A Mini Review of Catalytic Reducing Nitrogen to Ammonia under Ambient Conditions

Abstract

Ammonia(NH 3 ) has played an essential role in meeting the increasing demand for food and the worldwide need of nitrogenous fertilizer since 1913. Unfortunately, the traditional Haber-Bosch process for producing NH 3 from nitrogen(N 2 ) is a high energy-consumption process. Under ambient conditions catalytic reducing N 2 to NH 3 is an attractive and promising alternative approach which would emerge huge opportunity to directly provide nitrogenous fertilizers in agricultural fields as need in a distributed manner. In this review, some research findings showed alterna -tive, available, sustainable NH 3 production processes from N 2 in the presence of electro-catalysts and photo-catalysts under ambient conditions.