Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

196
atmospheric nitrogen. On July 2, 1909, after years of attempting to synthesize
ammonia, Fritz Haber succeeded in sustaining production of liquid
ammonia for five hours in his Karlsruhe laboratory. Crookes’s challenge had
been met in just over a decade. Less than a century later, half the nitrogen
in the world’s people comes from the process that Haber pioneered.
Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (BASF) chemist Carl Bosch commercialized
Haber’s experimental process, now known as the Haber-Bosch
process, with amazing rapidity. A prototype plant was operating a year
later, construction of the first commercial plant began in 1912, and the first
commercial ammonia flowed in September the following year. By the start
of the First World War, the plant was capturing twenty metric tons of
atmospheric nitrogen a day.
As feared by the German high command, the British naval blockade cut
off Germany’s supply of Chilean nitrates in the opening days of the war. It
soon became clear that the unprecedented amounts of explosives used in
the new style of trench warfare would exhaust German munitions in less
than a year. The blockade also cut off BASF from its primary markets and
revenue sources. Within months of the outbreak of hostilities the company’s
new ammonia plant was converted from producing fertilizer to
nitrates for Germany’s ammunition factories. By the war’s end, all of
BASF’s production was used for munitions and together with the German
war ministry the company was building a major plant deep inside Germany,
safe from French air raids. In the end, however, the German military
did not so much run out of ammunition as it ran out of food.
After the war, other countries adopted Germany’s remarkable new way of
producing nitrates. The Allies immediately recognized the strategic value of
the Haber-Bosch process; the Treaty of Versailles compelled BASF to license
an ammonia plant in France. In the United States, the National Defense
Act provided for damming the Tennessee River at Mussel Shoals to generate
cheap electricity for synthetic nitrogen plants that could manufacture
either fertilizers or munitions, depending on which was in greater demand.
In the 1920s German chemists modified the Haber-Bosch process to use
methane as the feedstock for producing ammonia. Because Germany
lacked natural gas fields, the more efficient process was not commercialized
until 1929 when Shell Chemical Company opened a plant at Pittsburg, California
to convert cheap natural gas into cheap fertilizer. The technology for
making ammonia synthesis the dominant means of fixing atmospheric
nitrogen arrived just in time for the industrial stagnation of the Depression.
dirty business