The new nitrogen
Our plasma turns air, water and electricity into nitrate. Any site, any scale.
Scroll to exploreThe world fixes its nitrogen in a few hundred places.
150 megatons of it is produced every year. They cluster around cheap natural gas or coal, the feedstock the whole industry is built on.
From there it travels the globe along major supply lines.
A few exporters feed the rest of the world. The heaviest lines are billions of dollars of fertiliser leaving a small number of gas-rich countries.
At the other end are hundreds of millions of users, spread thin.
There are roughly 2.3 million farms for every nitrogen fertiliser plant on the map. But food is not the full story. The critical elements necessary to sustain our industries are extracted from the ground with nitrogen too. A few hundred producers, hundreds of millions of dependants: that is the vulnerability.
- Farmland using nitrogen
- Mines
Electricity, however, is already generated where the nitrogen is used.
The map shows the distribution of renewable electricity generation — 108,605 plants. In a single generation, making electricity stopped being something a country does in a few places and became something it does in thousands. The power is already next to the farm, the greenhouse and the mine. The nitrogen is the only part still being shipped.
- Farmland using nitrogen
- Renewable generation, sized by capacity
It’s simple really.
The new nitrogen is electric.
Nitrate from air. Anywhere.
N2 Applied builds nitrate systems that fix nitrogen straight out of air and water, on electricity alone. No gas. No ammonia intermediate. No freight. Two processes on a skid, inside a shipping container. Skip the reformer, synthesis loop and the 300-bar vessels. The same design serves 30 tons per year on a farm and 3 000 on an industrial site.
- Horticulture fertilizer
- Organic waste upcycling
- Industrial nitrates for mining
Nitrate is the most valuable thing nitrogen becomes.
It is the form a plant can take up the moment it lands, which is why greenhouses and fertigation buy it and why it carries a premium over every other nitrogen compound. It is also what a mine blasts with, what nylon starts as, and what a dozen industrial chemistries are built on.
- Fertiliser60% · 8.4 Mt
- Mining20% · 2.8 Mt
- Industry20% · 2.8 Mt
Nine per cent of the world's reactive nitrogen, and the share that carries the premium.
Fertiliser
Ammonium and calcium nitrate, UAN, nitrate-bearing NPK — the fast-acting half of the fertiliser market.
Explosives and mining
Technical-grade ammonium nitrate. About a fifth of all nitrate, and the buyer is usually a long way from a port.
Industrial chemistry
Adipic acid for nylon, nitrobenzene, metal treatment, electronics-grade acid.
Three ways in.
FAQ.
Nitrate is 14 of 149 million tonnes. Aren't you chasing 9% of the nitrogen market?Yes — the most valuable 9%, and the beachhead rather than the ceiling.
Urea is the volume; nitrate is the value. Nitrate carries a premium because the plant takes it up immediately, it is what greenhouses and fertigation systems buy, and a fifth of it goes into explosives, where the buyer is a mine and the alternative is a truck from the coast. Starting where the value density is highest is the point, not a limitation — and 30 bn EUR of nitrate is not a small pond.
Nitrate is also the longest way round. Every tonne of it made today starts at a gas field or a coal mine: the gas or the coal becomes ammonia through Haber–Bosch, and only then is that ammonia burned over precious metal through the Ostwald process to make the acid. Ten unit operations across two plants, with the ammonia stored and shipped between them. That is the chain with the most to gain from being shortened, and nitrate is the product where making it where it is used takes the most steps out.
The share the technology can reach is much larger than that, because urea is not a preference, it is a compromise. Urea is shipped because it travels well, not because it grows more: on the field it loses nitrogen to ammonia volatilisation, and its efficiency depends on rain and incorporation that the farmer does not control. Nitrate is taken up directly, and making it locally at a price set by a power contract removes the reason urea won in the first place.
Nitrogen-enriched organic fertiliser goes further still: the acid is fed straight into the farm’s own slurry or digestate, which fixes the ammonia that would otherwise be lost, keeps the carbon and the potassium and phosphorus already in it, and returns a complete fertiliser made on the farm that spreads it. That product competes with urea on delivered cost per kilo of nitrogen taken up by the crop — and it is where the volume of the nitrogen market is.
Plasma nitrogen fixation lost to Haber–Bosch in 1913. Why is it different now?Because three of the four things that beat it have changed.
How much greenhouse gas does the conventional chain emit, and how much of it can this actually remove?About 4 tonnes of CO₂e per tonne of nitrogen made — and the production half of that is what the route removes.
What the plasma route removes is the production block and most of the transport block — about 4 tonnes of CO₂e per tonne of nitrogen — and it removes it structurally rather than by abatement. There is no reformer, so no process CO₂: the only carbon is whatever the electricity carries, which is zero on a renewable contract and falling everywhere else. There is no ammonia oxidation over platinum, which is where the N₂O is formed, so that stream does not exist to be abated. And the unit sits where the nitrogen is used, so the freight goes too. Field emissions are not a production question and we do not claim them — though nitrogen-enriched organic fertiliser changes what is applied, fixing ammonia in slurry that would otherwise be lost. On today's European carbon price the production block alone is a real number in the delivered cost, and CBAM puts it on imports too.