Researched
Haber-Bosch Process (Air to Ammonia)
Fritz Haber (1909) and Carl Bosch (1913) turned nitrogen from air into ammonia at industrial scale, making artificial fertilizer practically unlimited.
Open in the interactive tree →The process combines nitrogen and hydrogen over an iron catalyst at high pressure and temperature; BASF's Oppau plant started in 1913. Roughly half of the nitrogen in human bodies today comes from it, and world population grew from about 1.6 billion in 1900 to more than 8 billion. It uses about 1-2% of global energy and, by some estimates, causes up to 3% of CO2 emissions, and excess nitrogen pollutes waters and air.
Prerequisites
- Metallurgy (Bronze, Iron)~2500 BC
- Thermodynamics1824
- Catalysis1835Iron catalysts make high-pressure ammonia synthesis economical
- Mineral Fertilizer1840
- Physical Chemistry (van 't Hoff)1884-1887Haber used equilibrium thermodynamics to find the conditions for ammonia synthesis