New technology will let farmers produce their own fertilizer and e-fuels

Associate Professor Emil Dražević, head of the Power to Chemicals research group at Aarhus University is working on a new research project AELECTRA, which aims to develop a technology that will enable companies, industries and farmers to produce liquid ammonia more economically and in a more environmentally friendly way than today's centralized Haber-Bosch process.

"We believe that this technology has huge potential to drastically change the global market situation for ammonia and facilitate the green transition of a number of sectors," Dražević says.

"AELECTRA will build a prototype that can store electrical energy in liquid anhydrous ammonia, and that is extremely well-suited for decentralized use. The decentralized production capability takes full advantage of spatial and temporal variations in renewable energy production," says Associate Professor Jacopo Catalano, head of the Membrane Engineering research group and CO-PI of AELECTRA.

He adds, "The technology will be relevant for several industrial sectors, including power generation, food, pharmaceutical industry, shipping and, of course, fertilizer production. Farmers will be able to produce their own ammonia for fertilizer or e-fuels for emissions-free tractors."

The new technology could produce and separate ammonia at an energy efficiency corresponding to the Haber-Bosch process. But unlike the Haber-Bosch process, the new technology will work under far more gentle conditions, without the need for heat exchangers or high pressures.

This will halve investment costs, making the technology attractive for decentralized production.

"Our calculations show that the technology outperforms Haber-Bosch in production scales of up to 1,000 kg per hour. The prototype we're building produces and separates ammonia from the reactor and stores it as liquid in steel cylinders," says Dražević.

Today, ammonia is among the ten most important chemicals produced in the world in terms of volume. The substance is primarily used to make fertilizers for modern agriculture, but green ammonia in particular also has a future for energy storage and carbon reduction in many other industries.

"The green transition is well underway with 19% of EU's primary energy coming from renewables. Often forgotten in this equation, is the change from a highly centralized energy production scheme to a decentralized one, a change that also needs to take place for large downstream energy consumers, i.e., the fabrication of ammonia. The AELECTRA project displays a novel idea enabling a fully decentralized value chain, from renewable power generation to green ammonia.

"This empowers use cases where a local rural community can use solar panels to produce their own fertilizer. Or where a local harbor with a couple of wind turbines can produce their own ammonia to fuel their fishing industry," says Nicolai Fossar Fabritius, Senior Partner & Founder at the Greenlandic wind power company Anori A/S, who're also taking part in the project.

Every year, about 235 million tons of ammonia are produced globally, primarily via the Haber-Bosch process. Production costs 1.4% of the world's entire energy consumption and it emits approximately 450 million tons of carbon dioxide a year—about 1% of all anthropogenic carbon emissions and more than any other industrial chemical production.

"With AELECTRA, we hope to make a big difference by bringing climate-neutral, green ammonia into play via decentralized local production at a lower price than Haber-Bosch. If we succeed, we'll disrupt the way in which ammonia is produced today," says Dražević, though he underscores the complexity of the project. "The concept is high-risk high-gain, and so there are a number of conditions we need to meet during the project before the technology will work as we envision," he adds.

Provided by Aarhus University