In light of the targets set out by the Paris Climate Agreement and the global energy sector's ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewables, the chemical industry is searching for innovative ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of ammonia. To address this need, research and development is under way around the world to replace the century-old Haber-Bosch process for manufacturing ammonia from N 2 and H 2 , powered by renewable electricity. This involves replacing H 2 obtained from steam-reformed CH 4 to H 2 that is instead obtained from electrolyzed H 2 O. This transition will enable the changeover from the Haber-Bosch production of NH 3 to electrochemical, plasma chemical, thermochemical, and photochemical generation of NH 3 . If ammonia can eventually be produced directly from N 2 and H 2 O powered by just sunlight, at a technologically significant scale, efficiency, and cost, in a ''solar ammonia refinery,'' green ammonia can change the world! Ammonia Background Fritz Haber, a German chemist, Nobel Laureate in chemistry 1918, invented a way to make the nitrogen in air available to plants by converting it, together with hydrogen, into ammonia. Working with Carl Bosch at BASF in Ludwigshafen, Germany, he developed the heterogeneous catalytic Haber-Bosch process, 1-5 which first operated on an industrial scale for the production of ammonia in 1913. For developing this process, Carl Bosch received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1931. Surprisingly, the best catalyst for the production of ammonia, discovered by Alwin Mittasch, was found to have a composition similar to ''Gallivare'' magnetite, a multi-component iron ore from northern Sweden with a composition composed of Fe 3 O 4 , CaO, Al 2 O 3 , MgO, and Cr 2 O 3 component metal oxides.

Replacing petroleum by biomass can be economically feasible by generating revenue from the three primary biomass constituents.

A process that upgrades biomass-derived sugars to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a value-added platform molecule, is presented. The proposed process is ideally suited for integration with the current HFCS process and has the potential for long-term process improvement.

We demonstrate a process to produce levoglucosenone (LGO) and 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) from cellulose in up to 65% carbon yield using H2SO4 as catalyst and a solvent consisting of tetrahydrofuran (THF) and H2O.