Haber-Bosch Process

Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production

by Vaclav Smil  · 18 Dec 2000

in the Haber–Bosch synthesis of ammonia (fig. 8.1). But this global mean both overestimates and underestimates the degree of our dependence on the Haber-Bosch process because the 158 Chapter 8 applications of nitrogen in affluent nations have a very different role from the nutrient’s use in low-income countries

Electric City

by Thomas Hager  · 18 May 2021  · 248pp  · 79,444 words

its own significant nitrate industry. Italy and France were working on projects, but without much success. Germany, of course, was making nitrates using its secret Haber-Bosch process. North America, by contrast, had exactly one major factory successfully making the chemicals it needed: the plant Washburn built in Canada near Niagara Falls for

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, meeting with experts in En gland, Norway, Italy, Sweden, and France. And then Parsons found what he was looking for— in Germany. It was the Haber-Bosch process. Parsons could not examine the German factories directly, of course, but everyone he talked to seemed to believe that the German system was the best

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the way to go. Parsons came home from the war zone with a recommendation to build both. The government couldn’t afford to ignore the Haber-Bosch process; it was too potentially valuable, so he advised that the government build a relatively small, experimental Haber plant in hopes they could crack the secret

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dam that would rival the largest on earth. It would, however, cover all the bases, ensuring fast nitrate production and long-term possibilities for the Haber-Bosch process. If this experimental plant failed, there would be a complete cyanamide plant running right next door, pumping out nitrates with proven technology. The government went

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans

by Mark Lynas  · 3 Oct 2011  · 369pp  · 98,776 words

by today’s generations—even though we benefit from their inventiveness every time we eat a meal. The chemical technique that bears their names, the Haber-Bosch process, was undoubtedly “the most important technical invention of the twentieth century,” according to the Canadian scholar Vaclav Smil, whose book Enriching the Earth is the

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, and the new plant at Leuna began operation on April 27, 1917, producing more than 100,000 tonnes of nitrates annually.8 Thanks to the Haber-Bosch process, the carnage of the First World War was to continue for another year and a half before the German capitulation finally came. But Fritz Haber

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are actually served by ammonia pipelines. Today, more than half the nitrogen produced by the world’s crops originates in ammonia production plants using the Haber-Bosch process. Given that most of this ends up as our food, it is fair to say that most of the protein in the modern human being

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, as algae and toxic bacteria proliferate in the nutrient soup. The production and use of nitrates also worsens climate change, both directly and indirectly. The Haber-Bosch process is energy intensive and gobbles up 5 percent of the world’s entire annual natural gas production—emitting millions of tonnes of additional CO2 as

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recently, history suggests that technological applied science has tended to outstrip environmental science, as some of the other planetary boundary areas show. For example, the Haber-Bosch process to create synthetic nitrogen was invented early in the twentieth century and was producing millions of tonnes of ammonia per year before the downsides of

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; genetic engineering and; plea to give up flying; campaign against environmental toxics; nuclear power and; antiscience; population growth and Guardian Gulf of Mexico Haber, Fritz Haber-Bosch process HadCM3 Hambler, Clive Hansen, James Helm, Dieter Himalaya History of Life, The (Cowen) Ho Chi Minh City Holocene hominids Homo erectus Homo habilis Homo neanderthalensis

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Carrier, Israel natural capital Nature Nature Conservancy, 1148 New Economics Foundation (NEF) New Forests New Internationalist NGOs Niger, River Nile, River nitrogen boundary: famine and; Haber-Bosch process; nitrogen ape; meeting the; human production of nitrogen, benefits of; nitrogen oxide emissions; efforts to control nitrogen pollution; microbial denitrification; wastewater, removing nitrates from; organic

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis

by Ruth Defries  · 8 Sep 2014  · 342pp  · 88,736 words

implements of war. Germany had lost its access to the British-controlled Chilean source. With little domestic supply to produce munitions, BASF ramped up the Haber-Bosch process. After the war, the British victors inspected German factories, hoping to learn how the enemy had managed to produce so many explosives. But the British

