[Disclosure: AFN’s parent company, AgFunder, is an investor in Faraday Earth.]
Faraday Earth—a startup using non-thermal plasma to make green ammonia—claims its system could reach a levelized cost of around $500 per ton, putting it within striking distance of fossil fuel-derived gray ammonia, the backbone of most nitrogen-based fertilizers.
Couple this with decentralized, container-sized modular systems that cut out transportation costs associated with conventional ammonia supply chains, and the economics suddenly become more compelling, cofounder Debayan Saha tells AgFunderNews.
“Ammonia is almost $100 billion market, fertilizer being the biggest chunk of this market; it actually feeds half the world’s population. And our technology basically solves the bottleneck of the traditional ammonia production process, which is that nitrogen is very unreactive.”
While the traditional Haber-Bosch process uses high heat, high pressure, and catalysts to force nitrogen and hydrogen to react, producing ammonia in huge centralized plants, Faraday Earth instead uses a high-voltage electric field to create non-thermal plasma.
A highly energized gas sometimes called the “fourth state of matter,” this can “excite” nitrogen molecules and make them reactive.
This is key because nitrogen gas is notoriously inert, says Saha, who founded Faraday Earth in 2023 with Shashi Ranjan, PhD.
Each molecule consists of two nitrogen atoms held together by a strong triple bond. Once activated in the plasma reactor, the nitrogen can combine with green hydrogen, which Faraday Earth can produce via electrolysis—splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen—or procure from other low-carbon sources such as naturally occurring geological hydrogen.
Once produced, the ammonia can be liquefied for direct injection as a fertilizer, dissolved in water to make aqueous ammonia for industrial applications, or used as a feedstock for other fertilizers and chemicals. However, Faraday Earth’s initial focus is on ammonia as the end product.
The Eureka moment
While Saha and Ranjan had proved a novel activation pathway for nitrogen, the approach was not initially very efficient, says Ranjan. “When we started, our numbers were 60 to 70 times worse [than they are today]; we were trying to optimize things just by normal experimental methods, but progress wasn’t that good.”
The Eureka moment came when the two started experimenting with machine learning to optimize the plasma and maximize yield, adds Saha, who met Ranjan at Stanford University a decade ago.
“We knew that Google DeepMind had been extensively using AI to optimize plasma reactors for fusion reactors, and it hit us that we could use the AI to optimize our kind of plasma.”
Faraday Earth, which is incorporated in the US with R&D operations in India, then created an AI-based digital twin of what was happening inside the reaction, which is difficult to optimize through trial-and-error experimentation given the number of interdependent variables.
This enabled it to tune voltage, current, flow rate, electrode-related parameters, and other reactor conditions “almost in real time,” which has materially improved performance.
Not all green ammonia tech is the same…
While several startups are in the green ammonia space, alternate approaches such as electrochemical nitrogen reduction (using electricity to make ammonia in a water-based system) can struggle because nitrogen is poorly soluble in aqueous systems, claims Saha. This means much of the nitrogen in gas bubbles does not participate in the reaction, he explains.
“What ends up happening is that only the nitrogen on the outer shell of the bubble participates in the reaction; all the nitrogen inside the bubble just goes to waste.”
He is also skeptical of lithium-mediated approaches (electrochemical routes that use lithium to help activate nitrogen and turn it into ammonia), citing reactor stability concerns and potential lithium supply-chain constraints.
Meanwhile, plasma-based approaches that first convert nitrogen into nitrates may be less efficient if the goal is ammonia, because they then have to spend additional energy converting those nitrates back into ammonia, he claims.
By contrast, Faraday Earth is trying to directly activate nitrogen in the plasma and produce ammonia, rather than first making nitrate. The company still uses a catalyst to help nitrogen and hydrogen react, but says plasma is doing the hard part—nitrogen activation—replacing the need for highly specialized nitrogen-activation catalysts.
Progress to date
Faraday Earth has built a demo unit to show its tech in action and secured letters of intent, pilot agreement offers, purchase orders, and at least one paid customer. Interest is coming from existing ammonia producers, distributors, and suppliers serving markets including fertilizers, cold storage, meat processing, and other industrial applications, says Ranjan. “We have a MOU signed for commercialization with one of the top global companies in this space.”
Rather than building large centralized plants, Faraday Earth envisages containerized units—typically around 40 feet by 10 feet for larger systems—that can produce a few tons of ammonia per day. Customers with greater demand could stack multiple modules, while smaller users could deploy smaller systems.
This could open up decentralized ammonia production for fertilizer and industrial uses, especially in places where logistics make delivered ammonia expensive, says Saha.
The $500/ton target
As for costs, he says, “Rather than just looking at the cost of manufacturing, the levelized cost of ammonia is the true parameter that we measure (including capex, operating costs, energy inputs, maintenance, etc). We foresee levelized cost in the range of about $500 per ton in the upcoming time periods. If you can reach the theoretical limit, then it’s potentially even cheaper.”
By way of comparison, he says, “Gray ammonia [produced via Haber Bosch] before the war [with Iran], was in the range of $300-700/ton.”
Faraday Earth’s system is designed to pair well with renewable power because plasma can be switched on and off quickly, avoiding the long heating and cooling cycles associated with thermal processes, says Saha, who says the Iran war has brought both the price and availability of key fertilizer inputs into sharp focus in recent weeks.
“Ammonia is almost $100 billion market, fertilizer being the biggest chunk of this market; it actually feeds half the world’s population. And our technology basically solves the bottleneck of the traditional ammonia production process, which is that nitrogen is very unreactive.”
Ryan Lee, investment associate at AgFunder, which has recently invested in Faraday Earth, said green synthesis of key commodities “represents a fundamental decentralization opportunity and Faraday Earth is developing technology that tackles bottlenecks in how the world produces essential inputs. Localizing production in agrarian economies, especially in the Global South, has the potential to reshape supply chain dependencies and decarbonize critical industries.”
Further reading:
US Senate fertilizer hearing: Farmers ‘can’t take much more’ as prices surge
Brazil Potash makes the case for local supply as Iran war roils fertilizer markets
Fertilizer spike adds up to $35/acre for US corn as Iran crisis deepens
