Haber Process - Economic and Environmental Aspects

Economic and Environmental Aspects

Further information: Sustainable ammonia production

The Haber process now produces 500 million tons (453 billion kilograms) of nitrogen fertilizer per year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. 3–5% of world natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process (~1–2% of the world's annual energy supply). That fertilizer is responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population, but results in various deleterious environmental consequences. Notably, the rise of the Haber industrial process led to the "Nitrate Crisis" in Chile when the natural nitrate mines were no longer profitable and were closed, leaving a large unemployed Chilean population behind.

Read more about this topic:  Haber Process

Famous quotes containing the words economic and, economic and/or aspects:

    “In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up—or else all go down—as one people.”
    —Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

    “What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
    —Arlie Hochschild (20th century)

    “The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
    —Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)