The Haber–Bosch process, starvation…, 1
BY THE MID- 1800s humanity was in trouble. Population growth was outpacing food production. The problem could be summed up in a single word. Fertilizer.
Specifically, the bulk of fertilizer that we use is nitrogenous fertilizer. Why is that so?
Simply put, nitrogen composes much of amino acids. Proteins in turn are composed of amino acids. Much of the mammalian body (including the human body) is composed of collagen, which is the main structural protein in our connective tissues, and consequently the most abundant protein in our bodies. In addition, our muscles are also composed of proteins. So are our enzymes and hormones. By mass, the human body is Oxygen, (65%), Carbon (18.5%), Hydrogen ( 9.5%), and Nitrogen ( 2.6%). By number of atoms, the human body is Oxygen, ( 24%), Carbon (12%), Hydrogen (62%), and Nitrogen (1.1%).
People in the medical field often refer to these elements that compose proteins as CHON. In other words, if a doctor or nutritionist writes CHON, he or she is usually referring to proteins.
As for plants, by mass they are also mostly made up of CHON. (Carbon 45%, Oxygen 42, Hydrogen 6.5, Nitrogen 1.5%)
It’s therefore obvious that we better have our plant crops wellfertilized with nitrogenous fertilizers.
That became a huge problem in the 1800s, due to the fact that nitrogenous fertilizers were mainly derived from niter (potassium nitrate KNO3, and to a lesser extent sodium nitrate NaNO3), which naturally occur as minerals in dry places, and guano (the dung of seabirds and bats from tropical islands). Specifically, the problem was that seabird and bat excrement wasn’t enough, and minable deposits of niter minerals occurred only in Chile and Peru.
Just to give an example of how important niter had become, the War of the Pacific between Chile versus a Bolivian–Peruvian alliance from 1879 to 1884 was fought over niter, and so is also known as the Nitrate War. It lasted four and a half years, with thousands killed on all sides. A war one can argue was about nitrogenous fertilizers.
Fortunately, something happened so that this was the last war fought over a precursor to nitrogenous f e r t i l i z e r s . Wa r s , p r o b a b l y progressively more devastating and brutal as the human population explodes in a setting of lack of food crops due to lack of nitrogenous fertilizers, would still be fought if this something never happened.
In 1909, the German chemist Fritz Haber synthesized ammonia NH3 from Nitrogen in the air and Hydrogen. The German company
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Baden Aniline and Soda Factory (which subsequently became the largest chemical producer in the world today) smartly jumped on this new technology, bought it, and then hired Carl Bosch to upscale the process for commercial use. In 1910, Bosch succeeded. Both of these German chemists won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for this. One could arguably say that they won the Nobel Prize for saving humanity from starvation.