When Suzanne Zamany Andersen organized her journey to greenhouse grower Koppert Cress within the Netherlands, she thought she would simply be pitching her startup’s system, which turns electrical energy and air into ammonia, a extensively used fertilizer.
Not solely did the corporate agree to check the ammonia manufacturing system made by her firm — Denmark-based NitroVolt — it additionally referred her to its comparatively new funding arm, Division Q, which ended up investing.
Once put in, NitroVolt’s system will produce ammonia that Koppert Cress will use to develop its crops (a variety of various cress varieties), it’ll additionally use warmth generated by the system to heat its greenhouses. “This is an ideal match,” Andersen stated the corporate instructed her.
The majority of the world’s ammonia is produced utilizing the 115-year-old Haber-Bosch course of, which is closely reliant on pure fuel. For growers like Koppert Cress, which desires to get rid of its carbon emissions by 2026, fertilizer represents a difficult supply of air pollution to zero out.
NitroVolt is one in all a recent crop of startups working to search out options to Haber-Bosch. The firm begins by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules and separating nitrogen from the air. Then, it pumps hydrogen and nitrogen right into a response chamber, the place lithium helps connect the suitable variety of hydrogens to every nitrogen atom. Ammonia emerges from the opposite facet.
Ammonia is one in all two nitrogen-based fertilizers which can be broadly used all through agriculture. “Certain crops actually like ammonia, sure crops actually like nitrates,” Andersen instructed TechCrunch.
The first farmer more likely to pilot NitroVolt’s system is a rapeseed farmer in Denmark. “He swears by ammonia,” Andersen stated.
But Denmark doesn’t at the moment have any ammonia manufacturing, so the farmer’s brother drives to Poland a number of occasions per yr to obtain it. “When he noticed that we may do on-farm manufacturing, he was like, when are you able to promote me this unit?” Andersen stated.
Denmark isn’t the one place the place ammonia is tough to come back by. Much of Africa, South America, and even elements of Canada are ammonia deserts. “There’s locations the place the logistics and distribution prices of centrally produced fertilizer is simply actually excessive,” Andersen stated. “These markets, they’re not served by the present incumbent expertise. So that is the place we will basically step in.”
NitroVolt’s pilot unit will produce about 5 kilograms of ammonia per day, however the startup has plans to incrementally enhance manufacturing to 150 kilograms per day, sufficient to provide a typical farm in Denmark and the U.S. The entire operation would match inside a typical 20-foot delivery container.
The startup raised €2.75 million seed spherical led by BackingMinds and EIFO, the Danish sovereign wealth fund, to assist construct the pilot and rent workers to make it occur. Division Q, EQT Foundation, and Satgana participated, and BackingMinds underwrote a €750,000 convertible mortgage.
Andersen stated that, if farmers have renewable vitality on web site, NitroVolt’s system can produce ammonia at a value similar to what they pay as we speak. As extra farmers undertake renewable vitality, that might assist tip the stability in favor of electrically-produced ammonia.
“We first began with farmers three years in the past, they actually didn’t have numerous renewable vitality on web site,” she stated. “Over the previous three years, greater than half the farmers we talked to both have photo voltaic on web site, even though it’s principally by no means sunny in Denmark, or they’ve purchased large wind generators. It’s actually a shift that’s occurring.”
