Clean fertilizer technology attracts investment

Several startups developing technology to produce nitrogen fertilizers with lower carbon emissions have attracted investment in recent weeks. But some analysts say these companies are likely to play only a niche role on farms, given the huge size of the fertilizer industry.

Windfall Biofall has raised $28 million in Series A funding to increase production of bacteria that ferment methane from dairies, farms, and oil wells into nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Jupiter Ionics received a grant of $6 million from private investment and $1.6 million from the Australian government to continue developing an electrolyser that converts air and water into ammonia for fertilizer.

Meanwhile, startup Ammovia has raised $4.2 million in seed financing to expand its technology to produce ammonia at much lower pressures and temperatures than traditional processes. And last month, Tsubame BHB raised $35 million in Series C funding aimed at better catalysts for ammonia synthesis.

Ammonia is typically produced by catalytically combining hydrogen from fossil fuels with nitrogen from air in a reactor at high temperature and pressure. This process generates a huge carbon footprint, both from the carbon dioxide released during hydrogen production and from the energy consumed to combine the hydrogen and nitrogen.

Many large ammonia producers, including CF Industries and Yara, hope to reduce emissions by using electrolyzers to produce hydrogen from water and relying on renewable energy to combine hydrogen with nitrogen. This is essentially a cleaner version of the traditional Haber-Bosch process. . As an alternative approach, companies such as Tsubame, Copernic Catalysts, and Nium are developing more efficient catalysts that allow the Haber-Bosch process to run at lower temperatures.

Ammobia co-founder Karen Baert calls their technology Haber-Bosch 2.0. Conventional plants could only convert her 20% of the input gas into ammonia, she says. These facilities must separate the ammonia, repressurize the remaining gas, and recycle it back into the manufacturing process. Baert claims that Ammobia significantly increases the amount of gas converted to ammonia, eliminating the need for a gas recycling process.

“This is a huge recycling loop that requires a huge amount of energy,” she says. “Our new separation method avoids that.”

Other companies are pursuing entirely new routes for ammonia. Instead of producing hydrogen via electrolysis, Jupiter Ionics bypasses this intermediate step and produces ammonia via electrolysis from water and nitrogen. The company announced that it will use the new funding to reduce production costs and scale up its current 100cm electrolyzer.².

Skipping hydrogen production would make the process much more efficient, said Runil Dalia, a chemical industry analyst at information firm Lux Research. “Every time you take a step, you lose energy. . . . With just one step, he can minimize the energy loss,” he says. Still, Dahlia warns that the technology struggles to produce ammonia quickly enough to be economically competitive.

It is also possible to make nitrogen fertilizer using bacteria. Windfall CEO Josh Silverman (previously co-founder of methane fermentation company Calysta) said his company uses artificial selection to reduce the amount of grass produced when cows digest grass. He said the new technology improves the ability of natural bacteria to consume methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Windfall sells its bacteria to dairy farms, which pump methane from their barns into compost piles seeded with the bacteria. Bacteria feed on the gas, preventing it from reaching the atmosphere and multiplying. When farmers spread compost on their fields, the nitrogen derived from amino acids, proteins, and sugars within cells can improve soil fertility.

“What bacteria are really good at is making more bacteria,” Silverman says. “Trying to manipulate them to make chemicals is difficult. . . . The goal here is to give them the right environment, feed them, and they'll figure out how to do the rest. It’s about knowing what’s good.”

Daria appreciates the ingenuity of the new technology, but says it will be difficult to produce ammonia as cheaply as the synthetic fertilizer industry, which benefits from huge factories that have been optimized over decades. .

After the war, as the COVID-19 pandemic and clogged ports brought global trade to a standstill earlier this decade, companies such as Swallow and Jupiter Ionics forced farmers to buy their own to guarantee access to fertilizer. He said he might be interested in installing a small ammonia synthesis plant on the land. .

Dalia argues that such a system would be difficult to sell and would be limited to a niche market. Many of these companies also tout the low carbon footprint of their processes, but Dalia says there is no incentive for farmers to pay more for sustainable fertilizers.

“It all comes down to economics,” he says. “As long as these green fertilizers are more expensive than synthetic fertilizers, they won't catch on in the market.”