Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 18, 2025
Clean electricity-powered local fertilizer production!
Iowa startup Talusag is making ammonia fertilizer with water, air, and clean electricity.
Tell Congress to support clean local fertilizer production!
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Reasons For Hope
Iowa startup Talusag is building a clean electricity-powered factory in the town of Eagle Lake, Iowa that will create ammonia fertilizer from water and air, reducing both fossil fuel use and Iowa’s dependence on shipping in fertilizer from the Gulf Coast.
Their already-built pilot facility in Boone, Iowa is powered by on-site solar and can produce 1 to 2 tons of ammonia fertilizer per day. When complete, the Eagle Lake facility will be able to create 20 tons of ammonia fertilizer per day, running primarily on the Iowa grid’s abundant supplies of wind power.
Ammonia (NH3) is made of three hydrogen atoms for every one nitrogen atom. Currently, most ammonia is made with fossil gas as the source of the hydrogen, which can then react with nitrogen in the air to form ammonia. This exposes the fertilizer industry, and thus American food production, to the roller-coaster of fossil gas price spikes. Talusag gets their hydrogen from electrolyzers that split water into hydrogen and oxygen, making their process dependent only on local electricity availability — and it can scale up or down to synergize with current grid demand levels.
Notably, Talusag’s ammonia-producing electrolyzers and reactors are containerized and modular, allowing quickly scalable mass manufacturing. And as long as Congress doesn’t repeal the 45V hydrogen production tax credit, their “green ammonia” fertilizer is already cost-competitive with standard “gray ammonia” fertilizer made at gas plants on the Gulf Coast, thanks in part to the absence of transport costs. As clean electricity becomes more and more abundant and electrolyzer tech improves, this process could achieve unprecedented levels of inexpensive local fertilizer production.
Congress has a great opportunity here to empower further innovation in a new domestic American industry. To unleash domestic fertilizer abundance, keep the 45V tax credit and incentivize local ammonia production in the next Farm Bill!
So many advances in green tech have occurred and continue to do so. Oil is dead and we are witnessing the battle for wealth and supremacy at the expense of the climate, versus a chance and hope at a prosperous new clean future. I need my good news more every day.
Thanks for making us hope .