open letter to Iowa legislators

Dear Senators:
We appreciate the State's desire for clean energy and wanting to continue being a national leader in this field. We believe that the recent events in Japan prove that nuclear power is not our best option. Rather than just being opponents of nuclear power we wish to offer a real alternative. Our companies Enervation, LLC and S.A.F.E. (Sustainable Ammonia Fertilizer Enterprises) are working with existing proven technologies that have the potential to provide base load gigawatt scale power generation.

We all know how beneficial and successful wind generation has been in Iowa. We also know that we are reaching the limit of the Iowa electrical grid to accept more wind generation. S.A.F.E. offers a solution for creating NH3 (ammonia) from wind energy. This allows NH3 to become a virtual "battery" storing energy that the grid cannot handle. Then with additional technology such as the Bloom Box from Bloom Energy or a similar device being able to convert the energy stored in NH3 back to electricity on demand.

We are confident that a gigawatt scale wind to ammonia to electricity system can be designed, permitted, built and operated at less cost to Iowa rate payers within the time it takes to bring a nuclear plant online. (The system
would most likely consist of multiple smaller facilities, whose combined capacity would be a gigawatt or greater.)

If Iowa rate payers are going to make an investment in power generation we believe they would prefer and be better served by this solution rather than nuclear power. In fact it may be possible to put the entire financial risk of this undertaking with private sector entrepreneurs by simply requiring Mid-American Energy to issue a request for proposals for a firm renewable gigawatt scale power generation and storage system.
We welcome your questions and feedback on our proposal.
Sincerely,
Steve Gruhn
S.A.F.E.
sgruhn@freedomfertilizer.com
(712) 330-3114
Mark Steffen
Enervation, LLC

Wind to NH3 & IGLB is better for Iowa

If you are a resident of the state of Iowa, I would encourage you to contact your local state representative, and the governor's office, and please send the following message:

I am writing to encourage you to consider a local, home grown alternative to nuclear power that will be a boost to Iowa's economy, instead of boosting a large multinational construction companies bottom line.

Instead of promoting nuclear plants, we should be supporting IGLB (Integrated Generation & Load Balancing) power plants with new wind turbines and natural gas fired peaker plants, and then produce ammonia fertilizer with the excess wind energy.

For the cost of 1 nuclear power plant, we can put in several IGLB plants that will employ more workers, *in* the state, produce cheaper power for the ratepapers, and save Iowa farmers money on fertilizer.

Systemic economic change

I've been following this line of thought in regards to environmental limits and growth which basically revolves around 'do less, conserve more'. There's some merit to the idea, which I think is summed up by the idea of hard environmental limits. Now, the difficulty becomes in discerning what those limits actually are, vs what we think they are.
This is most obvious currently in discussions about atmospheric CO2 concentration. Will we cook the grandkids or did we head off an ice age (Now, to be honest, I just did a quick search, and I was not able to quickly find a coherent and well-put argument that we headed of an ice age). The point here isn't which 'side' of the debate you are on.. but how do we as a global community come to a consensus on what the acceptable atmospheric CO2 concentration is? Both extremes (human extinction) to (what, me worry?) are rather naive. There's a range in the middle that's realistic, and frankly, I don't have the foggiest idea what is the right CO2 setpoint.
The hard environmental limit that's much more interesting to me is Nitrogen intensity. Higher nitrogen intensity has a side-effect of promoting biomass growth, which in turn ties up more atmospheric carbon. I try very hard to be conscious of the many different sides of these arguments, and the conclusion I come to is that while most other resources and economies require a 'do less, use less' going forward, there are a couple of major exceptions, in which exponential 10% per year economic growth is not only possible, but absolutely necessary for the rest of the world to be able to make systemic economic change a reality. These things are, in order of increasing growth and monetizable return potential (aka, Venture Capitial investor attractiveness):

• Direct farm-to-table markets. This is the downtown farmers markets, and all kinds of new ideas which have yet to be developed and deployed. But they will be small-scale, small-business, and local oriented. Bottom-up approaches that come out of social interactions made possible by the global social networking software in bullet 2.
• Information/software/computer technology. Every product cycle, we pack more transistors on the same area of silicon, and this makes the resulting computing devices, software, and user applications more effective, capable, and productive using less resources for the same work as the last product cycle. Now mind you, the total work keeps increasing, so the end result is a slight uptick in net electrical power usage.. This is no problem, so long as the electricity is new renewable generation. (see bullet 3)
  
