Ammonia may conjure thoughts of off odors, but the world is entirely dependent on the smelly stuff as a fertilizer and for use in myriad other industries. Problem is, nearly all the ammonia produced today is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Making the compound releases more than 450 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, according to the International Energy Agency, around 2% of global emissions.
There are plenty of alternatives, but none of them have been able to compete with the polluting status quo. Part of the problem is that the process to create ammonia, known as Haber-Bosch, has benefited from more than a century of refinement.
One startup, though, hopes to give Haber-Bosch a run for its money by reducing the number of steps it takes to get from raw ingredients to finished ammonia. NitroFix, a finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, transforms water and air into the vital compound by feeding the two through a device known as an electrolyzer.
NitroFix isn’t the first to do so, but co-founder and CEO Ophira Melamed thinks a proprietary compound her company uses gives it an edge. The catalyst, which helps facilitate key chemical reactions, works when submerged in water, something Melamed said is unusual. That allows the company to make hydrogen in the same container where it’s used to make ammonia.
Other approaches tend to split water first to generate hydrogen, which adds costly and energy-intensive steps. “There is no additional step of hydrogen production,” Melamed told TechCrunch.
The company licensed the core technology from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where an early version was developed. Since then, NitroFix has continued to work on it, preparing it for industrial use. In the lab at Weizmann, the catalyst worked as a powder suspended in water. Today, it’s fixed to a panel that’s nearly one square foot in size.
NitroFix remains focused on refining that part of the electrolyzer, known as the cathode. “There are common electrolyzers that are already on the market producing hydrogen,” Melamed said. “We would like to take whatever is not the cathode — somebody else developed it — to use it in our system and to focus on the heart of the technology, which is cathode performance.” NitroFix plans to work with another company to produce completed electrolyzers.
With the new cathode, the startup can produce one metric ton of ammonia using nine megawatt-hours of electricity, about the same as an electrified Haber-Bosch process, Melamed said, though operating other parts of the plant add one more megawatt-hour to NitroFix’s total. “We should remember that the Haber-Bosch process is more than 100 years old, so the efficiency is quite high. We are much lower, but we have a plan to reach higher efficiencies,” she said.
NitroFix raised $3.1 million in 2023 in a seed round led by Clean Energy Ventures, with participation from High House Investments, SOSV, UM6P Ventures, and Zero Carbon Capital.
The startup intends to target companies in regions with high natural gas costs, which drives up ammonia production costs, and companies like pharmaceutical manufacturers or food producers that might prefer production on-site to avoid supply chain disruptions.
“The current need for ammonia is around 200 million [metric] tons, and it’s going to ramp up to about 700 million tons of ammonia. By 2050, you will need new facilities,” Melamed said.
By using electrolyzers, NitroFix’s devices are smaller than the mega-factories that use Haber-Bosch. “The idea is to have smaller production units that would be located in different places around the world, near the place where they are needed,” Melamed said.