Rice-built reactor yields green ammonia and purified water

New reactor system could decarbonize ammonia production, treat nitrate-contaminated water

20-Aug-2024 - Ammonia plays a critical role in sustaining food production for the world’s growing population, but making it accounts for about 2%of global energy consumption and 1.4% of carbon dioxide emissions. Rice University engineers have developed a revolutionary reactor design that could decarbonize ...

Engineers develop general, high-speed technology to model, understand catalytic reactions

08-Aug-2024 - Researchers have been studying the industrial production of ammonia for a century. But they’ve struggled to find ways to improve the low-yield, low-efficiency process. Atmospheric nitrogen, with the aid of an iron catalyst, reacts with hydrogen to produce ammonia. That reaction produces lots of ...

Chemists use the blockchain to simulate over 4 billion chemical reactions essential to the origins of life

“If you asked me two years ago, I’d be thinking we’d need years for this type of work”

26-Jan-2024 - Cryptocurrency is usually “mined” through the blockchain by asking a computer to perform a complicated mathematical problem in exchange for tokens of cryptocurrency. But in research appearing in the journal Chem on January 24, a team of chemists have repurposed this process, asking computers to ...

Microbes could help reduce the need for chemical fertilizers

A coating protects nitrogen-fixing bacteria: Start-up to commercialise coated bacteria for large-scale use in regenerative agriculture

21-Nov-2023 - Production of chemical fertilizers accounts for about 1.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. MIT chemists hope to help reduce that carbon footprint by replacing some chemical fertilizer with a more sustainable source — bacteria. Bacteria that can convert nitrogen gas to ammonia ...

Proman, Mitsubishi sign MoU to develop world-scale ultra low-carbon ammonia plant

19-Oct-2023 - Proman has signed an MoU with Mitsubishi Corporation to explore building a world-scale ultra low-carbon ammonia facility in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The proposed plant would produce approximately 1.2 million tonnes per year of clean ammonia by incorporating state-of-the-art carbon capture and ...

Inexpensive catalyst uses energy from light to turn ammonia into hydrogen fuel

Start-up Syzygy Plasmonics has licensed technology

28-Nov-2022 - Rice University researchers have engineered a key light-activated nanomaterial for the hydrogen economy. Using only inexpensive raw materials, a team from Rice’sLaboratory for Nanophotonics,Syzygy Plasmonics Inc.and Princeton University’sAndlinger Center for Energy and the Environmentcreated ...

Rice process aims to strip ammonia from wastewater

Ruthenium and copper catalyze a more environmentally friendly way to produce essential chemical

04-May-2022 - A dash ofrutheniumatoms on a mesh of copper nanowires could be one step toward a revolution in the global ammonia industry that also helps the environment. Collaborators at Rice University’sGeorge R. Brown School of Engineering,Arizona State Universityand Pacific Northwest National ...

Ammonia synthesis made easy with 2D catalyst

Scientists develop inorganic process for small-scale production

27-Nov-2019 - Rice University researchers have developed an inorganic method to synthesize ammonia that is both environmentally friendly and can produce the valuable chemical on demand under ambient conditions. The Brown School of Engineering lab of materials scientist Jun Lou manipulated a two-dimensional ...

Making ammonia 'greener'

Smaller ammonia processing plants powered by alternative energy

15-Jan-2019 - Ammonia, a compound first synthesized about a century ago, has dozens of modern uses and has become essential in making the fertilizer that now sustains most of our global food production. But while we've been producing ammonia at a large scale since the 1930s, it has been accomplished mainly in ...

Solving a 75-year-old mystery might provide a new source of farm fertilizer

29-Nov-2018 - The solution to a 75-year-old materials mystery might one day allow farmers in developing nations to produce their own fertilizer on demand, using sunlight and nitrogen from the air. Thanks to a specialized X-ray source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, researchers at the Georgia ...