After living through supply chain chaos during the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and now the war in Iran, farmers around the world are eager to ensure that they have stable access to fertilizers going forward, says Helga Dögg Flosadóttir, CEO of the Icelandic fertilizer start-up Atmonia.
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Atmonia uses a new catalyst and electricity to produce ammonia at low temperature and pressure. Unlike conventional ammonia plants, the company’s reactor can easily be turned on and off, making it possible to connect it to cheap, intermittent sources of electricity like solar panels.
In February, Atmonia won a grant from the European Innovation Council to start scaling up the process. The company hopes to develop shipping container-sized plants that farmers can operate on their own land. While the technology won’t provide an immediate solution—Atmonia’s reactor is years from commercialization—Dögg Flosadóttir hopes such systems will give farmers more control over their fertilizer and insulate them from future wars or disasters.
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Other firms developing decentralized methods of making nitrogen fertilizers are also progressing. Nitricity, based in California, raised $50 million last September to commercialize a process that converts almond waste into organic fertilizer. PlasmaLeap Technologies recently raised $20 million for technology that uses plasma to convert air into nitrogen fertilizer, and TalusAg is planning a green ammonia plant that will serve local farmers in Iowa and Minnesota.
But producing fertilizer at local scale is more expensive than making it in massive manufacturing plants, says Lorenzo Rosa, a principal investigator at Carnegie Science who researches fertilizer production. Farmers operate on such tight margins that it’s tough for them to justify paying for protection from price spikes that might happen only once every few years, he says.
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The fertilizer price spikes in recent years have put a spotlight on new fertilizer technologies, says Hunter Swisher, CEO of Phospholutions, a start-up that makes an additive to increase the efficiency of phosphate fertilizers. But the momentum doesn’t last long enough to boost new technology all the way from concept to commercialization, he says.
“That shock maybe lasts a year,” Swisher says. “These innovations take many years to develop, many years to commercialize at a meaningful scale.”
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