Good question. 3kg of hydrogen makes about 17kg of ammonia. One bushel of corn requires about 0.8 pounds of ammonia.
A bushel of corn weighs about 56 pounds and a pound of corn has about 1566 kilocalories.
Grey hydrogen is about $2/kg (more in Europe right now, about $5/kg not counting CO2 tax), and green hydrogen is about $3-6/kg, depending on your electricity costs.
So one kg of hydrogen produces about 1,367,000 kilocalories, or about 683 days’ worth if you ate just 2000kilocalories of field corn per day. :) A price difference of $1-4/kg for hydrogen means
less than 1¢/day… of course that’s only if you eat just corn at the bottom of the food chain and use efficient agricultural practices… also, everyone gets a cut on the way…
This is truly one of the more interesting HN comments I've read recently. I'm actually surprised how little H goes into a bushel of corn. This really makes the potential future energy tech even more exciting.
Keep in mind that’s for state of the art practices. In much of the world, productivity of food production is an order of magnitude less (corn is pretty much the most productive modern staple crop), and a bushel of corn produces about 6.7 pounds of beef, which is an order of magnitude fewer Calories than the corn you started with. Plus there is food wastage. With inefficient processes, the cost could be two orders of magnitude higher!
So the increase in actual food prices could be far greater than just one cent per day.
A bushel of corn weighs about 56 pounds and a pound of corn has about 1566 kilocalories.
Grey hydrogen is about $2/kg (more in Europe right now, about $5/kg not counting CO2 tax), and green hydrogen is about $3-6/kg, depending on your electricity costs.
So one kg of hydrogen produces about 1,367,000 kilocalories, or about 683 days’ worth if you ate just 2000kilocalories of field corn per day. :) A price difference of $1-4/kg for hydrogen means less than 1¢/day… of course that’s only if you eat just corn at the bottom of the food chain and use efficient agricultural practices… also, everyone gets a cut on the way…