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could not replicate the process, until they found a few German engineers willing to sell their secrets, at a price. The Haber-Bosch process spread to Britain and soon became its main source of fixed nitrogen. Industrial espionage joined trade, conquest, and the spread of ideas from one farmer

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knowledge to resolve the conundrums of settled life. That spelled the end of the Chilean nitrate trade and the beginning of the proliferation of the Haber-Bosch process across the industrialized world. Oh, the paradox of Haber’s life. On one side, his invention fueled explosives for world wars and conflicts that have

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for fixed nitrogen escaped its reliance on clover, excrement, and microbes, although it took another war before the power of the Haber-Bosch process for peaceful use was fully realized. The Haber-Bosch process had reached the United States by the beginning of World War II. American factories used it to produce munitions. At the end

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munitions factories, like the one at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, supported scientists in agricultural colleges, hoping to improve and spread the use of nitrogen fertilizers. The Haber-Bosch process became a mainstay of American agriculture after World War II. Production of nitrogen fertilizers, whether from repurposed, war-era factories or new ones built for

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were subsisting on foods that farmers would not have been able to produce without fertilizer made with the Haber-Bosch process, including grains to feed meat- and dairy-producing animals. There is no mistaking that the Haber-Bosch process was one of humanity’s all-time pivot points, changing diets and ratcheting up the number of

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more efficiently will circumvent a shortage at least in the near future. But no substitutes—nothing like the phosphate rocks that replaced bones or the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen—are on the horizon. Even if the days of cheap phosphate fertilizers last for centuries more, there’s already no escaping the hatchets

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to turn. The list of events, people, and motives that contributed along the way is long and varied: spies who spread the secret of the Haber-Bosch process; the chemist who rescued DDT from obscurity; the expeditions to find new seeds and to unearth geologic oddities; the intellectual curiosity to painstakingly brush pollen

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way out” (Haber 1920). 110“. . . [P]ower and civilization”: Emerson 2003, 22 (also cited in Daemen 2004). 110Across the industrialized world: The role of the Haber-Bosch process in Germany’s war effort is discussed in Hager (2008) and Leigh (2004). 111The age of sixty-five: The sad story of the end of

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persistence in the environment, 160 properties of, 156–157, 160 resistance to, 157–159 in World War II, 154 Dickens, Charles, 86 Diet changed by Haber-Bosch process, 112 eating locally and sustainably-produced foods, 202 fat in, 191–193 movement toward more plant-based, 202 overweight and obesity increase and, 193–195

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, 191–192 sources of, 192–193 Fermi, Enrico, 17 Fermi’s paradox, 17–18 Fertile Crescent, 52, 53, 57, 136 Fertilizer guano as, 88–92 Haber-Bosch process and, 109–113 industrial production, 109 lake eutrophication from, 119–120 Liebig as father of fertilizer industry, 62 mineral theory and, 107 phosphorus, 113–118

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Island Act in 1856, 90 Guatemala, pest management in, 152 Gulf of Mexico, 121 Gunpowder, 110 Gypsy moth, 151, 156 Haber, Fritz, 108–113, 197 Haber-Bosch process, 110–112 Habitable Zone, 19–21 Hadley, George, 94 Hadley cells, 94, 95 Hamburger connection, 198 Harness, collar, 78 Hays, Willet, 137 Herbivore, 74 Hessian

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman  · 23 Sep 2013  · 579pp  · 164,339 words

von Liebig had ever imagined, were also Germans. Each would be awarded a Nobel Prize for his separate contribution to what became known as the Haber-Bosch process, which has transformed the world like no other. And each would be undone by his German nationality. Fritz Haber was born to a Prussian Hasidic

