Haber-Bosch Process

The Haber-Bosch process is the main industrial method for producing ammonia, combining atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen over an iron catalyst so the ammonia can be used chiefly as nitrogen fertilizer. The German chemist Fritz Haber, working with his assistant Robert Le Rossignol, first demonstrated the reaction at laboratory scale in the summer of 1909, producing ammonia at a rate of about 125 milliliters per hour; the chemical company BASF then purchased the technology and assigned the chemist and engineer Carl Bosch to scale it up for industrial production, which he achieved by 1910. The first industrial ammonia plant opened at BASF's Oppau site in Germany in 1913 and was producing 20 tonnes a day by 1914, output that let Germany manufacture synthetic nitrates for munitions after Allied naval blockades cut off its natural saltpeter supply during the First World War; Haber received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and Bosch received the 1931 prize for his high-pressure chemistry work scaling it up.