Growing
concern about the supply of goods under the COVID pandemic
due to border restrictions and community lockdown has made us aware
of the limitations of the global supply chain. Fertilizers are pivotal
for the growth and welfare of humankind, and there is more than a
century of history in industrial technology. Ammonia is the key platform
chemical here which can be chemically diversified to all kinds of
fertilizers. This article puts a perspective on production technologies
that can enable a supply of ammonia locally and on-demand in Australia,
for the farmers to produce resilient and self-sustained fertilizers.
To assess the validity of such a new business model, multiobjective
optimization has to be undergone, and computing is the solution to
rank the millions of possible solutions. In this lieu, an economic
optimization framework for the Australian ammonia supply chain is
presented. The model seeks to address the economic potential of distributed
ammonia plants across Australia. Different techniques for hydrogen
and related ammonia production such as thermal plasma, nonthermal
plasma, and electrolysis (all typifying technology disruption), and
mini Haber–Bosch (typifying scale disruption) are benchmarked
to the central mega plant on a world-scale using conventional technology,
verifying that “Moore’s Law” (Mack, C. A. IEEE Trans. 2011, 24 (2),
202–207) of growing bigger and bigger is not the only path
to sustainable agriculture. Results show that ammonia can be produced
at $317/ton at a regional scale using thermal plasma hydrogen generation
which could be competitive to the conventional production model, if
credit in terms of lead time and carbon footprint could be taken into
account.