Producing fertiliser without carbon emissions

Researchers at ETH Zurich and the Carnegie Institution for Science have shown how nitrogen fertiliser could be produced more sustainably. This is necessary not only to protect the climate, but also to reduce dependence on imported natural gas and to increase food security. Intensive agriculture is possible only if the soil is fertilised with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. While phosphorus and potassium can be mined as salts, nitrogen fertiliser has to be produced laboriously from nitrogen in the air and from hydrogen. And, the production of hydrogen is extremely energy-intensive, currently requiring large quantities of natural gas or - as in China - coal. Besides having a correspondingly large carbon footprint, nitrogen fertilizer production is vulnerable to price shocks on the fossil fuels markets. Paolo Gabrielli, Senior Scientist at the Laboratory of Reliability and Risk Engineering at ETH Zurich, has collaborated with Lorenzo Rosa, Principal Investigator at Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, US, to investigate various carbon-neutral production methods for nitrogen fertiliser.