I've noted before that this is a nonsense phrase used by activists of various shades to hype an anti-fossil fuel agenda, an anti-fertilizer agenda, and/or a we're-all-gonna-die peak oil agenda.

Natural gas, methane, is a common feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer production since it has four nice hydrogen atoms, which is what is of use for fertilizer, and it is used as an energy source for heat and pressure production to enable the catalyzed reactions to take place.

But that's just one way to make ammonia, the simplest type of nitrogen fertilizer. At the turn of the century ammonia was a waste byproduct of coke production from coal that was sold as an industrial chemical and later as fertilizer. This is still so. But coal is still a fossil fuel albeit a much more abundant one. This debunks the peak oil whingers but not the anti-fossil whingers.

The earlier post Fire Down Below noted Iceland's use of geothermal energy and efforts to greatly increase production. One of their proposed uses of all that energy is to make hydrogen from water and export it around the world. They could use that hydrogen to make ammonia fertilizer and export that instead. It might be easier and more profitable.

Any energy system could be used to make hydrogen. We've heard of wind farms planning to use their peak output energies to make hydrogen as a way of storing the energy from intermittent winds. The hydrogen is a sort of battery in the sense of being charged up when the wind blows and drawn down between times, and thus overcoming one of wind's limitations as an energy system. Hydroelectric power has been used to make hydrogen and fertilizer too. All of these energy sources and hydrogen sources use no fossil fuels, just air and water, to make fertilizer.

This won't mollify the anti-nitrogen crowd since the petroleum connection was just a confirmation for an unreasoned bias. They have other equally tenuous supports, most of which have been debunked in earlier posts that explained about how to use nitrogen in smart ways that avoid all of the negative scenarios, and solve negative scenarios associated with agriculture that doesn't use nitrogen fertilizer.

The folio of false ideas about fertilizer is similar to those for biotechnology, nuclear energy and probably nanotechnology too, though that is an emerging squick. Scratch a little deeper and we'll find ambivalence about information and communication technologies too among the same fools. It's important to grasp that these people are not environmentalists. They are "greens" perhaps, but that has precious little to do with environmental preservation and remediation and quite a lot to do with socio-cultural and quasi-religious transcendent ideals that are essentially anti-humanist and anti-environmentalist.

They yearn for the collapse of civilization and a great die off of humanity. They predict such futures, work toward such futures, and take pleasure in every natural disaster since in some convoluted way it confirms their beliefs: some skilled kaleidoscope twirling required.

Real environmentalists are nothing like this. They don't blink reality, they observe carefully and prescribe methods for using all the techniques of humanity to care for the environment. They use nitrogen fertilizer wisely so that soil fertility improves without runoff into ground or surface waters, or excessive release of gasses through denitrification in the soil. Over time this allows the amounts of fertilizer used to decrease while still maintaining high fertility and high production, a critical need since we are using more land than required for food and fiber production, and this puts extra pressure on ecosystem services and reduces biodiversity.

The same is true for nuclear power and all of the components of "NBIC" (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information and communication technology (ICT), and Cognitive science). You have to be lost in space to imagine that these things aren't happening or that you can stop them. The only smart response is to try to influence technological development by inserting environmental concern into decision making processes. Merely opposing - and so failing to participate in decision making - is not helpful, it is abdication.