Why don't more countries use coal to make their own nitrogen fertilizers so as to ensure basic food security? It's not rocket science.
>>62129717Something with climate. Also realm fertilizers are rock dust. because that has healthy minerals not like modern fertilizers which make food grow empty and makes people sick
>>62129758What the fuck are you talking about? Why not just remain silent?>>62129717It's not rocket science and running the Haber-Bosch process at scale is 1930s tech. However, running it requires both a source of N2 and H2. The N2 is easy enough because you can site your facility near a plant that produces pure O2 for metallurgical use, and purchase the liquid N2 they make as a byproduct (this is also where a big portion of the noble gas supply comes from). H2 is the trickier part. Making syngas from coal and other hydrocarbon sources isn't free. You have to pay to generate all that heat for steam reformation reactions. If you look at your image, 99% of the Chinese H2 supply comes from making syngas. The Chinese also are able to produce enough electricity and secure enough energy imports to do that at scale. Random African states can't afford to buy/produce that much power. And even if they wanted to, they would be paying a premium to generate fertilizer at home compared to the cheap imported fertilizer made at massive economies of scale.The 1% in the graph is probably the future though. Finland and Australia have plants underway that will use wind/nuclear/solar fields to power massive electrolyzer arrays to split water for O2 and H2 production. These facilities are being sited in places where their H2 output will feed fertilizer plants and the O2 will feed steel mills.>TLDR steam reformation is energy inefficient>Just zap the water bro>DENORA stock goes up
>>62129717I'm surprised you can't just use the N2 that's in the air
>>62130949 meant for >>62130881
>>62130951You can't just feed air into that reaction and react it with your purified hydrogen gas, it needs to be purified N2. Air is about 78% N2, 21% O2, and 1% some mixture of CO2, H2O, CH4, Kr, Xe, etc... The presence of water and that much O2 will drastically change the reaction you get. And I should point out at this point that purifying gases is done by cyrogenically distilling air to separate it into component gases, which also is pretty energy intense because you're running massive refrigeration systems.
>>62130963damnI assumed they just absorbed the oxygen with some reducing agent and condensed the water vapour out by cooling down the air
>>62129717Why dont more countries sterilize shit eaters, a certain pedophile ethnicity, psychopaths and other filth instead of making more of them.
>>62129717Who pays for that and why?
>>62130985>The "don't answer that question" signal finger
>>62130881I'm not just referring to countries in Africa. India is an example of a country that has vast amounts of coal yet is currently having problems because it is a net importer of nitrogen fertilizer and also depends on imported LNG for much of the nitrogen fertilizer it itself produces.>steam reformation is energy inefficientSteam reforming refers to making syngas from hydrocarbons (such as natural gas) rather than coal (which is just carbons), no?AI tells me steam reforming is endothermic and requires 69kJ for each mol of H2, whereas coal gasification requires 131-172 kJ for each mol of H2, so coal gasification is more energy inefficient, however the coal can be mined nearby and is sure to arrive, whereas the LNG has to be shipped in from far away and might not arrive. AI also tells me that electrolysis requires 286kJ per mol. I'm no chemist so I'm not sure what the correct numbers are.
>>62131529>Who pays for thatIdeally, the state would pay the difference to make coal gasification competitive with steam methane reforming. Other solutions might be possible, such as quota systems.>and why?Food security
The answer to every form of the question "why don't ABC just do XYZ" is always the same:>profits and efficiencyIf it made sense economically, they would. It doesn't and if some plebs have to starve because they can't think ahead 3 months to stop by the bulk club and put a few hundreds pounds of beans and rice in their closet so be it. nothing of value will be lost in the coming reset. Every part of the industrialized economy is in a slow motion train wreck and the "brightest minds" are banking on AI and robotics automation to save us us with efficiency gains. lmao. total random chance coincidence all the wealthy in the know have spend the last 5 years building self sufficient doomsday bunkers that cost billions I'm sure.
>>62131756His >>62131603 solution is just to bill the taxpayers more.I mean that's the universal solution to such questions, just fund more stuff with more taxes!
>>62130984While it's possible to use a reducing agent like meta bisulfite to scavenge the dissolved oxygen out of some water, the sheer scale that industrial ammonia manufacturing requires makes that non-viable both in terms of chemical consumption and costs. The first plants that were made to do this were described as drinking oceans worth of air. And those were small compared to what came after.>>62131595>>62131603Steam reformation and coal gasification are the same reactions with different feeds. Coal (and wood) gasification is more energy intensive because you have to liberate a lot of stuff in the solid feed before you can react it to get what you want. Which is why it economically can make sense to ship in LNG rather than using local coal. But to make a switch to coal from LNG basically requires a complete replacement of the reformer into a gasification reactor, which will be more expensive to run the entire time it exists, and will only make sense to keep around if the state subsidizes it from a food security perspective. But since global ocean security has been free since 1945, its a hard thing to relearn.The other thing to consider is that power requirements are not created equal. Of the 10J of extractable thermal energy in a piece of coal, only 3-4 will end up as usable energy due to generation inefficiencies and transmission losses. Colocating an ammonia plant immediately by power generation brings up the used energy of the fuel to about 80% from a thermal plant. For a renewable source where most of the losses are from transmission, you get nearly all of what is produced. So eletrolyzer arrays can end up being way more competitive in reality than they should be on paper, simply because you can slap a warehouse full of industrial electrochemistry next to a power plant and reap the benefits in a way that is harder for a cryodistillation plant because it has to be near steel manufacture. Additionally, the only feeds are water and electricity.
