Haber-Bosch – most people have never heard of it but it drives life on earth

Back in October I mentioned the Haber-Bosch process that is the foundation for nitrogen fertilizer manufacture worldwide.  I’ve been meaning to come back to it but never got around to it until a recent online discussion got me thinking about it again. 

Most people have no clue what the Haber-Bosch process is or that it even exists for that matter.  They certainly don’t begin to understand how fundamental it is to our life.  We routinely hear people blathering on about how wonderful it would be if only we could live a totally natural life, by which they mean some utopia where nature coughed up enough to keep us alive without us having to put anything back in.  Most 8 year olds with a piggy bank understand the concept that you can’t keep taking out without ever putting back in.  So why is it so difficult for adults to understand the same concept when it applies to land? 

I just happen to have some US production figures handy for another project I’m working on so I’ll use them but the principle would apply equally to Canadian production.  The US produced roughly 12 billion bushels of corn in 2008.  That equates to about 4.8 million tons of actual nitrogen removed from the ground.  Just by way of reference, 4.8 million tons of actual N is equal to roughly 1/4 of the total annual US nitrogen fertilizer use.  

You could do similar calculations for all the cereal crops.  Vegetable crops are also high nitrogen users.  Soybeans are legumes so they can fix their own nitrogen but canola isn’t so it is a net miner of nitrogen.  Someday when I have nothing better to do I’m going to do a nutrient budget for western Canada just to see how far out of balance we are. 

Legumes return nitrogen to the soil but not as much as you might think.  There is still a significant nitrogen removal in the legume seed.  The only nitrogen that gets added to the system is whatever is left in the stubble or root system.  Anyone who has tried to grow a cereal on pea stubble with no added nitrogen will know how inadequate the nitrogen returned to the soil really is.

Haber-Bosch is so essential because, without it, our yields would drop off rapidly.  And the greenies can talk until they are blue in the face – the reality is that the whole system would be in a nitrogen deficit because of the nitrogen that is removed in the crops.  In fact the world is in a deficit because we are mining organic matter on a global scale.

In the early 1800’s Thomas Robert Malthus argued that any ecosystem has a natural limit on its ultimate growth.  He extended his argument to the world and argued that world population would ultimately be limited by mass starvation.  No doubt his dismal prediction would have been accurate if Haber-Bosch had never been invented.  Without the ability to artificially fix atmospheric nitrogen we would likely have long since outgrown our capacity to feed ourselves.  One of the surest ways to identify an undereducated greenie is when they trot out the human starvation argument.

There’s a really good graph about halfway down the page here.  Scroll down to the world population graph to see the invention of Haber-Bosch on a population timeline.  The graph doesn’t prove that Haber-Bosch enabled population growth but the relationship is pretty obvious on the chart.