Urea is a Nitrogen


Urea is Made From Natural Gas(LNG)

100,000,000 tons per year produced worldwide

Eutrophication of Estuarine and Coastal Zones

Global Consumption of Urea is mostly in the form of meat

Ammonia/Urea/Plastic

One Caveat: Use dated material accordingly: 030507

Urea is a Nitrogen Fertilizer Made From Natural Gas - LNG

Urea is used as a nitrogen-release fertilizer, it hydrolyzes back to ammonia and carbon dioxide, but its most common impurity, biuret, must be present at less than 2%, as it impairs plant growth. It is also used in many multi-component solid fertilizer formulations. Its action of nitrogen release is due to the conditions favoring the reagent side of the equilibriums, which produce urea.

Urea is usually spread at rates of between 40 and 300 kg/ha
1 ha = 2.471 acres
88 and 660 lbs/2.471 acres
a hectare is 10,000 square meters or an area of square measurement 100 meters on a side
Actual spreading rates will vary according to farm type and region. Several small to medium applications at intervals minimize leaching losses and increase efficient use of the N applied, compared with single heavy applications. During summer, urea should be spread just before, or during rain to reduce possible losses from volatilization (process wherein nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as ammonia gas).

In irrigated crops, urea can be applied dry to the soil, or dissolved and applied through the irrigation water. Urea will dissolve in its own weight in water, but it becomes increasingly difficult to dissolve as the concentration increases. Dissolving urea in water is endothermic, causing the temperature of the solution to fall when urea dissolves



Of the three macronutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) commonly found in manufactured fertilizers, nitrogen fertilizers require the greatest amount of energy to produce. Natural gas is a major input in the manufacture of nitrogen (N), both as a source of energy and as a supply of hydrogen (H) to form the ammonia (NH3) molecule. To industrially fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and produce anhydrous ammonia requires the consumption of approximately 1,050 m3 (37,100 cu. ft.) of natural gas for every tonne (t) of anhydrous ammonia produced. This readily explains the strong relationship that exists between the price of natural gas and the cost of manufactured nitrogen fertilizers. Ammonia produced using natural gas is used as an input for the manufacture of many of the other common nitrogen fertilizers, including ammonium sulphate, urea, diammonium phosphate (DAP) and monoammonium phosphate (MAP).
Excerpts from  http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/engineer/facts/06-059.htm

Urea is a nitrogen-containing chemical product that is produced on a scale of some 100,000,000 tons per year worldwide. For use in industry, urea is produced from synthetic ammonia and carbon dioxide. Urea can be produced as prills, granules, flakes, pellets, crystals, and solutions. More than 90% of world production is destined for use as a fertilizer. Urea has the highest nitrogen content of all solid nitrogenous fertilizers in common use (46.7%) and it has the lowest transportation costs per unit of nitrogen nutrient.
Monday, March 05, 2007
In a letter to the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Chairman Waxman

Urea is commercially produced from two raw materials, ammonia, and carbon dioxide. Large quantities of carbon dioxide are produced during the manufacture of ammonia from coal or from hydrocarbons such as natural gas and petroleum-derived raw materials. This allows direct synthesis of urea from these raw materials.

With 15 nations accounting for 84% of the world-wide production, access to natural gas has become a significant factor in international economics and politics. In this respect, control over the pipelines is a major strategic factor.
from Contours of the New Cold War



The world's revolution in agricultural production was made possible in large part by irrigation and the increased use of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers. (The precise contribution of fertilizers to raising yields is still unclear, but is estimated at between 35 and 50 per cent.) Fertilizers contribute to increased crop production and new, high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice have been bred specially to utilize more nitrogen and convert it into more grain. Increased yields have accounted for more than 80 percent of the growth in cereal production in the developing countries.

Modern agriculture is the leading source of anthropogenic (human origin) nitrogen entering the environment. Inorganic nitrogen fertilizers are an essential input to maintaining high crop yields. They cannot readily be substituted and fertilization must probably increase in the future if we are to feed a still-growing world population. In addition, meat consumption is rising world-wide and the numbers of livestock, and associated volumes of nitrogen-rich manure, will rise too.

In the past decade, we have greatly advanced our understanding of the global nitrogen cycle, and it has become clear that human addition of nitrogen to the environment is disrupting entire ecosystems across a wide geographical range. What have usually been considered as distinct problems - for example, eutrophication of surface waters, or acidification of lakes and forest soils - should be seen as symptoms of a more universal assault on the global environment. The global scale of nitrogen pollution is, at present, under-appreciated. Policy responses to the challenge of meeting future food needs without further unbalancing biological systems remain under-developed. There is a need for more longterm and coordinated thinking, and the closest analogy lies with the emergence of international efforts to manage the world's energy system and excessive emissions of carbon. Disruption of the global nitrogen cycle now appears to warrant the same degree of attention.

