Its complicated. History of ammonia the human race

Transcriber: Khoa Vo
Reviewer: David DeRuwe

So today I’m going to talk about ammonia.

It’s a rather smelly but invisible gas
that consists of a nitrogen atom

bonded to three hydrogen
atoms in a pyramidal structure.

This gas underpins a large amount

of the things we take
for granted in modern life,

from farming to fashion.

But our relationship with it began
thousands of years in the past

with a civilization
that was more concerned

with great pyramids
than microscopic ones -

the ancient Egyptians.

In the Siwa oasis in modern-day Libya,

Pliny the Elder tells
of the temple of Zeus Ammon

where the priests there
used ammonium chloride,

a salt containing ammonia and chlorine

for their medicinal and religious
practices on the site.

And in Rome, the togas that we associate
as being so white and clean

used [ammonia derived from urine]
to clean and bleach those garments.

This became such a widespread
practice in the city

that in 79 CE, Emperor Vespasian
declared “Urinae Vectigal,”

or a urine tax to deal with this issue
and turn the smelly collection of urine

in the city into a monetary
gain for the empire.

By the 10th century CE,

ammonium chloride was being traded
from the Far East to Europe

along the Silk Road,
along with the commodities

like spices and silk
we associate with that path today.

These natural sources of ammonia
were very useful to our ancestors,

but it’s not how we produce
ammonia in modern life.

That process began in 1904
with Fritz Haber developing

a chemical synthesis to make ammonia
from nitrogen from the air and hydrogen,

along with a fellow
German compatriot, Carl Bosch.

In 1914, they commissioned
the first Haber-Bosch processing plant

to produce ammonia for the war effort
for Germany in World War One.

This was necessary because the British
had blockaded the ports

that the German empire used
to import guano,

a natural source of ammonia
from South America.

And while this was quite a controversial
start for synthetic ammonia production,

it revolutionized farming and textiles
in the 20th century.

This was because of the excess nitrogen
available from the synthetic ammonia.

It was used to create the fertilizers
that we use in modern farming,

which increase the yields
of crops around the world.

This resulted in millions of people being
lifted out of food poverty and insecurity.

And further to this,

the availability of this cheap ammonia

resulted in the creation
of synthetic fibers such as nylon

that we’re all familiar with today.

By the 1930s, ammonia had become
such a useful chemical to us as a species

that we were using it
in refrigeration practices,

and what this meant was we were able
to increase the shelf life

of foods and medicines around the world,

which meant that they were more able
to get to the people that need them.

This is where my personal journey
with ammonia began,

researching sustainable and alternative
refrigeration methods at Queen’s.

Ammonia has been used for a long time,
and we are coming back

to considering using it as an alternative
to the modern HFCs and CFCs

we use in our air conditioners
and freezers today.

But ammonia is used
for much more than that.

We use it to make our food;
we use it to make our clothes as well.

And this has created a network

that produces 176 million tons
of ammonia every year.

That number is a little bit obscure,
so to put that into perspective,

the only things we make more of every year
on the planet are cement and steel.

Along with the other large
chemicals that we produce,

there’s an associated environmental
impact from this process:

The energy and the electricity we use

and the feedstock
that we get our hydrogen from

all derive from fossil fuels,
mostly coal and natural gas,

and these have an associated
carbon emission

that equates to 300 million extra tons
of CO2 entering our atmosphere every year.

That’s about equivalent
to the entire global shipping sector

that moves all the goods we use
as a species around the planet every year,

not a huge amount,

But ammonia presents a unique opportunity

in this group of massive
chemicals that we produce,

in that it contains no carbon -
it only contains nitrogen and hydrogen.

So the carbon that we use
is further up in the process,

and if we can remove that by decarbonising
the electricity production;

by using solar, wind, geothermal
or tidal energy to supply it;

and we create the hydrogen
we use to make it

using technology such as fuel cells
to split water into hydrogen and oxygen,

we can secure and make
a more sustainable future

for food production
and textile production in modern life.

This opportunity is something
that we need to grasp,

as ammonia is one of the only chemicals
we produce at this scale

that doesn’t contain carbon,

and what it will do
is it will allow us to enter

the next revolution that this very smelly
friend of ours can present to us:

the energy revolution.

One of the main problems
we are having right now

with transitioning from carbon-based
energy production to hydrogen-based

is hydrogen is very volatile
and very dangerous when stored or handled.

It also has the issue that we don’t have
the infrastructure or the network we need

to produce it up in the amounts
that we need to create the energy

that we all use every day.

But ammonia presents an opportunity
to sidestep those issues.

We already transport it
in vast quantities around the world,

and over the last century,
we’ve developed a network

of production and handling
that’s only rivaled by natural gas.

If we use ammonia
and its three hydrogen atoms

as a hydrogen vector
to transport hydrogen around the planet,

we can overcome these hurdles

and more quickly decarbonise
our energy production as a species.

So despite being a very old
and very smelly friend,

ammonia is constantly updating
its relationship status with us

to a more sustainable future
that we can all enjoy.

Thank you.