I grew up on an organic orchard, so don't get excited about artificial sources of nitrogen for agriculture and horticulture. It is better than getting fertiliser from fossil fuels, but it is still not great.

My mind goes to energy storage. If it was a smart way to do that, people would probably be doing it, who knows. Well, someone wrote a paper about it in 2022: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...

We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia by now if fracking hadn't made natural gas so cheap. Natural gas is the largest variable-cost input to making most ammonia (it's processed with steam reforming to generate hydrogen), and in the United States it cost more 20 years ago than it does now:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DHHNGSP

The cost of wind power and solar power have fallen dramatically, but without accounting for the externalities of CO2 emissions, natural gas is still the cheaper way to make ammonia.

Turns out the article is on the Ammonia Energy Association website, wake up Richard.

There are two camps: people who are fans of Haber Bosch because it feeds most of humanity, and absolute psychopaths.