[amirhirsch]

The real company that this was based on probably projected beating the cost of the equivalent Haber-Bosch industrial setup but ultimately couldn’t reduce the nanoparticle production costs and pivoted to selling nanoparticles. I think the best “carbon free” ammonia is still 50% more expensive than the cheapest ammonia, but there seems to be continuous research into promising methods. I’m not a chemical engineer though, and do not know how to qualify research, but this recent article from a Stanford group was intriguing: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/04/ecofriendly-ammoni...

A similar area with a ton of interesting research is sustainable production of silicon where current smelting uses carbothermic reduction of silica in an arc furnace

[Animats]

Total world silicon production for ICs isn't that big. It's about 9 million metric tons / year. Steel production is around 2 billion metric tons / year.

[selimthegrim]

There has been some recent work from KAUST calling the Stanford work into question.