Silicon Valley scale-up Ammobia is out to change the way fertilizer is made, products are manufactured, maritime transport is fueled, and energy is sourced.
“We will produce clean ammonia for all of these use cases,” says CEO and co-founder Karen Baert, a trained engineer and experienced investor turned entrepreneur (pictured here with her co-founder and CTO Tristan Gilbert). The company’s backers include financial investors such as Starlight Ventures and Collaborative Fund as well as major industry players such as Chevron.
Ammobia, a 2025 World Economic Forum Technology Pioner, is developing one of the emerging clean approaches to producing ammonia, which plays a crucial role in many industries and is the world’s second most produced chemical.
Nitrogen fertilizers are estimated to support about half the world’s population, enhancing plant growth and crop yields to feed an ever-growing world population. However, the current method of extracting and converting nitrogen industrially – nitrogen fixing – is both energy and carbon intensive, prompting a global push for greener alternatives.
Improved ammonia production via a process called green nitrogen fixation which involve methods like Ammobia’s for producing ammonia without relying on the traditional Haber-Bosch process, are expected to reduce energy demand and help combat climate change.
Green nitrogen fixation is one of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025 named in a June World Economic Forum report in collaboration with scientific publisher Frontiers. The Innovator is publishing a series of independently reported in-depth articles on the 2025 emerging trends in its FutureScope section, under a collaboration agreement with Frontiers.
Pilot-scale systems are now operating in more than 15 countries, according to the report, offering a more sustainable pathway for meeting global demand for ammonia and other value-added chemicals.
Clean ammonia – either in the form of low-carbon ammonia or as an e-fuel – is expected to play a critical role in the world’s journey towards Net Zero: It can be transported using existing infrastructure; and it has multiple end-uses, not only as a fuel or hydrogen carrier but also to help decarbonize industrial processes.
The potential impact is substantial, says the Forum report, as the technology represents a convergence of food security, energy innovation and climate action in a single transformative platform.
Haber Bosch 2.0
In 1918 and 1931, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch each won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which is still used today to produce ammonia from fossil fuels as a necessary building block for large-scale fertilizers synthesis. Synthetic ammonia is responsible for upwards of 50% of the world’s population food production. However, the process is largely unchanged since its invention and:
- Relies on natural gas or coal for energy and hydrogen supply
- Requires extreme temperatures and pressures, imposing costly materials and engineering demands
- Mandates continuous operation and centralized, large-scale production for stability and cost-effectiveness
The current Haber-Bosch process consumes around 2% of global energy demand, entirely through fossil fuels, contributing 2% of global carbon emissions. It emits 2.4 tons of CO2 per ton of ammonia produced – nearly twice that of steel production and four times that of cement manufacturing, so there is a real need and a real opportunity to find an alternative approach, says scientist and entrepreneur Javier Garcia-Martinez, a professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Alicante in Spain and a co-author of the Forum’s report on green nitrogen fixation.
While the principle of alternative nitrogen fixation was discovered in the 1930s, considerable progress towards large- scale commercialization is happening now.
These green alternative approaches to fixing nitrogen use electricity, light, plasma or naturally occurring microbes to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia at lower temperatures and pressures, says the Forum report. By using water or green hydrogen as a proton source, they significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Ammobia is one example. The company, which is in the process of scaling up, calls its technology Haber-Bosch 2.0. Its proprietary thermochemical reactor reimagines the ammonia synthesis reactor to operate at 10x lower pressure, 150°C lower temperature and 4x higher feedstock conversion efficiency, lowering capex by 50% and requiring up to 50% less energy, according to the company. A 50% reduction in capex and opex was confirmed by a cost study that Ammobia conducted earlier this year with Genesis, the consulting arm of Technip Energies, an engineering firm with decades of experience in ammonia, Baert says.
She points out that Ammobia’s modular ammonia production units, which are built from commercially available parts and equipment, reduce engineering and construction costs and enable faster, cheaper projects for ammonia products and developers. Today it takes about three years to get a new ammonia plant up and running. “With our standardized modular approach plants can be manufactured in three months and commissioned on site in under three months,” Baert says.
Baert previously worked as a strategy consultant advising big steel and chemical companies on how to decarbonize their businesses. “I soon realized that for these companies to decarbonize cost effectively – ideally cheaper or at the same price point – we needed better technology, so I moved to the tech side of things,” she says. While studying at Stanford she noticed that there were around 100 startups focusing on needed new hydrogen technologies “but nobody was innovating on the production process for ammonia,” she says. “There was a lack of innovation and huge potential.”
Making greener fertilizer is just the start. “In the future ammonia will be used as a clean energy carrier,” says Baert. “Two big use cases are fueling maritime shipping with clean ammonia and the second is cost-effectively redistributing renewable energy across the world.”
Some 90% of all traded goods are transported across the sea, and the global shipping industry is responsible for around 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Clean ammonia is one of the most promising clean fuels to replace highly polluting maritime fuel oils, she says, pointing out that ammonia combustion engines are already proven in the field and ready for widespread deployment.
Ammonia is also a versatile energy carrier with strategic advantages over liquid hydrogen. With storage requirements up to 30 times lower in cost than liquid hydrogen ammonia presents a more practical medium for hydrogen energy storage and transport, she says.