Trends in Nitrogen Fertilizer Use

Global consumption of fertilizer has risen spectacularly, increasing tenfold between 1950 and 1989. The steep drop in consumption after that date was due principally to collapsing demand in the former Soviet Union, and Central and Eastern Europe, but there was also a substantial fall in Western Europe, caused by grain surpluses, low crop prices, and saturated markets. The increasing share of nitrogen in the global fertilizer mix becomes clear after about 1960, and the bias is most strongly pronounced in the developing countries, where nitrogen now accounts for 66 percent of fertilizers consumed, compared with 55 percent in the developed countries. The bias towards nitrogen fertilizers has been encouraged in part by increased production in areas where cheap natural gas is available (including major consuming regions such as South Asia and China) and in part by the perception that nitrogen delivers the most spectacular yield gains, at least initially.

In 1960, the developing countries accounted for just 12 percent of all consumption; today the figure is nearly 60 percent. Fertilizer use in the developing world has been fuelled by rapid population growth and growing demand for food grains. This is especially true of Asia, where the scope for land expansion is limited. By contrast, the industrialized countries (with the exception of the former Soviet Union) increased their fertilizer consumption only marginally after 1980. Asia is now the dominant player, accounting for 50 percent of world fertilizer consumption, and 86 percent of developing country consumption.

A second trend of key importance in the story of food consumption and the nitrogen cycle is the growing popularity of meat and dairy products in the human diet. With rising income, consumers choose to eat more meat; still greater affluence and concerns for a healthy lifestyle seem to encourage a shift from red meat to poultry. Meat production world-wide has tripled since 1961, reaching 213 million tons in 1997, with output gains concentrated in the United States, the European Union, and China. Individual consumption remains highest in the industrialized world. Average per capita meat consumption in the United States was 118 kg/year in 1996, while the average for the developed world as a whole was 76 kg/person/ year. Average per capita consumption in the developing countries was 24 kg/year but the picture is rapidly changing in many parts of South America and Asia. For example, the Chinese each consumed 41 kg of meat in 1996, up from 20 kg/ year just a decade earlier. Total meat consumption in the developing countries just exceeds that in the developed world and, in internationally traded meat and meat products, there is a small net inflow to the developing countries.

To meet growing demand, the world's livestock population has boomed. Cattle numbers rose by 40 percent between 1961 and 1997, pigs by 130 percent and chickens by 246 percent. The world today is home to 13.5 billion chickens. In industrialized countries, animals traditionally reared on rangelands or in farmyards are now increasingly concentrated in intensive feedlots, where they are fed on cereals and commercial preparations of grain, animal protein, and fish meal. This trend, in turn, is leading to the concentration of huge volumes of manure, which cannot economically be redistributed back to areas where the cereals were originally grown. The nitrogen component of manure varies according to the animal and its diet but a crude global estimate is that approximately 32 million tons of nitrogen (derived from fodder crops and forage) are deposited into the environment via manure each year.

Where animals are still free-ranging, manure may act as a fertilizer. Where animals are concentrated in feedlots, manure is increasingly viewed as a waste disposal problem. Data for the United States indicate that, of nearly 160 million tons of manure produced annually, some 60 percent is excreted directly onto pasture and cropland, while 40 percent is collected from animals in confinement and must somehow be disposed of. Except for chicken farms, concentration of livestock in feedlots is not yet the norm in developing countries.

Although nitrogen is the most abundant element in the atmosphere, it cannot be used by plants - and the animals that depend on them - until it is chemically transformed, or fixed, into ammonium or nitrate compounds that plants can metabolize. In natural systems, this function is performed by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil and, to a much lesser extent, by lightning.

Such biological nitrogen fixation is believed to provide somewhere between 90 and 140 million tonnes of nitrogen to terrestrial systems each year. Humans have wrought major changes over the last 50 years. The advent of intensive agriculture, increasing fossil fuel combustion, and the cultivation of leguminous crops and other nitrogen-fixing plants have led to huge additional quantities of nitrogen deposited into terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and the atmosphere. It is estimated that human activities have more than doubled the amount of nitrogen available for uptake by plants. Land clearance, wetland drainage and burning of biomass also liberate nitrogen from long-term biological storage pools such as soil organic matter and tree trunks; these activities could emit up to another 70 million tons of nitrogen each year.

Marine Ecosystems

Eutrophication of estuarine and coastal zones has emerged as an immense and growing problem in recent years. Over 40 million tonnes of nitrogen, in dissolved and particulate form, are transported by the world's rivers into estuaries and coastal waters each year - double the pre-industrial rate. Unlike freshwater systems, where phosphorous is usually the limiting growth factor, nitrogen is usually the limiting growth factor in saline waters. Additional nitrogen can therefore promote huge algal blooms and significant oxygen depletion (hypoxia) in lower-depth waters. Some of the best-documented examples of coastal eutrophication come from the United States. According to a recent survey, 52 percent of the nation's estuaries suffer from some degree of oxygen depletion.

