Flipping the Switch on Ammonia Production.

• Position: CHEMISTRY - Haber-Bosch process

Nearly a century ago, German chemist Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a process to generate ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gases. The process, still in use today, ushered in a revolution in agriculture, but now consumes around one percent of the world's energy to achieve the high pressures and temperatures that drive the chemical reactions to produce ammonia.

However, chemists at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, employ a different method, utilizing enzymes derived from nature, which generates ammonia at room temperature. As a bonus, the reaction also produces a small electrical current.

Although chemistry and materials science and engineering professor Shelley Minteer and postdoctoral scholar Ross Milton only have been able to produce small quantities of ammonia so far, their method could lead to a less energy-intensive source of the ammonia used worldwide as a vital fertilizer. "It's a spontaneous process, so rather than having to put energy in, it's actually generating its own electricity," Minteer points out.

To make ammonia, which consists of one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms, chemists must break the...