Blue Urea: Fertilizer With Reduced Environmental Impact

Abstract

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers such as urea are a necessity for food production, making them invaluable toward achieving global food security. Conventional manufacture of urea is conducted in centralized production plants at an enormous scale, with the subsequent prilled urea product distributed to the point-of-use. Despite consuming carbon dioxide in the synthesis, the overall process is carbon positive due to the use of fossil feedstocks, resulting in significant net emissions. Blue Urea could be produced using attenuated reaction conditions and hydrogen derived from renewable-powered electrolysis to produce a reduced-carbon alternative. This paper demonstrates the intensified production of urea and ammonium nitrate fertilizers from sustainable feedstocks, namely water, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Critically, the process can be scaled-down such that equipment can be housed in a standardized ISO container deployed at the point-of-use, delocalizing production and eliminating costs, and emissions associated with transportation. The urea and ammonium nitrate were synthesized in a semi-continuous process under considerably milder conditions to produce aqueous fertilizers suitable for direct soil application, eliminating the financial and energetic costs associated with drying and prilling. The composition of the fertilizers from this process were found to be free from contaminants, making them ideal for application. In growth studies, the synthesized urea and ammonium nitrate were applied under controlled conditions and found to perform comparably to a commercial fertilizer (Nitram). Crucially, both the synthesized fertilizers enhanced biomass growth, nitrogen uptake and leaf chlorophylls (even in depleted soils), strongly suggesting they would be effective toward improving crop yields and agricultural output. The Blue Urea concept is proposed for installation in ISO containers and deployment on farms, offering a turnkey solution for point-of-need production of nitrogen fertilizers.

Reline deep eutectic solvent as a green electrolyte for electrochemical energy storage applications

“…43 Moreover, choline chloride is known to be an important nutrient that performs essential metabolic functions necessary for the formation of vital bodily substances needed for animal nutrition. 44 Besides, urea is a versatile organic substance with a high nutrient density and good handling and storage properties present in different industries, mostly cosmetics 45 (anti-ageing and dry skincare) and agriculture 46,47 (fertilizers).…”

Climate‐Smart Fertilizers in 4R Nutrient Stewardship

“…Ammonia, in fact, may play a role in an envisioned carbon‐free hydrogen economy. Fertilizer production technology conferences in 2022 feature topics like decarbonization and revamping options for the production of green and blue ammonia and urea—forms produced with zero or low emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (Driver et al., 2019). Over the past two years, many nitrogen producers in Europe and North America have announced investments toward producing ammonia with a lower carbon footprint.…”

Net Zero and Catalysis: How Neutrons Can Help

“…Even more challenging is the chemical use of CO 2 [127]. Some of the possibilities have been discussed in previous sections (dry reforming, Section 3.2; methanol, Section 3.5) but at present the only major chemical uses of CO 2 are for urea production (via the Bosch-Meiser process [138], Equations ( 8) and ( 9)) and for polyol synthesis [125,126].…”