The Haber Process

The Haber process, sometimes called the Haber-Bosch process for Carl Bosch's industrial scale-up, synthesizes ammonia directly from nitrogen and hydrogen gas at high pressure and temperature over an iron-based catalyst. Fritz Haber demonstrated a working laboratory version on 2 July 1909, and BASF, under Bosch's engineering leadership, brought the reaction to industrial scale by 1913. Ammonia made this way is the basis of most synthetic nitrogen fertilizer produced since, and the process is credited by common estimates with sustaining roughly half of current world population by making that fertilizer available at a scale natural nitrogen fixation could never have matched; it is also estimated to consume on the order of one to two percent of global energy output, since running it requires high pressure, high temperature and a continuous supply of hydrogen. Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber each later won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their separate contributions to it, Haber in 1918 for the synthesis itself and Bosch in 1931, jointly with Friedrich Bergius, for high-pressure chemical methods generally.