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Germany now keep feeding itself, but ammonium sulfate could be converted into synthetic saltpeter, from which BASF was soon manufacturing gunpowder and explosives. Without the Haber-Bosch process, World War I would have been far shorter. Fritz Haber’s discovery of how to synthesize fertilizer was so enormous that a Nobel Prize in

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live in a world using no more than 6 terawatts was 2 billion. Two billion was the population of the Earth in 1930, when the Haber-Bosch process had just become commercially available worldwide. Nearly everyone on Earth was still living off plants growing on sunlight, not fossil fuel. At 2 billion, the

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, 2009, levels had risen to 387 ppm.3 The second was the amount of nitrogen siphoned from the atmosphere for human use, chiefly through the Haber-Bosch process. The boundary they arrived at was 35 million tons per year, versus the current 121 million. (Phosphorus was still within its proposed boundary of 11

Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future

by Alan Weisman  · 21 Apr 2025  · 599pp  · 149,014 words

add. With synthetic fertilizer, we could grow far more plants than nature ever could. No other invention has changed the world as radically as the Haber-Bosch process. Without it, half of us wouldn’t be here. For literally changing the face of the planet by making vastly more land farmable through chemistry

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a nutrient need far greater than the soil microbiome can provide. “We outpaced evolution,” mused Temme. The way humans had strong-armed nature with the Haber-Bosch process had allowed 8 billion of us to be alive at the same time, but had also chemically undermined air, water, and soil—along with the

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vat doubling daily, Pivot Bio’s staff soon was doubling annually. Fortunately—if a global environmental crisis can be fortunate—the climate fallout of the Haber-Bosch process was increasingly on the radar of venture capital investors, whose job was gambling billions on the future. In the 21st century, that was increasingly a

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out of the Depression during World War II kept the prosperity going postwar by converting to fertilizer production. But in large part due to the Haber-Bosch process that begat it, Nebraska now has a double water problem. Its shallow, braided Platte River used to run dry in midsummer: now it’s March

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his 40s, with close-cropped auburn hair and a goatee shot with gray, adds that they’ll need to overcome a key limitation. “Energetics.” The Haber-Bosch process, he explains, is so energy-intensive because N2’s stable bond—two nitrogen atoms sharing each other’s electrons—is hard to sever. Soy and

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-xu-connected-nitrate-pollution-to-pediatric-cancer. Guidehouse Insights. “Green Ammonia and the Electrification of the Haber-Bosch Process Reduce Carbon Emissions.” April 6, 2021. https://guidehouseinsights.com/news-and-views/green-ammonia-and-the-electrification-of-the-haber-bosch-process-reduce-carbon-emissions [inactive]. Grunwald, Michael. “Chemical Fertilizer Is a Climate Disaster. Can High-Tech

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decarbonization efforts, 313, 315, 318, 361, 376 direct carbon capture, 361 emissions rates, 34–35, 192 and Framework Convention on Climate Change, 154–55 and Haber-Bosch process, 228 hydrocarbons, 290–91 impact on climate, 34 lawsuits, 156–57 and microbial farming, 53–57 oceanic CO2 absorption, 361, 364 and pipeline dangers, 175

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, 262 Gulf Oasis, 10–11 Gulf of Alaska, 285 Gulf of California, 243, 244–45, 258 Gulf of Maine, 290 H Haber, Fritz, 39–40 Haber-Bosch process, 39–41, 60, 228, 230–31, 239–40 The Hague, 155, 159 Hajra, Bablu, 194, 197, 200 Hannah’s Choice, 45 Hansen, James, 69, 129

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, 390–92, 396–97 Mesopotamian Revitalization Project, 27–28 methane and carbon credits, 359 and climate activism, 380, 385 green hydrogen as replacement, 102 and Haber-Bosch process, 41 and Iraqi oil infrastructure, 6, 23 and meat production, 38, 241, 275, 286 and positive feedback loops, 35–36 and realities of climate litigation

