A team of international researchers is optimistic that their environmentally friendly technique for fertilizer production will assist to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and food insecurity in the future.
Fertilizers are widely used by farmers to feed the world's over seven billion people. The sole commercially accessible technique of producing ammonia, a major component in fertilizers, is, however, currently not ecologically friendly.
The conventional Haber-Bosch method for turning nitrogen gas (N2) to ammonia requires intensive amounts of energy. About 1-2 % of global energy usage and 1 % of global greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to this process. Scientists from Calgary, Toronto, Houston, and Tennessee recently developed a new, environmentally friendly technique for converting nitrates (NO3) in industrial wastewater to ammonia.
By applying electricity to a single atom catalyst, Dr. Haotian Wang, an assistant professor at Rice University, and colleagues were able to convert nitrate to ammonia. It was crucial to zero in on a single atomic site to ensure the desired reaction. The researchers discovered that iron was the most effective at turning nitrate into ammonia after evaluating a range of single atom catalysts, and they recently published their findings.
The International team used the SXRMB beamline at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan as an important part of their work. “It enabled us to confirm that the catalyst we used was in fact a single atom catalyst and not a cluster of atoms or a nanoparticle.”
The University of Calgary team, lead by Dr. Samira Siahrostami, indicated they used computational chemistry to study the atomic structure of the catalyst.
The team's next steps include determining how to improve the catalyst's effectiveness and stability so that it can be scaled up for use in real-world applications, as well as doing further tests using industrial wastewater, which has a more complicated chemistry than the samples they used.