and expand. Solar at least predictably gets a Sun for half of every day, clouds notwithstanding, and people don’t generally farm at night.
If you insist on still not reading the article I can't help you further. The plant also has no batteries, so whether batteries are dirty or not is completely besides the point. It just scales up and down the electrolysers as power is more or less available.
Wind is actually one of the easiest green energy technologies to understand. In windy locations like Minnesota, the wind blows well over half of the time. Over 25% of the state's electricity was from electricity back in 2023 already. It will have increased further by now.
And anyone asking "why reduce your reliance on other nations" surely has not paying a lot of attention in 2026. Most of the world is scrambling to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels after the Straight of Hormuz closed. Reducing reliance on on other imported critical resources like chips and rare earths is near the top of the priority list of all the major policy blocks in the world. The assumption that you can always import enough ammonia from elsewhere is a risky gamble.
Y-yeah, that’s my point. The fact that there are no batteries means that instead of considering how it operates with a dirty battery (the only other option here), we consider how it works without any reliability.
Of course wind is green. It’s one of the simplest techs out there. It’s just mostly worthless if you don’t live in a wind tunnel. Even then, it’s unreliable. At best, as I said, this is a funsie project so Minnesota doesn’t have to buy from, say, Texas. I don’t think Minnesota is avoiding any international conflicts here, but maybe I’ve missed something. How would an unreliable fertilizer station get you away from conflicts anyways? “Well Tuesday was windy so we didn’t need to go to war for it, but today it’s dead so let’s bomb Iran” lol.
If you think the strait of Hormuz conflict is some reason for every nation to leave behind globalism, I don’t think you understand the whole idea behind globalism. It’s not that there will never be issues. It’s that we face them together.
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.
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. )
I think this is a [dup] of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048819
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?
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.
I grew up on an organic orchard, so don't get excited about artificial sources of nitrogen for agriculture and horticulture. It is better than getting fertiliser from fossil fuels, but it is still not great.
My mind goes to energy storage. If it was a smart way to do that, people would probably be doing it, who knows. Well, someone wrote a paper about it in 2022: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
Our ability to artificially capture nitrogen and feed it to plants is why we are able to feed 8 billions souls and still suffer less hunger than our ancestors.
You are free to grow your plants however you want on your property. But just keep in mind that "no fertilizer" is a luxury belief not affordable to the rest of humanity.
Yes, the Green Revolution. I agree it's not black and white, which may well be an ironic turn of phrase.
The "organic" designation does not preclude using artificial fertilizer. Just no pesticides.
It depends who's definition of organic you are using. Demeter and Biogro, which are the certifications I am familiar with prohibit most conventional artificial fertilisers.
Demeter is full of superstitious quackery.
> It is better than getting fertiliser from fossil fuels, but it is still not great.
Please explain how there is anything even remotely bad about it.
Its horrendously inefficient...and inefficiency is usually bad for the environment. For example, the solar PV when sited in Minnesota is so inefficient just making the electricity from natural gas would produce less CO2 per watt. So there is that, and that's before you look at if all the equipment you use to build the plant was better used elsewhere. And then you could put the solar PV somewhere where it would actually been better than just burning natural gas for electricity.
("Reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32608160#32612544 )
"Copper nanoclusters: Selective CO2 to methane conversion beyond 1 A/cm²" (2024) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092633732... ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899914
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48953769 :
> [1] "Production of hydrogen and carbon nanotubes from methane using a multi-pass floating catalyst chemical vapour deposition reactor with process gas recycling" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-025-01925-3
>> A renewable feedstock process that yields Hydrogen and O-CNT would be yielding teal hydrogen.
What should or could be made out of natural gas (instead of just carbon black)?
Hydrogen, Helium, Oxidized Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene, Carbon Nanospheres. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48949089
Graphene and various other CO2-derived carbon products can be added to construction blocks.
> For example, the solar PV when sited in Minnesota is so inefficient just making the electricity from natural gas would produce less CO2 per watt.
How does electricity from solar PV ever make any CO2 whatsoever under any circumstances (never mind, somehow more than natural gas)?