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ammonia production, 41, 230 atmospheric nitrogen, 55, 223 and biostimulants, 295 and corn silage, 222 and Dutch agriculture, 156n and fertilizer production, 233–35 and Haber-Bosch process, 39–40 and kelp growth, 285–87 and microbial farming, 52–56 and nitrogen-fixing bacteria, 223, 229–33, 236–41 runoff, 283 shortcomings of

An Edible History of Humanity

by Tom Standage  · 30 Jun 2009  · 282pp  · 82,107 words

with Bosch’s engineering innovations to produce ammonia—from nitrogen in the air, and hydrogen extracted from coal—using what is now known as the Haber-Bosch process. By 1914 the Oppau plant was capable of producing nearly 20 metric tons of ammonia a day, or 7,200 metric tons a year, which

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between using its new source of synthetic ammonia to feed its people or supply its army with ammunition. Some historians have suggested that without the Haber-Bosch process, Germany would have run out of nitrates by 1916, and the war would have ended much sooner. German production of ammonia was scaled up dramatically

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population, is also remembered today as one of the fathers of chemical warfare. When scientists in Britain and other countries had tried to replicate the Haber-Bosch process themselves during the war, they had been unable to do so because crucial technical details had been omitted from the relevant patents. These patents were

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process was refined so that it could use methane from natural gas, rather than coal, as the source of hydrogen. By the early 1930s the Haber-Bosch process had overtaken Chilean nitrates to become the dominant source of artificial fertilizer, and global consumption of fertilizer tripled between 1910 and 1938. Having relied on

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90 percent of the protein consumed by Chinese is homegrown, this means that two thirds of the nitrogen in China’s food comes from the Haber-Bosch process. Traditional methods, such as planting nitrogen-fixing legumes or using animal manure, simply cannot supply as much nitrogen per hectare. In many other populous developing

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an Empire. For an account of the sugar boycott see Wroe, “Sick with Excess of Sweetness.” PART VI The account of the development of the Haber-Bosch process follows Smil, Enriching the Earth; Erisman, Sutton, Galloway, Klimont, and Winiwarter, “How a Century of Ammonia Synthesis Changed the World”; and Smil, “Nitrogen and Food

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

by Ed Conway  · 15 Jun 2023  · 515pp  · 152,128 words

, 265 , 392 see also Salar de Uyuni borates 20 , 21 Borlaug, Norman 275 boron 8 , 20–21 , 372 , 376 Bosch, Carl 173 , 335 see also Haber-Bosch process bottles, plastic 354 , 355 , 360 Boulby, North Yorkshire 177 , 189 saltmaking 125–7 , 128–9 , 131 , 134 , 144 , 155 , 177 , 190 see also Cleveland Potash

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, Harry 171 Guggenheims, the 281 Guinea: iron ore 247 gunpowder 164 gunsights 46 , 47 , 48 , 50 gutta-percha 352 , 356 Haber, Fritz 173 , 174 , 334 Haber-Bosch process 173–4 , 176 , 188 , 204 , 275 , 342 , 351 , 430 , 432 , 438 Haiti: 2010 earthquake 80 halite 146 , 155 , 161 , 178 , 181 , 191 , 312 Hallein salt

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

by Oliver Morton  · 26 Sep 2015  · 469pp  · 142,230 words

or more in the manufacture of explosives. When the Royal Navy cut off Germany’s supplies of Chilean nitrate in the First World War the Haber–Bosch process allowed Germany to continue furnishing itself with gunpowder and other ammunition, very likely prolonging hostilities. After Germany lost, the victors gathered in Versailles insisted on

Not the End of the World

by Hannah Ritchie  · 9 Jan 2024  · 335pp  · 101,992 words

to take Haber’s invention and turn it into something that could sell. It took him just one year. By 1910, synthetic ammonia – from the Haber–Bosch process – was ready to be rolled out into the world. Both scientists would eventually win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work, Fritz Haber in

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