Exclusive: NitroVolt is helping farmers make their own fertilizer using renewable power
The majority of the world’s ammonia is produced using the 115-year-old Haber-Bosch process, which is heavily reliant on natural gas. NitroVolt could change that.
When Suzanne Zamany Andersen arranged her trip to greenhouse grower Koppert Cress in the Netherlands, she thought she would just be pitching her startup’s device, which turns electricity and air into ammonia, a widely used fertilizer.
Not only did the company agree to test the ammonia production system made by her company — Denmark-based NitroVolt — it also referred her to its relatively new investment arm, Division Q, which ended up making an investment.
Once installed, NitroVolt’s device will produce ammonia that Koppert Cress will use to grow its crops (a range of different cress varieties), and it’ll use heat generated by the device to warm its greenhouses. “This is a perfect fit,” Andersen said the company told her.
The majority of the world’s ammonia is produced using the 115-year-old Haber-Bosch process, which is heavily reliant on natural gas. For growers like Koppert Cress, which wants to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2026, fertilizer represents a challenging source of pollution to zero out.
NitroVolt is one of a fresh crop of startups working to find alternatives to Haber-Bosch. The company starts by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules and separating nitrogen from the air. Then, it pumps hydrogen and nitrogen into a reaction chamber, where lithium helps attach the right number of hydrogens to each nitrogen atom. Ammonia emerges from the other side.
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