Is Green Lightning a Fraud?

If you missed my last post, it is a very brief, not at all technical primer on nitrogen fertilizer. Nitrogen cycle chart courtesy of wikicommons.

There has always been a bit of a gap between advertisements and reality: during the two minute warning McDonald ’s promises a seared burger, crisp lettuce, a fluffy roll speckled with sesame seeds, and a slice of perfectly ripe tomato; in the bleary hours where too late a night becomes too early a morning polo-shirted hucksters demonstrate knives capable of cutting through tin cans, towels capable of soaking up gallons of water, blenders that promise to revolutionize cooking from the morning’s smoothie to the evening’s pasta sauce; the resort pamphlet shows an immaculate room with french doors opening into an edenic garden.

Inevitably, disappointment shades the translation from imagery to reality. The burger is compact and mushy, the knives dull after a month of use, nothing is blooming in the sweltering tangle of greenery carpeting the yard two stories below. It’s not quite fraud, but it’s also not quite honest.

In the age of the internet a more ambiguous category has risen to prominence. It still includes material goods like clothing and toys and appliances. But instead of idealized photos taken in perfect lighting they are advertised with images generated by AI, images which may bear only the most tangential relationship to the dress or the race car bed when it actually lands on the front porch. There’s still an exchange of goods for money, but a vast gulf lies between the promise and what’s delivered.

Dietary supplements and alternative health products constitute a significant portion of this morass. Instead of relying on dodgy pictures, charismatic influencers weave underpowered studies, vaguely plausible mechanisms, and anecdotes into compelling sales pitches. The promised results range from the anodyne, like better sleep, to the truly pernicious, like a cure for cancer.

It’s easy to understand why this tactic is so effective. In the case of t-shirts and cheap electronics, the cost is usually small enough that even a disappointing product isn’t worth the hassle of trying to return. In the case of supplements, particularly those claiming to address real but complex and diffuse phenomena like poor sleep or low energy, conditions to which conventional medicine often has few good solutions, the downside of a few spent dollars is small compared to the possibility, however remote, of a significantly improved quality of life.

Far stranger is the fact that the dynamic extends to farming. I say it is strange not because I expect farmers to be superior humans, universally capable of resisting marketing, but because they are far better positioned to test the veracity of claims than the average consumer and because the amount of money involved is often much greater.

Such were my reflections as I read about a seemingly too good to be true system supposedly capable of replacing expensive purchased nitrogen fertilizer with cheap fertilizer produced right on the farm.

Green Lightning and the promise of on farm fertilizer

Many alternative and alternat-ish ag products make limited claims while implying a great deal. Sea salt becomes a sea mineral complex with a full spectrum of trace elements. Couple this with pictures of glossy cows and glowing testimonials from other farmers who have seen the health of their herds improve after swapping in sea mineral complex for regular stock salt and the idea is clear enough: your herd has deficiencies that standard salt and mineral blends aren’t addressing, and this slightly more expensive supplement can fix them. Whether apple cider, fish emulsion, or rain attractors, the basic format holds.

Green Lightning’s website is a refreshing contrast. It states that its machines capture atmospheric nitrogen and put it into water in large enough quantities to replace purchased nitrogen fertilizer. The machines come in a range of sizes with clear claims about the scale of corn plantings each can service, ranging from 90 to 6000 acres. In other words, Green Lightning is unambiguously marketing itself as a cheaper alternative to one of the biggest agricultural input costs.

Unlike so many niche agricultural products, Green Lightning has a straightforward value proposition, which is where we spot the first red flag. Given the space involved and the fact that a good study would have to run for a couple years real world corn yields aren’t as easy to study as fruit flies in a lab. But with the size of the potential market — farmers managing millions upon millions of acres of corn, sugarcane, soy, wheat, potatoes, and all the other crops that make up the modern food system would line up for a proven cheaper alternative to conventional nitrogen — Green Lightning should be able to bankroll any number of studies.

There are other reasons for skepticism. First is the dodgy language around the nitrogen quantities. The site claims that each gallon of product contains the equivalent of three pounds of nitrogen fertilizer. The idea, I think, is that plants utilize the Green Lightning water more efficiently than traditional fertilizer, so even though it contains less actual nitrogen it promotes identical growth and yield. If I’m understanding this correctly it is quite a bold claim, one that would require robust evidence to prove.

