Via the Washington Post, bad news about the state of ammonium nitrate storage around the world:
(So here's what I don't get: suppose that you seize a kajillion tons of ammonium nitrate - now what? Where are you going to put it? How will it actually be consumed/gotten rid of safely? Isn't that the problem with the Beirut situation, i.e. now you have it, it's in your warehouses, and you can't figure out where to put it?)
(Also: does anyone know why ammonium nitrate is the fertilizer of choice? Is it just sheer low cost, or is it a combination of low cost and high nitrogen content? Any chance for us to figure out a safer way to deliver nitrogen to the soil?)
Ports around the world are working to remove potentially dangerous chemicals, sometimes stored in huge quantities, following an explosion in Beirut this month that left at least 180 people dead, thousands injured and hundreds of thousands displaced.
Officials in Dakar, Senegal’s capital city, announced Thursday they had requested the removal of almost 3,000 U.S. tons of ammonium nitrate from the city’s port — a larger volume of the chemical compound that caused Beirut’s explosion.
Last week, Romanian officials at the Black Sea port of Agigea said they had found a single warehouse illegally holding about 5,000 tons of ammonium nitrate. A further 3,800 tons of the compound had been found in raids across the country, police said in a statement.
...Other ports have seen similar problems. In India’s Chennai, port officials acknowledged this month they had been storing more than 800 tons of ammonium nitrate since its seizure in 2015. Some of the load was moved to Hyderabad via trucks last week. According to newspaper the Hindu, 10 containers were taken, accompanied by guards and the trucks equipped with dry chemical powder fire extinguishers.I like the idea of giving the trucks fire extinguishers - yes, that will take care of it.
(So here's what I don't get: suppose that you seize a kajillion tons of ammonium nitrate - now what? Where are you going to put it? How will it actually be consumed/gotten rid of safely? Isn't that the problem with the Beirut situation, i.e. now you have it, it's in your warehouses, and you can't figure out where to put it?)
(Also: does anyone know why ammonium nitrate is the fertilizer of choice? Is it just sheer low cost, or is it a combination of low cost and high nitrogen content? Any chance for us to figure out a safer way to deliver nitrogen to the soil?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_assimilation
ReplyDeleteSo basically it directly feeds into the nitrogen cycle for the plants to absorb and use directly. The issue is that nitrates are also the culprits for a big badda boom (remember how nasty nitric acid is?). Nitrites can react with ammonium to give N2 gas so that undos the hard work from nitrogen fixation so that's not so good. NOx is a big NO-NO (pun intended) for safety and practical reasons.
Low cost, high nitrogen content, exceedingly high mass efficiency, essentially native/endogeneous, easy to handle solid, enough reasons to overlook the big-badda-boom part I guess.
Thanks! This is very useful.
Delete@ Anonymous below: Urea is very good. More mass efficient than ammonium nitrate actually and handles equally well without any booming issue. Maybe from a chemist's standpoint it's slower since it needs to be hydrolyzed, whereas ammonium nitrate goes directly into the nitrogen assimilation cycle? It's pH neutral too so that can be a big plus (compared to ammonium nitrate or ammonia solutions). Also why peeing on plants is often said to be good for plants.
DeleteIf you add phosphoric acid to urea then you get urea phosphate (it's a solid) which apparently is a wonderful inorganic fertilizer, and you can dope with various trace metals to enhance it. It's acidic though, unsurprisingly.
People also use urea and liquid ammonia.
ReplyDeleteI can remember working on the farm where we used anhydrous (pre chemist days). At that point I had no idea what it was...I just knew it was dangerous.
DeleteTragically you've got tons (literally) of industrial fertilizer sitting in storage in countries where many farmers don't have access to modern industrial fertilizers and cost of food/food shortages are high/common. "Water, water everywhere. Not a drop to drink."
ReplyDeleteThey should make it available to farmers in their countries.