• Wind energy. Even with a 15% discount rate, wind energy has a net Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of better than 6.. and gets better the lower the discount rate is. In other words, if you want long-term energy production, put up a wind turbine. Then your problem is that wind energy is generally not close to the existing loads. So exporting wind energy as bits on a fiber optic line (bullet 2), or as tankers of ammonia (bullet 4), now we've decoupled the location from the point of use, just like oil has allowed huge economic growth for the first half of the 20th century.
• Electrically driven NH3 (ammonia) production. I'm putting my time and energy into Freedom Fertilizer because every indication I have is that this is going to be possibly the only growth area in anything that resembles large industry. There will be huge new economies created with what I reference in bullet 1. But NH3 is the only large scale thing I have come across in which the fundamental physics of mass transport and energy availability actually work out. Maybe someday WindFuels will work out, but this requires a point high concentration CO2 source. Ammonia needs air (78% Nitrogen), water (Hydrogen), and wind (energy). And with the available energy, taking 'dirty' water and distilling it is a very minor cost compared to getting the hydrogen out.
  

Natural Gas Futures

What is the future of natural gas? According to the every-so-infallible oracle of the markets (sarcasm), December 2023 natural gas futures are trading at $7.6 per MMBTU. This appears to be a 5.5% inflation rate if I did my math right. But who knows, when I started working on this project, I thought $10/MMBTU was pretty darn cheap, and that we'd have broken ground on a 100MW ammonia plant by now. This just goes to show one should never trust market futures any farther than you can throw a ton of the commodity being traded.

But I'm still a little confused.. I called up a farmer the other day and pitched the wind to ammonia idea. He wasn't particularly interested, which I can deal with. But what got me was he said he heard a presentation of a fertilizer dealer talking about how fertilizer is just going to get cheaper. I suppose I can understand how that could happen.. One would expect the big ammonia fertilizer manufacturers should be building new plants in the US to capitalize on the shale gas boom(s), which will cause new capacity, and new competition. But, the only buying that's been going on in the last few months has been fertilizer manufacturers buying each other, not plants.

This reminds me of a story I heard of a 'stranded' large ammonia plant (with local natural gas, but no pipelines) getting sold, and the seller said "Oh sure, there are plenty of natural gas reserves to run the plant for a long time". One (smart) buyer says "Okay, we're not smart guys, will you guarantee the reserves" (smart) seller replies "Oh, no way". Plant gets sold to buyer number 2 who thinks they are smart (but apparently not smart enough to have a petroleum geologist on staff to audit the supposed reserve numbers), and the plant runs out of gas in a couple years, well before the cost of the plant is paid off. Seller (and smart non-buyer) quietly laugh all the way to the bank.

What's the point here? Well, new large NH3 plants likely have the same (long) payback times of 8 to 12 years that our small-scale Nitrefinery wind to Ammonia plant will. So none are getting built because nobody is silly enough to guarantee a 15-20 year gas contract at $4/mmbtu. Sure it's cheap now, what about in 3 years when the production on all the recent shale gas plays slows down, and demand for oil in China and India picks up, causing more natural gas truck conversions?

I'm not really hear to argue peak natural gas or shill about rising prices. If someone can actually produce me a 20 year contract for $4/mmbtu natgas, I'd go line up financing for a wind farm with integrated combustion engine natural gas generation and then stick some Nitrefineries along with it for even more integration benefits.

What I am here for is to attempt to explain this whole system in a straightforward way, and how wind energy to ammonia on a large scale is inevitable.. it's just a matter of will it be today, or 5 years from now, and that mostly depends on finding someone with an appropriately sized checkbook who understands the issues. We've finally managed to put everything together, and now we need to connect the last dot - Who will own unit serial #00001?

"Holistic Engineering" The Gulf Oil Spill vs Ammonia

As reported by slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2251130/

...
The best responses to unlikely events take a holistic look at the problem, says Harrald. Rare events "raise opportunities to look at whole systems and get the political will and public support to do something about it." In this case, that might mean not only examining the safety of tankers and oil rigs, but also reducing our dependence on oil in favor of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar. But that might be the most unlikely event of all.
...

Cleanup is expected to cost over $12.5 billion.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/new-economy/2010/0503/BP-oil-spill-2010-How-much-will-it-cost

Some versions of my business card say "Holistic Engineer". Seems quite appropriate.. For less than 1/100th the cost of the cleanup, (say $125million), I can start construction on a 150MW electrically driven ammonia plant, and make a renewable, environmentally safe fuel to replace petroleum. If you have a large ammonia spill.. It's not something to laugh at.. it's quite dangerous. But once the ammonia has evaporated, or been recovered, it doesn't hang around in the soil or the groundwater causing cancer. Plants literally eat it up. It's fertilizer.

