This Molecule Has Saved Billions of Lives, How Do We Make It Without Killing Ourselves?

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BTW: Aged urine was a source of ammonia for cleaning wool after it was woven. That job was what a "fuller" did for a living. They poured fermented urine in a big tub, put in the wool and hopped in to stomp it with their feet. The stomping and ammonia got the lanolin out of the wool making it soft and fluffy to be nice and warm.

Worth a mention that ammonia is easy to transport as it becomes a liquid at achievable temperature and pressure. I'm old enough to remember ladies carrying "smelling salts" to revive others that had fainted. :) Sure in high concentrations not good but it has a smell that's impossible to ignore. It's also highly soluble in water so a leak is fairly easy to deal with.

Ammonia products ARE actually used for foodstuffs. Ammonia salts are commonly used in liqourice known as Salmiak. Also ammonium carbonates are used as baking powder for certain recipes.

The band Sabaton has written a song called 'Father' dedicated to Fritz Haber , contemplating his historic significance and controversy because he is know as the "Father of artifical fertilizers" , thus saving maybe millions from famine and starvation but he is also the "Father of chemical warfare" because he was the main proponent of the deployment of poisonous gases on the battlefields in WW1. Check out the song and the videoclip: Sabaton, Father

One huge point in favor of the Haber Bosch Process is just how cheap the required catalyst is - it's mostly based on iron, containing small amounts of other cheap metal oxides as promoters. If a successor process to Haber Bosch wants to have any chance at viability it must have a catalyst superior in price to performance. To add insult to injury even if a catalyst of superior qualities is available - the Haber Bosch Process scales exceptionally well on an industrial level. For the time being it is my opinion that the most realistic chance to advance the nitrogen fixation is to "clean up" the classic Haber Bosch Process, mostly by addressing the steam reforming process that is currently the main source of hydrogen, but unfortunately that is another deep chemical rabbit hole in its own right.

The major reason why this isnt used today is because its very slow and operating costs are high. Think of it like this: the Haber-Bosch method is driving your car, this method right now is like driving your car on gold and the top speed is 1 mile per hour. Before we can drive down the costs its useless, because costs is often very well correlated with Co2 emissions. So right now the process is like driving a car with a top speed of 1 mile an hour and it spews out so much Co2 cars looks clean.

The man who invented the Haber-Bosch process is also the brain behind the Chemical Warfare of Germany in WW 1.

How do make it indeed :)

Plants use protein nitogenase that has a molecule FeMoCo which stands for iron molybdenum cofactor which can reduce nitrogen gas to ammonia. The chemical mechanism is fascinating.

Hmm, actually this sounds like the Red Hydrogen systems Japan is trying to scale up to commercial levels could produce Ammonia with just an few extra steps. Red Hydrogen involves using a gas cooled high temperature reactor to provide super high temperatures to power a process to split off hydrogen from water, so just take that red hydrogen and add an extra layer to use the heat from that same reactor to bond it with nitrogen.

If your heat source for the Haber-Bosch was Nuclear, the whole impact could be reduced.

Woohoo! Got it right! Saw the molecule and thought: That's NH3, ammonia. Chemistry A-Levels was useful after all.

There is a company called Fuel Positive that is working on a method to create green ammonia and hopefully will come out with it this year.

Love reading scishow comments, half for learning random facts which is always a plus and half to laugh at people trying to be smart arses😅👌🏼

Ammonia makes an excellent refrigerant and was also the original before CFCs!

What about bacterial nitrogen fixation? Have we found a way to make ammonia that way for cheap and easy?

ENRR might not be scalable. Some things just aren't. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, won't know until we exhaust every possibility.

"How do Make It" Was there not enough room in the title, was it a typo, or was it intentional?

Hank, you better be telling your kids all your Dad jokes! Especially the science jokes. I hope, because you have a fun delivery, that your kids enjoy all the science you bring to them! We really need a lot of STEM - motivated kids with a liberal dousing of the Arts. And your kids are in that next up and coming generation we'll need to help push forward.