The Energy Markets Podcast S3E24: 'Food is energy.' So what is the energy-intensive fertilizer industry doing to decarbonize while still keeping the world fed?
The world's burgeoning billions have been kept fed thanks to the "Green Revolution" of the 20th century, which featured new hybridized crops with enhanced yields. Often deemed a miracle of science, it was also made possible by energy-intensive industrial fertilizers. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch were each awarded the Nobel Prize for their contributions to the widely used processes for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen taken from ambient air and hydrogen derived from fossil fuels. These ammonia-based nitrogen fertilizers, along with mined fertilizers, today help to feed the world, something Thomas Robert Malthus never envisioned in his 18th century writings warning of overpopulation.
Today we are concerned with another green revolution that seeks to end the use of fossil fuels, which when burned create emissions that are dangerously warming the atmosphere and creating the need for a second agricultural revolution to ensure the world's billions can still be fed in the face of drastic climatic extremes. So as we look to decarbonize the world's economy and phase out the use of fossil fuels, what is the fertilizer industry doing to green its highly fossil fuel-dependent industrial and mining processes?
We talk with Alzbeta Klein, CEO of the International Fertilizer Association, freshly returned from COP28 in Dubai, where for the first time the world's nations agreed to the need to phase out fossil fuels to temper the runaway climate change we are experiencing. "Food is energy, and we need to understand that connection," Klein says. "We need to understand the transition for the energy markets, and we need to understand the transition for the food market because the two go hand-in-hand."
We also hear from Hiro Iwanaga of Talus Renewables, a nitrogen fertilizer startup at the forefront of using photovoltaics to crack hydrogen from water, rather than fossil fuels. Also freshly returned from Dubai, Iwanaga talks about his company's demonstration project now under way in Kenya, and the company's next projects here in the United States. "The green hydrogen tax credit that was passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act makes our product cost-competitive," he explains.
Also, Brandon Kail of Rocky Mountain BioAg speaks to his company's approach employing soil microbes as the foundation of a non-fossil fuel-based approach to plant nutrition, and Divina Gracia P. Rodriguez of the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research tells us about an EU-funded project in Ethiopia she is spearheading that seeks to address barriers to the adoption of human urine-based fertilizers.