Economics of Emerging Ammonia Fertilizer Production Methods – a Role for On-Farm Synthesis?

Abstract

Prospects of recent promising methods of producing ammonia without fossil fuels are discussed. Despite demonstrating efficiency gains over previous similar approaches, the novel biological and electrochemical pathways require further large improvements to compete with electricity-powered Haber-Bosch. As some literature asserts that future production will shift to smaller scales, such as on-farm, we qualitatively discuss the economics of scale of future green ammonia production.