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We rely on nitrogen.

ATP needs nitrogen, our DNA needs nitrogen, so it's essential to life as we know it.

And we think that it is as old as about 3 billion years.

So the first billion years of life didn't have biological fixation of nitrogen.

So what do we mean by that?

Luckily, there's a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere.

Lots.

But it is not readily available to our cells.

It cannot enter our cells as easily.

It needs to be transformed.

It's a triple bond.

It's very, very strong.

So life invented it.

a way to break this bond and turn nitrogen into a form that is ammonia, that is available for life.

And that's been doing that for three billion years, relying on a single enzyme.

So if that enzyme is ruined, the whole show collapses.

Or so we thought.

So we created an artificial way of fixing nitrogen.

That's the Haber-Bosch process, which is insane amount of energy.

About 2% of world's entire energy consumption goes through the production of artificial ammonia through artificial nitrogen fixation process using Haber-Bosch.