The worst affected area is the Gulf of Mexico, where 85 percent of estuaries are affected. In the most dramatic example, a so-called "dead zone" of 16,000-18,000 km2 has developed where the Mississippi River discharges into the Gulf. Fish and shrimp have disappeared from the area, threatening the local fishing industry, while less mobile life-forms, such as starfish and clams, have died. Scientists have linked the growth of the dead zone to nitrogen fertilizers and livestock manure from farms hundreds of miles upstream. More than half the 11 million tonnes of nitrogen added to the Mississippi Basin annually come from fertilizer, and only about 50 percent is taken up by plants. Nearly 2 million tonnes of nitrogen flow down the Mississippi each year, more than triple the amount 40 years ago and the dead zone has ebbed and flowed consistently with peak river discharges and the associated nutrient flux. The Mississippi dead zone is one of more than 50 similar oxygen-starved coastal regions which now exist world-wide, a threefold increase over the past 30 years.

Coastal zones are among the world's richest fishing grounds, unchecked agricultural run-off poses a serious threat to commercially important fish stocks. Nitrogen pollution is blamed in part for the collapse of the Baltic Sea cod fisheries in the early 1990s, as well as major fish kills (and associated human illness) following outbreaks of Pfiesteria, such as that affecting the Chesapeake Bay, in the United States, in the summer of 1997. Toxic algal blooms, known as "red tides" or "brown tides" are growing world-wide in frequency and severity, damaging offshore fisheries and causing losses to aquaculture enterprises.

The world's population is projected to grow to about 7.3 billion by 2020, with over 90 percent of the increase occurring in developing countries. More people will eat more food, and more protein since, as already described, people almost invariably choose diets which are richer in meat and dairy products as their incomes rise. This will require more cereal to be grown per capita: nearly 40 percent of total grain production is already fed to livestock and the grain-to-protein conversion efficiency is low, lying between 2:1 (chickens) and 7:1 (feedlot cattle). The International Food Policy Research Institute has recently projected that global demand for cereals will increase by 41 percent between 1993 and 2020, and that meat demand will rise 63 percent to 306 million tons.

Analysts at the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) have made detailed projections of future fertilizer demand, and come to a problematic conclusion. Their "real world" projection takes into account various economic and non-economic variables, such as foreign exchange availability, crop and fertilizer prices, the development of irrigation and other infrastructure, and the impact of policy reforms. On this basis, global consumption of fertilizer is projected to rise from 134 million tons today to 208 million tons in 2020.

This substantial increase might not be enough, however. The IFDC's second projection is based on food production needs, that is, the amount of fertilizer needed to grow 2.5 billion tons of cereal or more. This leads to global fertilizer consumption in 2020 of 263 million tons, and nitrogen consumption of some 160 million tonnes (assuming today's NPK ratio does not change). The fertilizer "shortfall" in developing countries might be as much as 64 million tons. A third projection is based on "sustainable farming" needs, or the amount of fertilizer needed to maintain nutrient reserves in the soil at their initial levels. The projection is based on assumptions about nutrient uptake efficiency for various crops, expected improvements by the year 2020 in different world regions and the proportion of crop residues which are returned to the soil. Under this scenario, producing enough grain to feed the world, without mining the soil of its nutrients, would require application of 366 million tonnes of fertilizer; the proportion of nitrogen would probably decrease but would still be substantial. The fertilizer shortfall in developing countries is estimated at 130 million tonnes.
from the 2007 UN FAO report, and IFDC report



The primary use of ammonia gas is in the fertilizer industry, as a direct application fertilizer and as a building block for the manufacture of nitrogen fertilizers, such as urea, ammonium nitrate, ammonium sulfate, ammonium phosphate and nitrogen fertilizer solutions.

It is also used in production of nitric acid and in the fibres and plastics industry for the production of caprolactam, acrylonitrile, hexamethylenediamine, toluene 2,4-isocyanate and melamine. Less important uses include the manufacture of explosives; as a refrigerant in both compression and absorption systems; in the pulp and paper industry; in metal-treating operations, such as the nitriding of steels and bright annealing; in the extraction of certain metals, such as copper, nickel and molybdenum from their ores; in pH control; removal of nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides from stack gases; as a corrosion inhibitor at petroleum refineries and natural gas plants; in the rubber industry for the stabilization of natural and synthetic latex; in the food and beverage industry; as a curing agent in making leather; manufacture of moth proofing; in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, dentifrices, lotions and cosmetics; in the manufacture of household ammonia, detergents and cleaners; in combination with chlorine to purify industrial and municipal water supplies; in the manufacture of numerous organic and inorganic chemicals, such as cyanides, amides and dye intermediates; and as a precipitant in uranium concentrate production.



Monday, March 05, 2007
In a letter to the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency  Chairman Waxman discloses that documents the Committee has received raise new questions about how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is handling the air permit application for the BHP Billiton liquefied natural gas (LNG) floating storage and re-gasification project off the coast of Ventura County, California.

September 6, 2007
Chairman Waxman wrote to Secretary Kempthorne to question the Department of Interior's refusal to comply with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 requirement to study the effects of coal bed natural gas production on surface and ground water resources in six western states, and insisted that the Department comply with the law.