Very interesting indeed. I had not thought of ammonia production as such, much less as a fuel. I will definately have to do more reading on this.
A couple of comments I have on this subject. First on urine which IS high in ammonia. It has been used for millenia in the tanning industry. Urine would have to be collected seperate from fecal matter. In sewage it's all run together of course. Running the sewage through a methane digester removes methane for use as fuel, leaving a nitrogen rich sludge that can be used for fertilizer. Now, in current plants the sludge is often contaminated with heavy metals, however on a smaller scale where industrial waste is not fed into the sewage system I think this problem would be mininmal. To my thinking this is a better use for the urine than a straight application which is a 'hot' mix and could 'burn' crops.. the same to be said for anhydrous ammonia.
The second comment has to do with the 'confinement' hog and poultry industry as well as the large confinement dairy operations. Come the day of destruction, when power is lost, those plants, and they are more plants than farms no matter what might be thought, they will implode. Feeding, ventalation, water, and cleaning of those places is based on ELECTRICITY. (Cleaning perhaps not so much.) With non-family labor on most of the places, labor fails to show up... management perhaps is not the owner, fails to show up... hence the place shuts down.. within a week animals are dying, which causes a problem.. You think they smell NOW.. imagine 1000 dead hogs decomposing. or 100000 chickens or turkeys.. There will be a massive waste of edible resources with the modern mega agriplants acoss the food belt. Sure some will be salvaged by those with something on the ball. IF they can react in time to 'farm out' the livestock to small holdings. But there is still the matter of foodstock for the animals. Much of the foodstock is human edible and will work it's way directly to people than the critters.
As a souce of fetilizer however the agriplants are abundant in that catagory. In tune with the methane digester, there are hog operations and dairies that have their own digesters to run generators. Common sense and helps with the waste disposal problems. But they are far and few between.
Anyways, my two cents of rambling.
Grae
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