#fixed nitrogen

[upthewitchypunx]

Weird fact this week from plant school studies: lightning helps aid in nitrogen fixation in the ground for plants.

It does this by breaking to bonds of atmospheric nitrogen allowing it to combine with oxygen, making nitrogen oxide, which dissolves in rain and provides plant usable fertilizer on the ground.

This accounts for us to 2% of fixed nitrogen in the world.

[biology-geology-beaches-india]

The Scientific Research Notes of S. Sunkavally, Printed Part, page.109.

Dates unclear, but certainly between 2006-2012.

[biology-geology-beaches-india]

The Science Research Notebooks of S. Sunkavally. Page 170.

[rjzimmerman]

Our fertilizer is killing us. Here’s a fix.

It’s a crisis as big as the planet. Bezos, Gates, and friends are backing a solution.

Excerpt:

Nitrogen is everywhere. It makes up 80 percent of the air you’re breathing. On its own, it has no real value. But if it’s combined into a molecule with another element, like hydrogen or oxygen, it becomes something that can react with other chemicals. In this “fixed” state, plants can use it to build proteins. Our bodies use those proteins, in turn, to build muscles, bones, DNA, and babies.

Humans have nearly doubled Earth’s natural flow of fixed nitrogen, overwhelming the capacity of ecosystems to remove it. The resulting buildup is poisoning the planet’s waterways, creating a crisis some consider even more threatening than the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Wherever they gather, nitrogen compounds turn poisonous. In drinking water, they cause blue baby syndrome, which prevents infants from absorbing oxygen; in lakes, they fertilize neurotoxic algae; in farm country, they are a major source of suffocating smog.Then there’s the climate. Some of the nitrogen seeps out of the ground as nitrous oxide (yep, laughing gas), which turns out to be a greenhouse gas 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer sucks up 1 percent of all the energy humanity harnesses, more than all the wind and solar energy produced worldwide last year, and produces as much greenhouse gas as all the homes in the United States.

But we can’t simply turn off the spigot of industrial nitrogen, because we depend on it. More than 3 billion people wouldn’t be alive today without Haber’s industrial process.

Now, for the first time in over a hundred years, there’s a potential solution. A pack of startups is racing to market with a means of fixing nitrogen without polluting the Earth. One of them, Pivot Bio, just garnered a $70 million vote of confidence in a funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the coalition of big-name billionaires — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson — hoping to power climate change-beating innovation.

The world’s largest factory for fixing nitrogen sits alongside the west bank of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, an hour’s drive from New Orleans. The CF Industries Donaldson Nitrogen Complex contains 1,400 acres of concrete tanks and steel gridwork with twisting pipes that lead to a series of chambers where gas and air are brought together at up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, creating a pressure cooker that could squish a human body like a grape. That’s what it takes to turn nitrogen from the air into fertilizer.

Bacteria accomplish this same feat of engineering within the fragile wall of a single cell. They offer a microscopic solution for this enormous problem. “There’s a simple elegance and beauty in the way these microbes activate nitrogen,” said Karsten Temme, Pivot Bio’s CEO. Instead of fossil fuel, these bacteria run on sugar, which they get from plants in exchange for nitrogen. And they produce fertilizer exactly when and where plants need it: Pivot’s bacteria coat roots “like a glove,” Temme said, feeding them tiny squirts of nitrogen as they grow. That’s much more precise than spreading synthetic nitrogen, or organic guano, or liquid manure pumped from a holding tank under a hog barn. In short, turning to bacteria for fertilizer holds the potential to stem pollution without famine, food rationing, or more wars over nitrogen.