The Haber-Bosch process is like a super important recipe that helped feed the world!
Two smart guys, Fritz Haber, and Carl Bosch, came up with it about a hundred years ago.
They figured out how to take nitrogen from the air and hydrogen and turn it into ammonia.
This might not sound that exciting, but ammonia is used to make fertilizer which helps plants grow better.
Think about it like this: nitrogen is like food for plants, but the nitrogen in the air is locked away in a form plants can’t use.
The Haber-Bosch process is like a key that unlocks the nitrogen, making it into a form plants can eat!
But there are some problems. The process needs a lot of energy (like 1% of all the energy we use in the world!) and it also produces a lot of CO2, a gas that’s causing climate change.
So, for over a hundred years, scientists have been trying to find a better way to do this, one that doesn’t use so much energy or make as much CO2.
Chemists have been trying to come up with a fundamentally better way to fix nitrogen for over a century.
Have they finally succeeded?
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