Habber Bosch
Back ground
The Haber Bosch process meandered its way into the global sciences at the perfect time right around the early 1900’s during the first World War to create explosives for battle. This was a critical period during our society’s history where our population was growing faster than the infrastructure that we had can support it.
As you can see from the data provided in the chart above, the land that the united states utilized stayed relatively constant over the years, but the big kicker is that we have started using agricultural practices that are not necessarily friendly to our ecosystems here on earth. The solution to feeding an exponentially growing population lies in the Haber Bosch process.
Nitrogen is an element that is extremely important to our global ecosystem through all forms of life including agriculture and animals that thrive off of said agriculture. In most cases before the 19th century, nitrogen was, in a scientific sense, the limiting reagent for most of the success in an ecosystem. Without it, life would not thrive since most of the building blocks of life are composed of nitrogen like Nucleic acids and chlorophyll.
The Haber Bosch Process is a technique that scientists discovered in the early 1900’s that involves producing nitrogen based products as a result of reactions with atmospheric nitrogen to produce ammonia and other nitrates, a common nutrient and fertilizer. The Haber Bosch process achieves its output through taking atmospheric air and reacting it under unfathomable unnatural pressures and temperatures that you would never see out in nature. This is usually achieved by burning fossil fuels and raise green house gas emissions as a result.
This, in theory, is a revolutionary idea since fertilizer is extremely useful for high crop yields and nitrogen is what makes up well over the majority of our atmosphere. Finally, a solution to the worlds growing population. But wait, this process isn’t all sunshine and rainbows after all, there comes some unintended consequences of using nitrogen that has been sequestered from the air through the Haber Bosch process.