“Geographies that don’t have abundant renewable power or cheap gas– like Europe – will import clean ammonia and use it as a power source and chemical feedstock,” predicts Baert.
Clean ammonia could also clean up manufacturing, she says. Some 20% of ammonia produced globally is used to manufacture plastics, polymers, explosives, rubber, and fiber-based products. Clean ammonia can cut the carbon footprint of the end-product by up to 50% without requiring significant change to the manufacturing process.
Ammobia says it wants to serve all these markets. It plans to start with small customers enabling ammonia to be generated using locally abundant renewable energy, such as wind and solar. The ammonia produced locally could then be efficiently stored and/or processed on-site, saving transport energy and costs. The San Franciso-based scale-up later plans to leverage its technology to build large new plants and retrofit existing ammonia plants. “The potential of clean ammonia goes far beyond fertilizers – it’s a game-changer for clean shipping and energy storage and it can help decarbonize the entire value chain,” she says.
Other Emerging Approaches
Bio approaches to green nitrogen fixation are also getting a boost from new technologies. Azotobacter is a bacterium that can fix atmospheric nitrogen and convert it to a form usable by plants. This ability is due to the presence of an enzyme called nitrogenase, which converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. By using Azotobacter for nitrogen fixation, farmers can reduce their dependence on synthetic fertilizers and thereby reduce their carbon footprint. In addition, biological nitrogen fixation by Azotobacter can help maintain soil fertility by providing a source of available nitrogen for plants. Professor Doh Chang Lee and a team of scientists in S. Korea’s Center for Synthetic Biology KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) are combining biological nitrogen fixation via Azotobacter with quantum dots-semiconductor particles a few nanometers in size with optical and electronic properties- to make the process more efficient, says Dr. Sang Yup Lee, Director of the Center and a co-author of the Forum’s report on green nitrogen fixation.
U.S. ag tech company Pivot Bio is taking a different approach. Its gene-edited microbes convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia directly on the plant’s root system. The company claims that its nitrogen is weatherproof, safer to handle, does not leach or contribute to nitrous oxide pollution.
“There are many other exciting new developments,” says Garcia-Martinez. One is photocatalytic reduction. Instead of using electricity this approach uses only water and sunlight to convert nitrogen into ammonia.
Another promising approach is lithium-mediated electrochemical processes which have the potential ability to produce ammonia using only air, water and renewable energy, says Garcia-Martinez. Australia’s Jupiter Ionics is spearheading lithium-based nitrogen fixation technology developed by researchers at Monash University.
Other companies are producing ammonia directly with electricity, nitrogen gas and water. Israeli startup Nitrofix’s catalyst enables ammonia production in a one-step electrochemical process, which can be powered by renewable electricity and operates at low temperatures and pressure. This process does not require any hydrogen gas as a feedstock or intermediary (hydrogen atoms are pulled directly from water). The technology was developed at Israel’s Weizmann Institute in Israel. Backers include Clean Energy Ventures.
Denmark’s Haldor Topsoe has also developed novel catalysts from entirely renewable sources for green ammonia production. In August of last year Topsoe and its partners Skovgaard Energy and energy company Vestas inaugurated a new green ammonia plant in Ramme, Denmark which is expected to produce 5,000 tons of green ammonia annually from renewable power. The plant will demonstrate how renewable power can be coupled directly to an ammonia plant while taking the fluctuations in power production into account, and simultaneously making it a cost-effective way of producing green ammonia, according to a press release. The partnership has received €11 million in funding from the Danish Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program.
Germany’s Thyssenkrupp has developed a technology that can produce green ammonia using only water, air and electricity and has already built four electrolysis-based ammonia plants.
And in July China’s Envision Energy launched what is being billed as the world’s largest green hydrogen and ammonia plant in Inner Mongolia. The plant runs completely on off-grid renewable sources like wind, solar, and battery storage and artificial intelligence manages its operations.
Envision’s ammonia output is already the largest in the world at 320,000 tons per year and it plans to grow this capacity to 1.5 million tons each year by 2028. Envision has already secured a major off-take agreement with Marubeni Corporation of Japan. The deal will supply green ammonia to sectors like fertilizers, chemicals, and shipping, enabling climate targets and energy security.
Garcia-Martinez says he believes the proliferation of promising new approaches to producing ammonia will lead to green fertilizer in the near term. Energy applications will take five years or more to scale-up, he predicts, as they will require the reinvention of whole industries.
Strategic Implications
The geopolitical landscape of ammonia production currently stands at a pivotal moment, according to the Dubai Future Foundation, which contributed to the Forum’s report. With China accounting for around 30% of global production and India and Middle Eastern countries poised to expand capacity green nitrogen fixation could reshape regional dependencies and create new centers of agricultural and energy influence. “Those who develop scalable green ammonia production capabilities may gain significant strategic advantages in both food security and clean energy transitions,” says the Dubai Foundation.
It predicts that over the next decade, leadership in green nitrogen fixation will likely emerge from those who can integrate three distinct strategic capabilities: advanced electrochemical manufacturing, renewable energy infrastructure and agricultural innovation ecosystems.
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