Facet Amtech, an Australian start-up, has developed a multifunctional catalyst that it says produces ammonia directly from air and water, doing away with the dedicated hydrogen production and air separation that an ammonia plant normally needs. If it works at industrial scale, the company believes it could make ammonia cheaper than today’s natural-gas-based product without any carbon price, lowering both the cost and the carbon footprint of the key input for nitrogen fertilisers.

The company announced a A$3 million ($2.1 million) seed round from Main Sequence and Uniseed. Cofounder Peter Richardson, PhD, told AgFunderNews the money will fund a pilot making 1 kilo of ammonia a day in early 2027. A second pilot at 100 kilos a day would follow about two years later, and a 4-tonnes-a-day unit in the early 2030s, large enough to de-risk full-scale production. “If we can prove this at scale, this could be a major disruption, not just an incremental improvement from a slightly better catalyst,” he said.

Most ammonia today comes from the Haber-Bosch process, which combines hydrogen, usually from natural gas, with nitrogen separated from the air under high heat and pressure. Green ammonia swaps in hydrogen from electrolysis but still needs a hydrogen plant. Facet’s catalyst, Richardson said, splits hydrogen from water or steam and reduces nitrogen from the air on the same surface at the same time, at milder conditions than Haber-Bosch, with renewable electricity or waste heat providing the thermal input.

Facet makes the catalyst in-house from pure metal powders blended and heat-treated in a furnace, with no platinum-group metals or rare earths. Richardson expects overall catalyst costs “roughly on par or potentially even a bit cheaper” than in a conventional plant, and says the larger saving comes from removing the hydrogen plant, which accounts for most of the cost of ammonia today, and from collapsing several reactors into one. The pilot aims for more than 2,000 hours of continuous operation, the benchmark industry contacts have set. The reactor produces aqueous ammonia, which needs a separation step before it can be stored as gas or turned into fertiliser.

The company was founded in 2024 by Richardson and fellow mechanical engineer James Bradley and recently moved from the University of Newcastle campus to its own industrial site nearby. It plans to license plant designs and supply catalyst to global fertiliser producers rather than run its own facilities, at plant sizes of roughly 500 to 3,000 tonnes a day, in line with the incumbent industry. “What we’re striving for is being cheaper than grey ammonia without including any carbon pricing. It’s a pure economic play,” Richardson said.

“Facet Amtech is tackling a problem that sits at the intersection of energy security and industrial resilience,” said Emerald Scofield, investment manager at Main Sequence Ventures. Richardson said several ammonia majors have offered to validate the technology through in-house catalyst tests, cost estimates and a small pilot, but want pilot data before committing.

Nitrogen fertiliser prices track the cost of natural gas and of the plants that turn it into ammonia. A route that removes the hydrogen step would, if proven, change the economics of the input that farmers spend most on.

Source: AgFunderNews