Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: December 12, 2024
Decentralized clean energy-powered ammonia fertilizer production!
A startup in Denmark is empowering farmers to produce their own ammonia fertilizer on-site with clean energy.
Tell Congress to support research into decentralized clean ammonia production in the next Farm Bill!
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Reasons For Hope
In Denmark, early-stage startup NitroVolt (formerly Nitrofix Solutions) is revolutionizing fertilizer production with a decentralized clean energy-powered system that allows farmers to produce ammonia on-site.
Their technology, a new alternative to the venerable Haber-Bosch process that has produced most of the world’s fertilizer for decades but is often powered by fossil fuels, works by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with an electrolyzer, then using a lithium-mediated reaction to attach the hydrogen to nitrogen molecules from the air, with the whole shebang able to run on the power from nearby solar panels.
“The technology relies on our patent pending lithium-mediated ammonia synthesis reactor we call the Nitrolyzer. The final system will only require air, water, and green electricity to synthesize sustainable ammonia directly at the point-of-use.
The modular units can stand at the customer site, such as a farm or greenhouse, generating the necessary ammonia on demand. The technology is easily scalable, and fits the customers daily demand from a few hundred to thousands of kilograms of ammonia.”
-NitroVolt
You’ve probably heard already that Congress is still discussing the upcoming Farm Bill, a huge investment in American agriculture (the U.S. spends an average of $648 billion per year on Farm Bill programs) that’s up for renewal for the first time since 2018. As with our previous Farm Bill-related policy actions on climate-resilient crops, methane-reducing vaccines for cattle, methane-eating microbes, phytomining, and electro-agriculture, the just-getting-started field of decentralized clean ammonia production is a brand-new invention and not really on the political radar screen yet. That means there’s a really great opportunity here to tell Congress to use the Farm Bill to help promote their research and development!