An Agrichem Blog: The 100th Birthday of the Ammonia Plant

One hundred years ago, next month, the first ammonia plant was built in Germany.  

Ready for a history lesson?  Do you recall the airship (zeppelin) that burned in New Jersey in 1934?  It was the Hindenburg and, although loss of life wasn't massive, it was, and still is, considered a major disaster.  One of the questions I had as a youth was why the Germans stupidly used flammable hydrogen instead of inflammable helium in the Hindenburg.  With helium, the ship would have still dropped to the ground but would not have set off the fireball so famous from period newsreels.  As it turns out "stupidity" had nothing to do with it.  

The reason the Germans used hydrogen will lead us to the reason Karl Bosch built the first ammonia plant in 1913 as strange as that sounds.

For the over forty years leading up to the Hindenberg, the zeppelins all used hydrogen .  The reason had to do with security.  The only place you could find helium in the 1900’s was in the central United States where there are still large deposits.  The zeppelin was a military aircraft and the Germans didn't want to rely on a strategic resource so far removed from Germany and so likely to be disrupted. Hydrogen they had - from chlorine manufacturing to coal gasification, the Germans had plenty of hydrogen.

Some thirty years before the Hindenburg crash, Fritz Haber discovered, in 1903, how to "make ammonia from air". He used plentiful German hydrogen plus air under high pressure to produce a few milliliters of ammonia.  He won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his discovery.

Ten years later, Karl Bosch took Haber's discovery and commercialized it at the IG Fabrikchemie plant in Ludwigshaven, Germany.  Karl also got a Nobel prize.  

Why did it take so long… ten years, until 1913, to use Haber's discovery to make synthetic ammonia? The answer is the same as why the zeppelins used hydrogen instead of helium - security. 

In 1903, when Fritz Haber made ammonia for the first time in his laboratory, it was a time of peace in Germany.  In 1905, though, came the Tangier Crisis where Germany, to antagonize Germany’s centuries-long enemy, France, worked to gain independence for the French colony or Morocco.  Morocco gained independence but at a cost, the French reaction was to mobilize for war.

In 1911 came the Agadir Crisis where France retook Morocco.  War was closer.

In the 1900’s Germany relied on Chilean Saltpeter to make gunpowder - Chilean saltpeter, of course, comes from Chile which is a very long way from Germany.  So, the Germans had a similar problem to the “helium supply”.  They needed a substitute for saltpeter that could be made in Germany.  Enter Karl Bosch.  Using Haber’s process (and catalyst) from ten years earlier, Bosch and Haber built the first synthetic saltpeter plant.

In 1914, World War I began and Germany was ready with plentiful synthetic saltpeter from Ludwigshaven,

Later this month I will tour the original Ludwigshaven plant (now BASF) as part of the celebration of 100 years of ammonia production.  The official announcement, “The Haber-Bosch process for ammonia synthesis, which was first successfully operated here in September 1913, was the decisive step into the age of mineral fertilizers. This innovation became a key driver in the development of the industrialized society and is still securing the nutrition of billions of people today.” is no doubt true as synthetic ammonia has radically enhanced food supplies but… Now you know.