From baguettes to beer, the world’s leading food and drinks makers are rushing to reduce their carbon footprint by tackling one of the hidden culprits of emissions in their value chains: fertilisers.
Ahead of disclosure rules for greenhouse emissions throughout their supply chains enacted next year, companies including PepsiCo, Heineken and Nestlé have turned to green fertiliser start-ups to help tackle emission levels.
Crop nutrients underpin production of half the world’s food but contribute significant CO₂ emissions at the same time. Fertilisers used for agricultural ingredients account for about 15 per cent of total emissions from beer supply chains and 35-40 per cent for bread, according to industry experts.
Nitrogen-based fertiliser and farm manure make up 5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, producing 2.6bn tonnes of CO₂ a year, more than global aviation and shipping combined, according to research published by the journal Nature Food.
It’s worth noting that one of it not the the largest current uses for hydrogen is for producing ammonia nitrate fertilizers, and that’s currently done with methane steam reformation, which produces an massive amount of co2 compared to the hydrogen. Just getting that demand replaced with green hydrogen would be a massive reduction in co2.
Biggest process-related emissions (i.e. not energy production, transportation, heating etc.): steel, concrete, plastics, and fertilizer. Together they use about 17% of all energy generated. All industrial energy use is about 23% of the total. See https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Milorganite all over again
This stuff is great, but quantities that are available don’t suffice to replace the Haber-Bosch process for production of nitrogen fertilizer.
The bigger plan is the use of green hydrogen as an input to fertilizer manufacture.
That last sentence is rather jarring.
Um… Why do we need to produce fertilizer? Animals make poop pretty easily and compost just needs to be turned frequently to make something to help plants grow.
Seems to me maybe these companies could adopt regenerative farming techniques is they are really concerned.
Animal husbandry is a challenge in and of itself, introduces additional disease vectors, and has a carbon load of its own.
I have composted for a garden for 7 years now, and I have found that I still have to add nitrogen sources and a few other things like bone meal to get productive soil, even with pretty extensive composting. There are probably better composting methods, I’m not an expert, but compost is no silver bullet even at the small scale.
And the scale of commercial farming is mind-blowing, I really don’t know what kind of techniques can be used at scale.
You cannot feed 8 billion people with the arable land that we have available without synthetic fertilizer.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-with-and-without-fertilizer
Even if we were to Thanos snap the world population and feed those people with only compost/manure/night soil, a large percentage of the labor force would need to go into food production, and cheap food would no longer be a possibility.
Farmers are using all the manure that they have available in the most efficient manner that the market will bear right now and even then I don’t know about any for profit farmer in my extension office who doesn’t use additional synthetic fertilizer.
