The closure of Britain’s last Haber-Bosch plant, which produced ammonia vital for the creation of fertilisers and explosives, symbolises the country’s growing dependence on imports and the broader trend of deindustrialization, says Ed Conway in the Times. Here’s an excerpt:
What is the single most consequential invention in modern human history? It’s tempting to vote for the aircraft or the motorcar, or maybe the computer or the internet, but if you ask me it has to be the Haber-Bosch process. This complex chemical reaction, devised by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch in the early 20th century, is not universally famous. Yet nearly half of us wouldn’t be alive without it.
Haber and Bosch, a German scientist and engineer, were the duo who worked out how to capture nitrogen from the air and turn it into ammonia – from which we make fertiliser (and explosives).
Nearly everything you eat will contain nitrogen made this way. Actually it gets wilder than that, because more or less half the nitrogen inside your body (and there’s quite a lot, not least in every strand of your DNA) is nitrogen from a Haber-Bosch plant.
The story of the past century, of a global population swelling to eight billion and beyond without running out of food, is the story of Haber-Bosch. Even if we gave over every acre of available land on this planet to agriculture, we could not grow enough food to keep us all alive without the nitrogen fertilisers made in Haber-Bosch plants. It’s hard to think of anything quite so important for our survival as a species.
Which is why the following piece of news should give us all pause for thought: Britain is shutting down its only remaining Haber-Bosch plant. This may come as a surprise — it hasn’t appeared in a single national newspaper report — but those who work in the business see it as a watershed moment. For the first time in a century this country will become entirely dependent on nitrogen fertiliser imported from abroad.
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