Environmental Impact and Sustainability Aspects of Plasma‐Based Nitrogen Fixation

Plasma-assisted nitrogen fixation (PANF) is not just a recent fancy research conception but was on industrial scale as early as 1903 in Norway. The plasma-assisted Birkeland-Eyde process turned commercial, just before the Haber-Bosch process was developed, which surpassed it by better energy efficiency. Proper energy use remains the issue of today's window of opportunity for PANF. While plasma processes have improved in energy efficiency considerably in the past century, the Haber-Bosch process has advanced as well. Life cycle assessment is able to quantify the environmental advantages of PANF assuming best-case scenarios, yet that momentum is not strong enough to compensate current economic and scale-up disadvantages of PANF. As a way out of this dilemma, this chapter informs about “what else” is needed to support industrial use of PANF besides improving energy efficiency to push PANF as business model and boundaries in scale-up. The role of renewable energy and distributed small-scale production is determined as a key lever as well as establishing recycling, circularity, and cost-internalization. To make use of those momenta, a change in the business model of N-fixation, and beyond that in the agricultural use of fertilizers, is needed, which finally extends the economic–environmental perspective of the fate of PANF into societal-governance decision-making.