u/21Kuranashi

Emergency vehicles and utilities would still have access.

The plasma is splitting N2 (nitrogen gas, which is notoriously hard to split because it is triple bonded) and causing nitrogen bearing compounds to form and remain in solution in the water. In agriculture, reactive nitrogen is a serious nutrient bottleneck. All the proteins in all of biology depend on biological access to reactive nitrogen.

Reactive nitrogen (as opposed to nitrogen in N2, which is inaccessible for chemical reactions for most of biology and is for the most part unreactive) is typically produced in ecosystems when certain microbes split nitrogen to produce ammonia and nitrate, which then get used to make amino acids, which are then used to make all proteins. These nutrients are recycled in the process of decomposition, but a good portion of it returns to the atmosphere as N2 in the process of denitrification, which is used by certain microbes as a source of energy. Natural production of nitrogen and the enriching of soil can be done organically and in low-tech fashion by doing crop rotation with plants such as legumes that are symbiotic with nitrogen-fixing microbes, but in applications where nitrogen is a real bottleneck, being able to produce your own fertilizer would be a huge benefit.

The industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer is a massively polluting industry, and is highly concentrated by big players, which are usually connected to the petroleum industry. The Haber-Bosch process that is currently used to produce nearly all of the nitrogen fertilizer used throughout the world uses natural gas as one of its main reagent feed stocks. The development of this inexpensive and open source method of using plasma to form a reactive nitrogen solution is a breakthrough that not only decentralizes the production of fertilizer, but enables it to be powered by renewable electricity rather than natural gas.