I presume battery storage cost will get to a point where process engineering for generation intermittency won’t be required, whether LFP or sodium chemistry, with an added benefit that the agricultural coop who owns the renewable energy and fertilizer production stack can also get paid for grid services and energy arbitrage using said battery storage.

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/us-energy-storage-installat...

(federal subsidies remain intact for battery storage, as of this comment)

The only chemical inputs a Haber-Bosch plant needs are nitrogen and hydrogen. The nitrogen always comes from air and in this plant the hydrogen comes from electrolysis. The plant also needs electrical power to run compressors, but that can also be supplied by wind and it's minor compared to the embodied energy of the hydrogen input.

Why would the HB plant be powered with fossil fuels? You can power that with wind power as well.

Turns out the article is on the Ammonia Energy Association website, wake up Richard.

We would probably have large scale use of renewable ammonia if fracking hadn't made natural gas so cheap. Natural gas is the largest variable-cost input to making most ammonia (it's processed with steam reforming to generate hydrogen), and in the United States it cost more 20 years ago than it does now:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DHHNGSP

The cost of wind power and solar power have fallen dramatically, but without accounting for the externalities of CO2 emissions, natural gas is still the cheaper way to make ammonia.

There are two camps: people who are fans of Haber Bosch because it feeds most of humanity, and absolute psychopaths.

It's just electrolysing water into hydrogen and then using the hydrogen in a Haber-Bosch reactor with nitrogen from the air to make ammonia. Electrolysis is easy enough to do on a small scale.

Fritz Haber initially demonstrated his process producing 125 milliliters per hour of ammonia in a "tabletop machine", so it's obviously technically possible. Typical process parameters are about 200 bars and 500 degrees C, so it's not trivial but also not outside of what a dedicated hobbyist could reach. I'm pretty sure it's not economically feasible at small scales though. Even the earliest industrial plants in the 1920s made 20 tons of ammonia per day. It will be vastly cheaper to just buy the stuff in bulk from a plant churning out hundreds of tons per day than it will be to make it yourself at a rate of 2 liters per day.

That said, go for it! A factory is just a room, and similarly a chemical reactor is basically just a steel drum.