If you are someone who grows things for a living on a scale larger than, say, a couple dozen acres, you may remember when the most efficient and cost-effective way to get nitrogen to your crop was anhydrous ammonia.
I pulled a few tanks for Jeremy back in the day when I was mostly just the girlfriend. Everyone knows that you should be married before you start doing any of the farm work, and also you should never start doing something that you didn’t want to become your responsibility forever and ever amen. Things have worked out for us in spite of these rules; your mileage may vary.
Anhydrous (NH₃) requires care because of PV=nRT. To get it in a liquid form you have to compress the gas, and when it comes out of compression it’s desperately cold. I suppose I could look up that number, but it’s so cold it burns exposed skin and eyes, and it kills the plants it touches (ideally weeds). Also, “anhydrous” means “will seek out any available water and bond to it with no regard to the fact that it may be your tears.” PPE is not optional. But if you knife it into sufficiently damp soil, the anhydrous ammonia bonds to the water in the soil before it goes off into the atmosphere instead, and voilà: Nitrogen fertilizer for your crops.
Thanks in part to my disused chemistry degree, I’m no stranger to chemical PPE, and, well, it doesn’t scare me. There’s training. You have to be mindful. It’s fine.
Then maybe 10 or so years ago, some partially political, partially criminal, partially pseudo-safety things happened with anhydrous ammonia, and now not so many farmers use it. You can still get it here, but you’ll have to go some distance to source it, and it’s not widely popular. Neither of the two co-ops we formerly bought it from sell it anymore (one is CHS, which is sufficiently huge enough to swing markets on a national level). There was noise made about imports from China and some other things said about people using it to make meth and it just became “better” to use urea or liquid fertilizer (like 32 percent, which is sticky, nasty, corrosive stuff). There was also the thing about safety, but on several levels, that’s nonsense. Farmers need their eyeballs and fingertips to do most of the things they do. In reality, the economics hinged on politics and crime. As do many economic decisions.
Aside, I haven’t really followed the meth numbers closely (or at all), but I suspect that removing access to ag-use anhydrous ammonia has not really cut the availability of meth. Also, Americans clearly buy a zillion things from China, not just fertilizer. Here ends my digression.
Jeremy and I fell right down a YouTube-enabled rabbit hole because he saw somewhere that Toyota said electric vehicles were a thing of the past because of the potential of vehicles powered by anhydrous ammonia.
(Not especially to my credit, my first thought was: So we can’t use anhydrous because it’s not safe, but you’re going to put refill stations out for the general public. Uh. Really.)
My general position is that there is a whole lot of junk on YouTube. I don’t love video (and if you haven’t read that from me at least sixty jillion times, well, I’m clearly not opinionating loudly enough). Jeremy’s favorite language is video, though, and so we went video hunting.
Man. Let me say again: There is a whole lot of junk on YouTube.
We finally decided upon a CNBC clip about ammonia-powered vehicles. No surprise in a day when everything bears the hashtag #climatechange that it’s a clean energy story. The only sure things are death, taxes and climate change, right?
It’s fine. Even if we’re tired of hearing about it, and even if anything can be spun any direction to make any point into a point of contention, we ought to take care of the Earth, if we can figure out how. It’s the only one we have.
The rabbit hole we followed was perhaps more of a prairie dog den, with openings for sleeping, lots of potential offshooting paths, coyotes at the door, and one thing another. If there’s one more thing that isn’t in flux about climate change, it’s that you can see one thing and immediately see a whole bunch of opinion about it.
As it turns out, the target market for the anhydrous-ammonia-to-hydrogen-fuel-cell-generator-to-electricity powered vehicles is not really the daily drivers for individual people and families, but the diesel-powered things that most people don’t have to drive but everyone relies on. Think semis. Think mining trucks. Think tractors.
Of note, this is curiously opposed to the original thing that said it would put electric vehicle makers out of business. This is actually an electric vehicle. Read your internets with healthy skepticism, people. (She rolls her eyes.)
Anyway, from the CNBC video, we searched the startup Amogy and ended up on a video showing their conversion of a John Deere 6195M from diesel to this fuel-cell technology. It features a farmer, an easily-Googled guy who farms in Interlaken, New York, who, with the tractor, moves wheat with a grain vac and also pulls a packer like you’d use for newly planted alfalfa. (I have some picky questions about the horsepower ratings, but instead of asking, I’m just going to take their word for it.)
From there we decided to learn where anhydrous comes from, and this video from the University of Illinois is quite interesting. It is not too long to watch, but if you don’t, it pretty much says we make what we use. To get it, you need to strip the hydrogen out of natural gas and bond it with nitrogen from the atmosphere and compress it; the U.S. produces a majority of the natural gas in the world; of the total anhydrous used in the U.S., we produce most of it and import a very small share; and at least on the surface of it, none of that anhydrous comes from the biggest producer, which is China.
At this point we talked a little, making sure we both understood the information the same way, and we stopped exploring. I know that seems like a pretty lame denouement, but to be honest, I don’t think we can have an unshakeable opinion about this electric vehicle business. (I don’t think we need to have an opinion on every single thing that comes across our eyeballs, for sanity’s sake.) We don’t know enough (and it may not be possible to know enough) to know whether this fuel cell method is actually a way to do better than a battery or diesel vehicle. But is it interesting? Oh, for sure. Science is interesting. Change is interesting (even when it’s totally debatable whether the change is for the better or for the worse).
We noticed when we picked up pork from the locker after the fair that the bags had shiny gold stickers with locker information on them rather than the printed vacuum bags they’d been using. Why the change? I asked, because, well, change is interesting. I assumed it was a holdover from covid-y issues, but no. Their printed bags were stuck on the California border. The shipper had to use an electric semi tractor in the state of California, but that truck didn’t have the oomph to get all the way to Nebraska. So the products were dropped there and put on a different tractor to get the rest of the way to halfway across America. It took too long. They ran out of bags.
So, anecdotally speaking, would it be OK with us to have a natural-gas-anhydrous-ammonia-hydrogen-fuel-cell truck that could get the bags to the locker? Yeah. It would. It’s a little round-about-ish compared to a diesel engine, but it would. Economics will, inevitably, either support its success or spell its demise.
As usual, time will tell.
This Prairie Life. 