Bill Gates-backed tech aims to transform key chemical used for half of world’s food supply
Environmental and political concerns create demand for locally produced green hydrogen, says Danish tech developer NitroVolt
The round was led by Swedish venture capital fund BackingMinds, NitroVolt announced today (Wednesday).
The start-up last year received a grant from Breakthrough Energy, the innovation fund of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, to develop its technology.
That is equivalent to the entire aviation industry.
“The ammonia industry cannot keep polluting, and the whole industry is under huge pressure to transition towards greener production methods,” said NitroVolt.
There are also geopolitical concerns, said NitroVolt, with Russia and China the largest exporters of ammonia worldwide. Ammonia prices skyrocketed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while the West is in a period of tense relations with China.
All of this creates a demand for “local and green” ammonia production, said NitroVolt.
NitroVolt is developing a technology known as a 'lithium-mediated ammonia synthesis reactor', being commercialised as the Nitrolyzer, that it says can “produce green ammonia directly at the point-of-use; at the farm.”
The product will be a container-sized system, it said, combining only air, water, and renewable electricity.
inside the nitrolyzer
The process happening inside the Nitrolyzer unit is based on the reduction of lithium salt to metallic lithium, according to the company's website. This metallic lithium will then react with nitrogen to form a nitride. The nitride is easily protonated by hydrogen sourced via water splitting. This leads to the formation of ammonia, and the lithium is released back into solution, to be recycled and start the reaction again.
The system “totally removes fossil fuels from the production process, making their ammonia 100% renewable, carbon-free, and competitive with current black ammonia prices on the market.”
“Our technology makes it possible to produce ammonia locally and puts the end user in control of the production,” claimed Suzanne Zamany Andersen, CEO and co-founder of NitroVolt.
“This means that the production becomes resilient to supply chain volatility and green at the same time – something that doesn’t exist on the market today.”
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