SUMMARY
Nitrogen, itself, is an inert gas of no particular use, but nitrogenous compounds are necessary to agriculture, to refrigeration, to munitions manufacture, and to the applications of chemistry in general. In the native gaseous state, it makes up about four-fifths of the atmosphere, and combined it occurs as nitrate minerals, as organic compounds, and in carboniferous deposits. Atmospheric nitrogen is of use only after it has been artificially compounded or fixed, a proposition which the natural inertness of nitrogen renders difficult and expensive. The only mineral deposits of consequence are those comprising the nitrate fields of northern Chile. The organic resources include all manner of animal and vegetable refuse. Coal-tar ammonia from retort-coke and gas manufacture, along with some shale-oil ammonia, makes up practically the whole supply derived from the carboniferous sources. This range of associations, including animal, vegetable, mineral, and atmospheric sources, transgresses all established rules of resource occurrence, and consequently all regularly constituted research. As a result the nitrogen resources and their needs for attention have never been comprehensively investigated. This became strikingly apparent when the war, threatening swift disaster in the guise of a nitrogen shortage, showed us up to be quite devoid of any systematic nitrogen program and precipitated an hysterical effort to devise a makeshift one instead. The atmosphere was found to provide the only independent source of supply available on an emergency rating; so, following the lead of the European countries, several plants for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen were projected governmentally.
Industrially, the nitrogen sources may be classified as natural, by-product, and fixation. The natural supply is almost wholly in the form of sodium nitrate from the Chile nitrate deposits. These are controlled and operated by British, Chilean, German, and American capital. The American imports are largely handled by three companies, whose system of control is effected through the medium of shipping and warehouse facilities.
The by-product sources include nearly all of the organic nitrogen used, and the nitrogen from coal and oil shale as well. The supply is governed as to magnitude by the progress of industrial co-ordination through the medium of centralization in the preparing of animal, vegetable, and coal products. Thus the development and marketing of the by-product supply tends naturally to gather to industrial combinations. These, however, are natural developments, not developments artificially created in the interest of price control. The price of by-product nitrogen is controlled not by trade combinations, but by the price of the product from other sources, which is to say, by the price of Chile nitrate. Beyond that, the advantages accruing in the way of low-producing costs do not go wholly to commercial profit but to the saving of costs with reference to the major production, as for instance in the case of gas-works ammonia, which makes its chief contribution toward lowering the price of gas to the consumer. The rapid development of fixation is attributable largely to political influences, activated by conditions leading to and through the war. There are a number of projects for fixing nitrogen, but only three have any genuine measure of industrial achievement to their credit, are fixation in Norway, Haber synthetic ammonia fixation in Germany, and cyanamid fixation in a number of places. Three of the four large American plants are of the last-named order; the other is a synthetic ammonia proposition. All four were contracted for by the Government, and so far as fixation can be said to have gained an industrial foothold in the United States it is wholly in response to the dictates of political control.
Probably rather less than half of the nitrogen consumed is organically associated, and rather more than half of it chemically combined. Practically all of the organic nitrogen and around one-fourth of the chemical nitrogen is of domestic by-product derivation. So far, the balance has been supplied from Chile nitrate, supplemented by small imports of guano, animal refuse, by-product ammonia, and cyanamid from abroad.
There is no apparent likelihood of this adjustment being materially affected as an immediate outcome of developments with reference to fixation. These have shown themselves to be of the utmost political significance as affording an unlimited, independent source of nitrogen supply. Their genuine economic significance at the present stage of enforced expansion, however, is questionable. In this country, especially, the scale of costs gives an unpromising setting. The by-product sources growing out of centralized industrial co-ordination are in line with the trend of modern industrialism and may be looked to as assuring a steady increase in yield, especially if the process of industrial evolution in the direction of co-ordinated economic efficiency is adequately cultivated instead of being interfered with. In this same connection the most significant accomplishment recorded for nitrogen, lies in the working out of a means for the oxidation of by-product ammonia, thus rendering the growing by-product supply available for the full range of nitrogen uses.
With reference to the economic and political aspects of the outlook ahead, all else is obscured and lost to view in the pressing need for a constructive program worked out on a comprehensive basis, in keeping with the comprehensiveness of the resources themselves, with which to supplant the uneconomical makeshift program brought into being by the war. The program called for is one calculated to bring out, and bring out co-ordinately, the best there is in bacterial as well as chemical fixation, in the industrial by-product sources of organic and chemical nitrogen, and in the province of sanitation.