L. David Roper
http://arts.bev.net/RoperLDavid/
29 October, 2011
Ammonia is used to provide nitrogen for crop fertilizers. It is made from natural gas and nitrogen gas taken from the air.
Data for world ammonia production are available at http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/nitrogen/:
The curve is a 2-Verhulst-functions fit to the data:
where
The parameters of the fit are:
Q1 |
1435.7 |
T1/2_1 |
1980.6 |
tau1 |
8.54 |
n1 |
0.08 |
Q2 |
5850.8 |
T1/2_2 |
2012.1 |
tau2 |
11.28 |
n2 |
0.91 |
Since ammonia is made from natural gas it is instructive to plot world-natural-gas extraction with the ammonia production:
With the advent of natural-gas extraction from shale, there is likely to be a large decadal peak for natural-gas extraction. Here is a rough estimate of how large it may be:
If this comes about there will undoubtedly be a future large peak in ammonia production for crops fertilizer to help feed the burgeoning population.