Chemical Engineers Develop ‘Greener’ Ammonia

Ammonia, a compound first synthesized about a century ago, has dozens of modern uses and has become essential in making the fertilizer that now sustains most of our global food production. But while we've been producing ammonia at a large scale since the 1930s, it has been accomplished mainly in hulking chemical plants requiring vast amounts of hydrogen gas from fossil fuels—making ammonia among the most energy-intensive among all large-volume chemicals. A pair of researchers at Case Western Reserve University—one an expert in electro-chemical synthesis, the other in applications of plasmas—are working on fixing that. Researchers Julie Renner and Mohan Sankaran have come up with a new way to create ammonia from nitrogen and water at low temperature and low pressure. They've done it successfully in a laboratory without using hydrogen or the solid metal catalyst necessary in traditional processes.