Haber Bosch Process: Industrial Fertilizer, Energy & Beyond

Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch (Nobels 1918 and 1931) are responsible for the world population explosion.  Through a very energy dependent process, Haber created the process for artificial industrial fertilizer and Bosch perfected its mass production. Their Haber-Bosch process is often called one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.  In Europe, for example, it took one farmer to feed 2.5 people in 1900, currently the ratio s/he will feed well over 100. Yara  Haber & Bosch are primarily responsible for the world's population going from from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000. IDSIA

• Industrial fertilizer is the cornerstone of the green revolution.  It's production consumes between 1-1.5 percent energy used worldwidewith massive amounts of carbon dioxide as a byproduct produced.  It's created by fixing nitrogen and hydrogen that occurs naturally in the air through a process known as ammonia synthesis to create industrial fertilizer.

• We're still working with 100 year old technology. Nothing has come close to what Haber originally created. Currently, production is at 500 million tons produced per year, and it sustains about 40% of the population.  That's 2.4 billion people who exist because of that, and in turn, need energy to make the fertilizer to get food on the table...and our dependence will only increase as the global count moves well beyond 6 billion people.

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture released figures for fertilizer, prices have risen 117 percent since April 2000 (and 65% since 2007), rising faster than any other raw material used by farmers. The price of ammonia has tripled.  BusinessWeek

This is especially bad for those farmers in developing markets where cost of production takes a much bigger proportion of their capital expenditures than it would a farmer's in a developed country.

Add to that the pollution problem brought on by industrial fertilizer and the monoculture mentality to which it's inextricably tied.  The creation of industrial fertilizer created this massive world population that is unsustainable without it. 

The big question is will there be a breakthrough that is less energy and environmentally intensive to be able to meet fast growing population's demand for food. Industrial fertilizer is not a sexy product.  That could contribute to the reason no one has invested in newer processes. More importantly, up until recently, the cost of producing fertilizer (tied in to the cost of energy to produce it) wasn't an issue because it was cheap to produce and as an outcome, soft commodities e.g. produce and food products were cheap to buy at the markets.  No one is going to be interested in a sexy-granola-hybrid car when there are larger fundamental issues that need to be addressed and solved - what to eat. Hopefully, it will happen before there is a large disruption.