Which relates to the second problem, the general dearth of specifics. I’m pretty confident in the characterization above, but there is nowhere on the site that forthrightly lists what the Green Lightning-ified water contains and in what concentrations, a clear explanation of what nitrogen equivalent units are or how they were determined, or even exactly how to use Green Lightning to replace conventional nitrogen fertilizer.

My best guesses

Pending better information, my best guess is as follows. I think the Green Lightning machines work in the narrowest sense, meaning I believe they do convert atmospheric nitrogen from an inert gas into a form accessible to plants. Specifically, I would guess they turn the water into a very weak nitric acid solution. The Birkeland–Eyde process uses electricity to do precisely this, and the mechanism closely resembles that by which lightning fixes nitrogen in the soil.

I’m guessing it’s a weak nitric acid solution because the amount of energy required to break the strongly bonded atmospheric nitrogen molecules is basic high school chemistry. Meanwhile, a blog post detailing costs on the Green Lightning website breaks down the electricity usage, arriving at a figure of $0.011 of electricity per pound of nitrogen equivalent. Using the most conservative numbers I can find this is less than a tenth the cost of the energy inputs alone needed to make nitrogen fertilizer via the most efficient industrial methods currently used, methods that are something like 65% efficient. In other words, the Green Lightning machine uses far less energy than would be required to generate the actual amount of nitrogen, even if it was 100% efficient, which it definitely isn’t. Unless the Green lightning folks have figured out how to subvert the known laws by which atoms bond to each other the amount of nitrogen captured by the process is extremely limited.

So, is Green Lightning a scam?

A friend who happens to be a magazine editor once told me it’s a journalistic truism that if an article has a question in the title the answer is no. Did David Duchovny Encounter a Real Alien on the set of the X-Files? Did Jimmy Carter Convert to Paganism on his Deathbed? Is HIlary Hahn Going to Clown School?

I’m going to buck the trend. I would bet good money that Green Lightning is a fraud. I do not think the 90 acre machine can provide all the nitrogen fertilizer to grow 20 acres of high yielding corn year over year, let alone 90. I think the 6000 acre machine is little more than an overpriced, temperature controlled shipping container.

I would be genuinely excited to be proven wrong. Making nitrogen fertilizer uses an immense amount of energy, and a technology that radically reduced that requirement while allowing hyperlocal production would be a huge advance. I will enthusiastically update this post if I see evidence that causes me to reconsider.

These are just a few of the questions that should be answered at great length on the site of a company trying to convince farmers to invest thousands upon thousands of dollars in an unproven technology:

• Exactly what comes out of the tank after water has been treated by a Green Lightning machine?
• If it is indeed a very weak nitric acid solution, what is the evidence that it can replace conventional nitrogen fertilizer when growing a high yield crop like corn?
• What would it cost to create a similar solution by other means, like buying conventionally produced nitric acid concentrate and diluting it?
• What third parties, particularly ag colleges, are running multi-year independent tests on the machine in real world conditions?

The bigger picture

In researching Green Lightning the second most surprising thing I’ve found is how many farmers have bought the machines. The most surprising thing is how many of them claim some measure of success. While I have not seen a single person claim it has fully replaced other nitrogen sources, if you bushwack deep enough into the thicket of online ag forums (forums still operating on software that looks to be from 1998) you will find farmers reporting that reduced conventional nitrogen plus Green Lightning can save money on total fertilizer costs, though I have yet to see a single person say that Green Lightning alone is sufficient.

Though superficially compelling, such accounts aren’t good evidence. In addition to the problems with running on-farm trials that are fundamentally different from the claims made on the Green Lightning site (remember, it is marketed as a replacement for other sources of nitrogen, not a supplement), these farmers are anything but impartial; after spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a nitrogen system they have every reason to look for signs of success and every reason to ignore signs of failure.

If farmers whose livelihoods rely on understanding the nutrient cycle of the crops they grow can be misled and can mislead themselves to this extent, we should all be humble about our own capacity for self-deception. The higher the stakes, the greater the risk that we are not seeing as clearly as we believe.