Because the PV panel itself has to be manufactured. And under ideal conditions, the amount of power needed to make the panel is about 5 years of what the panel produces. Most of the power goes to purify the poli-silica that makes the bulk of the panel itself. If the PV panel is sited somewhere with less than 25% of the ideal amount of sun, then its manufacture makes more CO2 than the power it will replace on the grid. Minnesota is uniquely bad for site siting. Its at a low elevation with lots of cloud coverage and its far to the north of where the breakeven line for solar PV.
PS Did you think solar PV was made from unicorns or something? Making stuff requires power, unless you are making that power from hydro or nuclear, that's going to make a lot of CO2.
Okay, so you are indeed talking about total lifecycle footprint rather than marginal footprint (which is strange to me because discussion of fossil fuels rarely mentions the carbon footprint of building the plants). The electricity generation is not actually producing the CO2 here, of course, which was my point.
Regardless, I don't know where you're getting your information or arguments, but you're way off base. Mining and refinement are more like a quarter of the power input, and many parts of the process can be electrified and don't require high temperatures (i.e. can themselves run on clean power once you bootstrap it). Solar panels typically pay off the energy cost of manufacture within a few years, but are expected to last for 30 (and inverters for 15). IEA studies (e.g. https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Slides_IEA-P... ) show a similar story for carbon; amortized over the lifecycle, the carbon intensity is on the order of a few dozen grams/kW, where natural gas is an order of magnitude worse just counting the combustion (and coal is even worse, of course). And those numbers are from 2023; things have only improved (certainly in terms of cost per panel).
They have solar power working effectively across Europe, particularly in Germany (Wikipedia tells us it's about 1/6 of power generation there), despite significantly less sun than Minnesota. It's actually only slightly more cloudy or less sunny in Minneapolis than in Kansas City, MO (again per Wikipedia); cross-referencing a few things, we can easily find that, far from "less than 25%", Minnesota sees almost half the maximum solar yield. As for elevation, that's obviously irrelevant unless you happen to be right next to something taller.
The condescension is really not necessary.
We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia by now if fracking hadn't made natural gas so cheap. Natural gas is the largest variable-cost input to making most ammonia (it's processed with steam reforming to generate hydrogen), and in the United States it cost more 20 years ago than it does now:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DHHNGSP
The cost of wind power and solar power have fallen dramatically, but without accounting for the externalities of CO2 emissions, natural gas is still the cheaper way to make ammonia.
"We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia"
I seriously doubt that. Using natural gas to make ammonia is cost effective even if natural gas prices go up by a lot...and by that I mean they could go up 10x and it still makes sense. Its a really, really efficient industrial process.
Turns out the article is on the Ammonia Energy Association website, wake up Richard.
There are two camps: people who are fans of Haber Bosch because it feeds most of humanity, and absolute psychopaths.
That is a bit extreme. Wanting to preserve the environment isn't the same as wanting to let everyone starve, it's quite the opposite. Spend a minute or two looking up soil erosion, and extrapolate 100 years.
It would be interesting to get details what’s the process behind. Can you reproduce it on personal level?
It's just electrolysing water into hydrogen and then using the hydrogen in a Haber-Bosch reactor with nitrogen from the air to make ammonia. Electrolysis is easy enough to do on a small scale.
Fritz Haber initially demonstrated his process producing 125 milliliters per hour of ammonia in a "tabletop machine", so it's obviously technically possible. Typical process parameters are about 200 bars and 500 degrees C, so it's not trivial but also not outside of what a dedicated hobbyist could reach. I'm pretty sure it's not economically feasible at small scales though. Even the earliest industrial plants in the 1920s made 20 tons of ammonia per day. It will be vastly cheaper to just buy the stuff in bulk from a plant churning out hundreds of tons per day than it will be to make it yourself at a rate of 2 liters per day.
That said, go for it! A factory is just a room, and similarly a chemical reactor is basically just a steel drum.
On a smaller scale plasma electrolytic cells look more economical than Haber-Bosch but are still new tech. I don't remember the company trying to commercialize it but their target is on farm nitrate production.
you might be thinking of https://www.greenlightning.ag/ - seems really cool tech. combined with variable cheap power source like solar or wind, seems like a good way to give ai bit more control over inputs for farmers.
Ghost of Timothy McVeigh has entered the chat