alchemy of air

the book summary that will convince that synthetic fertilizer is the coolest thing you never knew about.

In 1907 a speech given to the entire scientific community speaking of doom. The world will run out of food. The world will plunge into a global famine and civilization will crumble.

This is summary of the book The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager. If you stick with this reading, you’ll realize the incredible story of how the world avoided near complete collapse in the early 20th century.

background

Plants needs needs nitrogen to grow. You'd think that should be no problem as nitrogen is everywhere in the air. But that nitrogen (N2) can't be easily used in chemical processes. It's chemically stable with a covalent bond that’s very hard to break. For nitrogen to be useful, it needs to look like ammonia, NH3. This is fixed-nitrogen.

Fixed nitrogen is limited. When a farmers planted crops in their fields, the harvest would never be as good as the very first harvest. That's because the fixed-nitrogen in the dirt was depleted.

Now farmers could introduce nitrogen in a few ways. One way is to rotate crops, and introduce fixed-nitrogen promoting plants. Plants like pea plants nurtured some bacteria that helped produce fixed-nitrogen in the soil.

Farmers also found accumulated nitrogen in animal waste. Cities and populations learned to apply animal wastes and food scrapes to their fields. And that's what civilizations did for a while. Large towns would pay to collect and ship city waste to adjacent farms. There was no shortage of demand for manure, scraps, bones for use as fertilizer. These methods alone could only sustain 2 people per acre of farmable land in Europe. But as the cities of Europe and America were growing more food was needed. Denser food quantities grown close to the growing urban populations.

Fixed-nitrogen became scarce. New virgin farmlands had been exhausted by the later 1800s. And human civilization, with the boom of industrial revolution demanded more food.

natural deposits

It turns out there were sources of fixed nitrogen in high concentrations in the world. There are pockets of processable product from minerals, like saltpeter. The same material the Chinese discovered to create gun powder. Humans discovered that if you dropped this nitrogen-rich material on your fields, your plants would grow.

So these concentrated fixed-nitrogen sources could act as fertilizer and gunpowder. This made this material the most important material for a country to have access to. You could use it to feed your people and kill your enemy.

At one time, there was another incredible valuable product called guano. This was the accumulation of bird-droppings found on islands were migratory flocked and bred. The United States passed the Guano Islands Act, for any US citizen to claim any islands that had guano to be a United States territory. The US lays claim to those islands to this day.

From South America to India, these concentrations of nitrogen would be extracted and sent to Europe and the United States. These sources propped the propped the farming industries. With them, mouths were fed faster than conventional farming methods ever could.

The world was addicted to these sources of fertilizer. The world ran on them as if they would never run out. But soon the guana islands laid bare. The last source of nitrogen product available came from the Atacama Desert in South America. Control for this source started the Saltpeter War between Chile and Bolivia for control needed to feed the world, where Chile won.

By the late 1800s there were signs that this resource would start to run out. From the 1907 speech, scientists started to pay attention had a scary prediction.

The world had about 20-30 years left of fixed-nitrogen for their farmlands. And there was no backup to be found.

science arrives

Fritz Haber, a German scientist, looked to find a way to pull nitrogen into a useable form from the air. He found that with enough pressure and heat, pulling nitrogen from the air might be possible.

Trial after trial after trial. He couldn't get enough to show that this process could be commercialized. He searched for a catalyst metal to help the process and something worked. His many attempts finally produced something. With the right catalyst, he was able to show that ammonia could be formed from the air. Not much to use, but enough to get a company to invest in R&D (and help him get a rich contract).

He sells his patents to the German chemical company BASF. Another chemist Carl Bosch, put the research money to commercial the process. Bosch had to create the biggest machines ever conceived by man at the time. He built a research team to discover ways to create the largest metallic drums more pressure than any machine before.

By 1913, the industrial process found its viability. Slowly the drops of ammonia began to flow. And then drops turned to streams. Soon tons of ammonia could be formed. The synthetic stuff could start to compete with the diminishing natural product. The Haber-Bosch process to convert air to ammonia was born. Haber and Bosch both won the Nobel prize for their efforts.

Now, civilization was able to pull the building blocks of life from the air and use it to feeds its people.

a lasting legacy

“The Haber–Bosch Process today consumes more than one percent of humanity's energy production and is responsible for feeding roughly one-third of its population.” [Wikipedia]

Without synthetic fertilizers, if we relied on perfect 'natural' methods of farming, all the farmable lands on earth could only feed 4 billion people. We’re closing in on 8 billion people today.

Like all inventions, there were also unintended consequences. Remember how saltpeter doubled as a source for gunpowder? This process for creating ammonia was used to create large scale weapons of war. This same process led to Hitler’s assault on the world in WW2.

I’d also add here the value of human ingenuity. Humans have gone through many global crisis than we can remember. But humans have found ways to overcome obstacles when things looked bleak. Yes, the stakes are higher today than ever before. We have nuclear weapons, climate catastrophe, artificial intelligence safety. But humans have shown a resiliency in the face of obstacles. And if this story has shown anything, it’s that we’ve solved big things before.

If you enjoyed this summary and want to dig into the history. I’d highly recommend The Alchemy of Air (link)