- Minnesota spends upwards of a billion dollars a year on anhydrous ammonia fertilizer as as a whole state.

None of it is made in Minnesota except the small amount that we're making here at this pilot plant.

We've been doing renewable energy research here at the West Central Research and Outreach Center since 2005, when that first wind turbine went up.

Some of that idea was what could we do to provide jobs and income for people in rural areas?

And one thing we have is a lot of energy.

We have wind energy out here in West central Minnesota.

And then it was like, well, could we do something with it?

Could we make some product that would be useful locally?

As far as we know, this was actually the first site of a wind to hydrogen to ammonia plant.

Whenever the wind is blowing and we don't need that electricity, we could electrolyze water and make hydrogen, and then later on we could take that hydrogen and burn it in a generator and make electricity again.

So it was a way to store energy.

We decided we could use that hydrogen to make ammonia.

And anhydrous ammonia is a primary fertilizer that goes on the corn fields all around Minnesota.

- This here is our serial number one, our ammonia production unit.

We have this built for us specifically for this project.

So we'll bring that stored hydrogen, anhydrogen, pass it through some regulators, then pass it through a compressor.

And this compressor is just basically a pump pushing the airflow.

Flows through four exchangers, one, two, three, four.

As it passes, leaves four, then it goes through that horizontal unit right there, that's just electric heater.

Heats us up this hydrogen nitrogen up to about 820 degrees Fahrenheit.

Where then it passes into this device right here, this vessel, this is our ammonia production vessel.

It goes at 820 degrees, comes out at 975 degrees, roughly 15 to 20% of that ammonia or hydrogen and nitrogen become ammonia.

- This is looks like a very complicated piece of equipment, but it's really like when you are a kid and you have the chemistry set, as a possible Christmas present, this is kind of a giant version of that.

Probably half the people in the world wouldn't have food if it wasn't for synthetic ammonia.

Haber and Bosch, German scientists won the Nobel Prize for this development.

And usually when people kind of think about things that humans have done, this is in the top five.

And most anhydrous ammonia fertilizer is made at these what are called world scale plants.

Super large plants make thousands of tons a day.

This by comparison, makes about 25 tons a years, is what it was designed for.

Just enough ammonia for our farm field, which is under a thousand acres.

(country music) The idea, the model on this was sort of an idea that maybe a farmer co-op would be formed.

They could have some wind turbines and generate electricity.

They could have a small plant making ammonia fertilizer that they would then use on their farm fields and kind of have that circular economy going for themselves.

The new inflation reduction act has a incentive to produce green hydrogen.

Green hydrogen means that the hydrogen is made from renewable energy, as opposed to normally it's made from methane or natural gas.

So a lot of the ammonia plants are near the Gulf coast or in places where they have natural gas in abundance, and then it comes up in a pipeline or in a truck, or by ship or barge up into the Midwest.

Current price of ammonia is 600 to $800 a ton.

With this IRA incentive of $3 a kilogram, we're almost, the incentive is almost equal to the cost of production.

That IRA incentive is for 10 years.

If you start five years from now, you can still get that incentive for 10 years.

There's no question that there are going to be hubs of folks making ammonia in the Midwest using renewable energy to get the hydrogen and then nitrogen from the air and making the ammonia.

So just a question about who's gonna do it.

(country music) Another aspect of the research we're doing here at the West Central Research and Outreach Center is looking at the carbon footprint of agriculture.

It turns out that a little over a third of the carbon footprint of growing corn is due to the ammonia fertilizer because of that natural gas used to make the hydrogen.

Another third to 40% of it is in drying the grain.

Another LCCMR project that we just completed was actually using ammonia in a grain dryer.

We converted a grain dryer from natural gas to run on ammonia and demonstrated that as a possibility.

We also finished a project a year and a half ago, maybe now, where we replaced up to 50% of the diesel fuel in a tractor, in a John Deere tractor with ammonia.

Hydrogen is an important element in steel making.

And so that's something that in Northern Minnesota we could possibly be looking at that.

There's a lot of possibilities that kind of stem from this green hydrogen, then going to ammonia, and then going to other fuels, other chemicals, other products.

In 2010, when we first started turning wind energy into hydrogen, and then this ammonia plant went live in 2013, and we're now operating almost a $20 million federal grant to replace this facility with one that will make 15 times more ammonia.

- That's about the size of a co-op or a county wide.

And I mean, and that's kind of the size we're shooting for.

- A model of a plant like this size will be an incentive for maybe farmer co-ops or that kind of level of scale to come around and see if they can't get a piece of that action.

There are some new technologies that some of these larger companies have come up with where they can now ramp the production of ammonia from a hundred percent down to 10% in an hour and back up again to a hundred percent.

That's what's gonna be tested here.

You can follow wind as we like to say, or follow the sun, make it during the day and and not at night.

That has a potential to really lower the cost of production for ammonia fertilizer.

(lively music) Minnesota has great wind resource, especially in Western and southwestern Minnesota.

We have excellent solar resources, but what we do not have is any fossil fuels.

So we don't have any coal in Minnesota.

There's no natural gas.

And so those precursor items to make to get to hydrogen don't exist in Minnesota.

By using renewable energy in a site like this, everything is right here, and we're making the product that goes right on that cornfield.

The idea of making a product like ammonia fertilizer is very attractive in places where you have excess renewable resources, especially wind.

We've had a group from New Zealand out here that's very interested in doing some research here, or perhaps even purchasing this original reactor when we put the new one in.

We've also had farmer groups from the Dakotas out.

So every where place where we're burning something, if we could use electricity instead, that is the shortest path to really reducing our carbon footprint because we can put in wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal dams, hydropower, all of these kind of things, we can make the electric grid less carbon intensive faster than we can do anything else.

And that's the beauty of this green ammonia, it's a drop in replacement.

It doesn't change anything the farmer is doing, they're just using a green ammonia instead of an ammonia made from natural gas.

Almost a billion dollars a year that Minnesotan spend on ammonia fertilizer could potentially someday stay in the state.

- One of the first ethanol plants in the world are actually right here at this facility at the West Central Research and Outreach Center.

So now you look at it today, how you have ethanol plants over the Midwest.

Well that started in the early late '70s, early '80s.

Well, we started this in 200s, 2010s, what's gonna happen 20 or 30 years from now?

Are we gonna have ammonia facilities all over the site and say, Hey, we started that right here at the West Central Research and Outreach Center as well.

So I think that's really neat.

These small towns are dying, all the kids are going to the cities and they're staying there.

And these towns out here getting smaller and smaller.

Well, if we can bring jobs out here, we can bring a vibrant economy back to the rural areas.