Fertilization Fixation: Designing Alternatives For Agriculture’s Nitrogen Fertilizer Problem
The Nutrien Redwater Fertilizer plant near Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, Canada, October 7, 2021.
The Haber-Bosch Process
A sweeping history of tragic genius, cutting-edge science, and the discovery that changed billions of lives - including your own.
At the dawn of the 20th century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world's scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch.
Together they discovered a way to make bread out of the air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives. Their invention continues to feed us today; without it, more than two billion people would starve.
But their epochal triumph came at a price we are still paying. The Haber-Bosch process was also used to make the gunpowder and high explosives that killed millions during the two world wars. Both men were vilified during their lives; both, disillusioned and disgraced, died tragically. Today we face the other unintended consequences of their discovery - massive nitrogen pollution and a growing pandemic of obesity.
The Alchemy of Air is the extraordinary, previously untold story of a discovery that changed the way we grow food and the way we make war–and that promises to continue shaping our lives in fundamental and dramatic ways.
Thomas Hager on The Alchemy Of Air
Ammonia is the primary fertilizer we use to fertilize our crops around the world.
If not for the Haber-Bosch process, the first industrial chemical process to synthesize ammonia, humans would all have starved in the mid-20th century.
By combining nitrogen from the air with hydrogen under extremely high pressure and moderately high temperatures, ammonia production is responsible for the 2 to 6% energy consumption on earth every year.
Pollution By Fertilization
To increase crop yields, farmers tend to use a lot of fertilizers.
For those corn farmers in the US Midwest, their fertilizers would get washed into the streams when it rains. The fertilizers would then flow into the Mississippi River and will eventually reach the Gulf of Mexico. In the Northern Gulf of Mexico, there is a massive hypoxic zone where no aquatic lives are found. This “dead zone” is the result of when the toxic ammonia ends up in the water and kills lives.
On the other hand, when ammonia is allowed to sit on the ground for too long, it volatilizes and binds with oxygen, which then turns into nitrous oxide that goes into the atmosphere.
As a greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide (N2O) is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2). Nitrous oxide would last longer and absorb more heat, contributing much more to the greenhouse effect.
Taken together, from the burning of methane gas and the release of nitrous oxide, fertilizer accounted for 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions in 2019, or about 2% of global emissions for that year
As a result, it has long been concerned about the overuse of fertilizer as well as the overproduction of ammonia. In fact, these concerns have led to some government regulatory efforts such as the recent mandates from the Dutch government against dairy farmers.
Met with a lot of opposition, these regulations may not be the best way to address the problem.
New solutions are urgently needed.
New Alternatives for the Fertilizer Problems
It is time for us to find new ways of living and new ways of speaking with molecules to address our present needs. Synthetic chemists speak to the molecular world through heat, solvents, acids, pressure. Synthetic biologists speak to it with DNA. Inside cells, enzymes move atoms and reshape molecules. They take simple sugars and other foods an organism eats and they turn it into more organisms, along with an incredible array of different molecules. Synthetic biologists patch and tweak the sets of enzymes inside of a cell by changing its DNA.
Christina Agapakis on Designing Alternatives For Agriculture's Nitrogen Fertilizer Problem
Without industrial fertilizers, there would not be enough food. Most crops need these synthetic fertilizers, except for soybeans and other legumes. Microbes found in their roots can pull nitrogen out of the air and convert them into fertilizers for the plants. As nature’s free fertilizers, they would not wreak havoc on the local environment nor break down into the nitrous oxide greenhouse gas.
If only we could just replicate these microbes and use them on other crops, the global fertilizer problems would be solved.
We can now. And this is precisely what synthetic biology companies such as Gingko Bioworks are working on.
Joyn Bio, a joint venture between Gingko Bioworks and the life science conglomerate Bayer, has been engineering agricultural microbes for nitrogen fixation and other key processes in the soil that shape the global metabolism. They are having success in designing and testing strains of bacteria that can colonize non-legume crops and provide nitrogen, reducing the need for added fertilizer by 40%.
Plants in the Joyn Bio greenhouse in Woodland, CA. Image courtesy of CNBC.
Rising Geopolitical Tensions are Exacerbating the Problems
With the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gingko’s technological innovations can’t come at a better time.
As the prices of natural gas go up, so too does the cost of nitrogen fertilizer. Higher fertilizer prices are making the world's food supply more expensive and less abundant, as farmers skimp on nutrients for their crops and get lower yields.
The fertilizer crunch is further threatening the worldwide food supplies, which are already suffering from the disruption of crucial grain shipments from Ukraine and Russia.
With global food security at stake, it is indeed time for us to look for new alternatives for agriculture’s nitrogen fertilizer problem.