Too Much of a Good Thing: Nutrient Pollution
(PRWEB) July 30, 2015 -- By: John Lacy, P.E.
Almost 80 percent of what you just inhaled was nitrogen. Thanks to waste and bacteria, the limited amount of usable nitrogen returns to the air and soil to begin the process again. If nitrogen doesn’t make it back to the air or soil, fewer plants can grow and that means less animals and people can survive. In order to prevent this, a German chemist figured out in 1909 how to create nitrogen fertilizer from air to feed plants. Today, hydrogen from natural gas and nitrogen from air are combined to make nitrogen fertilizer using this same basic process.
Thanks to fracking and cheap natural gas, our country is the world leader in natural gas production; making us number 2 and 3 in nitrogen fertilizer consumption and production. In fact, the United States applies over 20 million tons of fertilizer each year, with roughly 13 million tons of nitrogen and 5 million tons of phosphorus, respectively.
It’s no surprise that “nutrient pollution is one of America's most widespread, costly and challenging environmental problems, and is caused by excess nitrogen and phosphorus in the air and water,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency website. In 2007, the EPA reported that 1 in every 4 water body impairments was nutrient-related.
As a result, the EPA and state agencies started measuring what the actual and desired nutrient levels were in each waterway. The desired reduction was then divided and assigned to the sewage treatment plants along the waterway. If the waterway nutrient levels needed to be reduced a lot, the amount of reduction could require significant plant modifications to achieve.
Read more: http://www.costelloinc.com/blog
Scott Steiner, On Target Agency, +1 (281) 444-4777, [email protected]
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