When's the last time you heard of an ammonia tanker leaking? If that happened in the gulf, you'd likely have the mother of all algae blooms for a few weeks, it it would be quite a bad deal. For a few weeks, or maybe a year. But we are going to be cleaning up oil sludge from this platform for the next 20 years. And we'll be dealing with the carbon dioxide released from burning that oil for
likely the next 50 years.

And what, you ask, of the hypoxia (dead zone) in the gulf of mexico, from fertilizer runoff? Well first, the cause of fertilizer runoff is that farmers get paid to grow corn, and ammonia makes corn grow. So when the market conditions change so that my father's farm gets a higher price for corn grown with less nitrate runnoff, then the nitrate runoff will stop. Or just measure the runoff and set a threshold. Above the threshold you get a tax/expense. Below the threshold you get a credit. Or just consider that we grow about twice as much corn using the same amount of ammonia as we did when we started applying ammonia 50 years ago.

Right now though, frankly, the petroleum is a bigger problem, so I'm focusing on the big problems first, and will work back down through nitrate runoff once we have sustainable fertilizer.

-- Troy Benjegerdes
Holistic Engineer / Chief Technology Officer
Freedom Fertilizer
troy@freedomfertilizer.com

Comments from Troy Benjegerdes Technology Officer at Freedom Fertilizer

When I came across the potential that wind to ammonia could actually be real, and did the back of the envelope calculations as to how much load we could realistically be controlling, all the discussion about forecasting,dispatch, and everything else is purely an academic discussion.

Ammonia production widely deployed will smooth out the lowest cost down to whatever price point we decide to turn on full rate production. If we deploy the same software we use to control the ammonia plant to municipal utilities to dispatch their diesel (or ammonia) fueled generators, that will then set the peak price point for any node with both ammonia production load, and generation.

All of the other complicated stuff that everyone else is trying to sell is just *NOT* needed. Electrolysis, haber-bosch, and old-fashioned diesel cycle engine technolgy is all that's needed. Oh, plus some open source process control software, and interfaces to MISO.

Small-scale SOM units are a way to prove the concept out, because right now nobody would ever loan money for a 100MW/$100Million dollar ammonia plant, and DOE is too caught up in fancy new stuff of the day and academic discussions to even understand why simple back of the envelope calculations and an electrically driven ammonia pilot plant are necessary.

It's not just simple, it's so stupid simple nobody seems to be able to be dumb enough to actually see it.

Freedom Fertilizer mentioned in Farm Industry News

USING WIND POWER TO PRODUCE ANHYDROUS AMMONIA

Mar 1, 2010 12:00 PM, By Rhonda Brooks

New technology may reduce U.S. reliance on imported natural gas

UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS are harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity, which may contribute to moderate-priced anhydrous ammonia fertilizer for U.S. farmers.

A pilot project, five years in the making, is finally under way at the University of Minnesota, according to Mike Reese, the renewable energy director at the UM west-central research and outreach center. “The project entails using wind power to drive a water electrolysis system to produce hydrogen and an air separations unit to pull nitrogen from air,” Reese says. “The hydrogen and nitrogen are then combined in an advanced catalytic reactor, also developed at the university, to produce ammonia.” Ultimately, he adds, “we believe that producing anhydrous ammonia from electrical means will be cheaper than using natural gas to produce it.”

The wind-based technology could drastically reduce the dependence the U.S. has on fertilizer made from natural gas imported from China, India and Russia, which combined accounts for about 50% of the natural gas produced worldwide.

In the process, the U.S. may be better able to minimize the wild price swings in anhydrous ammonia fertilizer that farmers have experienced the past two years. In early February of this year, anhydrous ammonia fertilizer costs were running roughly $500/ton. But two years ago, the costs were about $1,300/ton.

According to the UM Web site, “Initial estimates imply that switching to this method of production would utilize over 2 gigawatts of wind power statewide and would keep $300 million within the state of Minnesota.”

Ammonia production may open a market for “stranded wind” energy, which is potential wind energy that is not developed because it is not near an urban or industrial center. Freedom Fertilizer, based in northwest Iowa, is working with stranded wind with the intent of producing cost-effective ammonia. Steve Gruhn, Freedom Fertilizer business owner and developer, says, “This approach will help provide energy and cost independence for Iowa communities who have had no choice recently but to buy expensive imported ammonia produced with natural gas.” However, the current transmission infrastructure is insufficient to move wind power to urban areas and will need to be developed.

Reese says the Minnesota project, funded by the state and the University of Minnesota, will be fully operational by December.