Re: Here comes WW III....

Clifford Heath wrote:
Nico Coesel wrote:
Clifford Heath <no@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
90% of the world's grain comes from land where that's
only possible due to nitrogen fertilizers made using
natural gas. Google "Haber process". Start a significant
war, and most of that land gets no fertilizer.

Not according to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia

From the page you quote, what are you disagreeing with?
This:

"About 80% or more of the ammonia produced is used for fertilizing agricultural crops"


That's not the same as saying "90% of the world's grain comes
from..." It could be that all the fertilizer is used on a small
portion of the farmland, for example.

or this:

"Today, the typical modern ammonia-producing plant first converts natural gas (i.e., methane) or liquified petroleum gas (such gases are propane and butane) or petroleum naphtha into gaseous hydrogen" ... "To produce the desired end-product ammonia, the hydrogen is then catalytically reacted with nitrogen (derived from process air) to form anhydrous liquid ammonia. This step is known as the ammonia synthesis loop (also referred to as the Haber-Bosch process)"

The point is that most of our grain is a fossil fuel.

The same article says ammonia production consumes about
1% of all man-made power. Not very much.

But, if starving is the question, you could feed twice
as many people just switching everyone from beef to chicken
(chickens take half as much grain to make the same pound of
meat), or feed roughly 4-5x as many by going vegetarian.

So we've got quite a bit of leeway.

Cheers,
James Arthur
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Substitute for fertilizer, etc.?
    ... > Natural gas is only used for ammonia, crude is the main feedstock for any ... > Ammonia is made from hydrogen and nitrogen. ... is was slow and expensive compared to the Haber process as was the Cyanamid ... and ammonium sulfate for the simple fertilizers. ...
    (sci.energy)
  • Re: Lawn fertilizer prices skyrocket
    ... about double or triple the price of that fertilizer component. ... Prior to the use of NATURAL gas as a hydrogen source, ... production and need to import from global market. ...
    (rec.gardens)
  • Re: Lawn fertilizer prices skyrocket
    ... about double or triple the price of that fertilizer component. ... Prior to the use of NATURAL gas as a hydrogen source, ... production and need to import from global market. ...
    (rec.gardens)
  • Re: long distance transport of solar thermal energy
    ... Synthesis of 1 mol of ammonia generates ... natural gas) generates about 902 kJ of heat. ... You can see that the natural gas has about 10 times ...
    (sci.energy)
  • Re: You Dont Carry What? For Why? Really? REALLY?
    ... "Where's the ammonia?" ... manager, who's bagging ... so we don't carry it anymore." ... can't get fertilizer at Home Depot? ...
    (rec.food.cooking)