`Holy grail' of chemical process found.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Chemists at the University of Oregon have discovered a way to make a form of active nitrogen at room temperature and pressure, the first time such a process has been demonstrated and a step toward one of the long-sought goals of chemistry.

Although it may be decades from practical application, the process could one day make an important fertilizer cheaper and easier to obtain.

In an article to be published later this month in the Journal of the American Chemistry Society, UO chemistry professor David Tyler and graduate students John Gilbertson and Nate Szymczak describe the technique developed over five years of research.

Their process was carried out in ether solutions, but they said all but one step will work in water.

`In the eyes of chemists, the conversion of nitrogen to ammonia in water, using simple hydrogen at room temperature and pressure, is the `holy grail' of nitrogen fixation,' Tyler said in a statement announcing the discovery. "The next challenge is figuring how to carry out the complete cycle in water."

Nitrogen is an important plant fertilizer and although the Earth's atmosphere is more than 70 percent nitrogen, the nitrogen molecules in the air are so tightly bonded they are largely inert. To make nitrogen available for biological processes it must be `fixed'; that is, it must form a compound, typically with hydrogen, to produce ammonia that plants can extract from the soil and use to form proteins, DNA, RNA and other essential building blocks of life.

Currently, ammonia for fertilizer is produced under extremely high temperatures and pressures using a century-old method of converting atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Chemists have long sought a simpler and less expensive way to fix nitrogen.

The method developed by Tyler and his research team uses a simple compound of iron and hydrogen as the source of electrons needed to form a fixed nitrogen compound.

"This is simpler than any other solution put forward to date," Tyler said. "Other procedures involve the use of relatively exotic electron sources or they require elevated temperatures to complete the synthesis."

But Tyler emphasizes that this is just an early step toward the goal of a cheap and simple source of nitrogen compounds. It could take decades to adapt the process to industrial-scale production, if it can be done at all.

The new approach builds on earlier work done by Gilbertson and Szymczak, who received funding from the National Science Foundation through a grant from the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program.