• @[email protected]English
    5•8 months ago

    I wonder about how the end-to-end efficiency of this compares to going back to older processes from before synthetic nitrogen fixing.

    Reading between the lines, they are fixing nitrogen by converting it to ammonium nitrate using the Haber and Ostwald processes, with energy the run the process provided by solar panels, and then scattering the ammonium nitrate on the soil where they grow their crops.

    The classic way to fix nitrogen is to grow nitrogen fixing crops sometimes (members of the Fabaceae / pea family), such as peas, clover etc…, which fix nitrogen, and rotate the crops growing in each plot of soil over different growing seasons between crops that deplete nitrogen and crops that fix nitrogen. It’s entirely possible that this is more efficient in terms of land use (area * years) than using some of your land for solar panels and then growing the crop you want continuously in the other part of the land. It also means lower embodied costs in terms of resources to manufacture the solar panels.

    So it would be good to see some actual numbers around this.

    • @[email protected]
      5•8 months ago

      Good points but the solar panels don’t have to be on productive land they can/should be on shed and building roofs and can go on degraded/unproductive land. Even over water to reduce evaporation loss as well as provide power. They can also be used in conjunction with crops and livestock if planned properly. They can provide shading in harsh temperature environments that is beneficial to the livestock and crop ( depending on crop) There are other benefits in the micro biome to field rotation as well so there does need to be care that you don’t just exhaust your fields by dumping nitrogen endlessly on them.

      Actual numbers would be good!