Today the Haber-Bosch process is responsible for almost all of the world’s synthetic fertilizer. A little more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to it, as the futurist Ramez Naam has noted. Remarkable fact: “That 1 percent,” Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.” Between 1960 and 2000 global synthetic fertilizer use rose by about 800 percent. About half of that production was devoted to just three crops: wheat, rice, and maize. One way to look at this figure is to say that the accomplishment of Borlaug and his associates was to create
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