Inside Faraday Earth’s Bid to Make Cheap Green Ammonia without Haber-Bosch

by Elaine Watson (Ag Funder News) Can a container-sized plasma reactor compete with the century-old Haber-Bosch process to fix nitrogen from the air and turn it into green ammonia at industrially relevant cost?

Faraday Earth thinks so. The US-incorporated startup, which has R&D operations in India, is using non-thermal plasma—a high-voltage electric field—to excite notoriously inert nitrogen molecules so they can react with hydrogen to form ammonia, without the high heat, high pressure, specialist catalysts, and mega-scale plants associated with conventional ammonia production.

The company claims its AI-optimized system could reach a levelized cost of around $500/ton, putting it within striking distance of fossil fuel-derived gray ammonia before factoring in the transport costs and supply chain vulnerabilities that come with shipping ammonia from centralized plants to farms and industrial users. Couple that with modular reactors designed to fit inside shipping containers, says the firm, and the economics of green ammonia start to look pretty compelling.

AgFunderNews (AFN) caught up with cofounder Debayan Saha (DS) at AgFunder’s AGM to learn more…

We’re exciting electrons of the nitrogen to make them reactive, rather than heating them at 700 kelvin or 250 atmospheric pressure to break the [Nitrogen] bonds.

DS: There are several pathways to produce green ammonia. You can make it through greener Haber Bosch [using renewable power and green hydrogen], but you need renewable electricity, which is generally intermittent, so you’d need batteries and hydrogen storage alongside electrolyzers [to manage intermittency], which increases the capex, and that’s why this is very costly.

Other technologies have come up in recent years such as lithium-mediated approaches [which use lithium in the nitrogen reduction process]. But lithium is facing a huge challenge from the EV industry, so it’s a scarce resource, and there are also stability issues with lithium.

Electrochemical ways of making ammonia have also been tried, but you have to first dissolve the nitrogen into aqueous media [water-based solution] before the other reactions can happen, and that dissolution itself is very challenging because nitrogen is not very soluble.

By contrast, we are directly converting gaseous nitrogen into ammonia, so we don’t have that problem.

There are other companies who have tried to do the nitrogen to ammonia route through non-thermal plasma. But they were first trying to convert the nitrogen into nitrates [rather than directly reducing nitrogen to ammonia], basically oxidizing the nitrogen, and then reducing it back to ammonia, and ended up spending more energy and making the system more complex.

DS: Currently the hydrogen is coming from an electrochemical reaction [electrolysis] from water, but as natural hydrogen and other cheap sources of hydrogen start coming in, we can exploit those sources, especially natural hydrogen [naturally occurring geological hydrogen].

For other companies, it would be difficult for them to capitalize on natural hydrogen, because the sources are at distant locations in limited volumes. So you cannot place a Haber Bosch system there, because you need large systems for Haber Bosch economics. But we are very well placed for those kind of systems [owing to Faraday’s modular, distributed model using reactors in shipping containers].

Likewise, as we’re not primarily dependent on [highly specialized nitrogen-activation] catalysts and things like that, we can deal with impure forms of hydrogen, which are very low cost, but which will render the catalysts of our competitors ineffective. We don’t have that problem because of the way we are doing it. For us, the non-thermal plasma acts like a catalyst.

DS: Our modular decentralized units can be used at farmgate or at chemical plants that need ammonia as a feedstock. They can also be used for supplying ammonia to cold storage industries.

DS: We started the company a couple of years back and had a miniaturized proof of concept, and from there we have grown significantly. We now have a demo unit producing green ammonia and we are sharing that with customers and potential customers.

Based on that, we’ve got a good amount of industry traction in terms of pilot agreement offers and potential offtake, and the next stage is to scale it up towards a pilot demo. Once we do that, we will start generating revenues. READ MORE