Addis Energy

The Haber-Bosch process of manufacturing ammonia is one of industrial chemistry’s foundational achievements, key to producing the agricultural fertilizer that helps feed half the world. But the high temperatures and pressures it requires come at an extraordinary environmental cost. An astonishing 2% of global energy consumption and 1.3% of carbon emissions are directly linked to ammonia production. In recent years, significant progress has been made at scaling so-called “green ammonia,” made through an electrochemical reaction. But beyond agriculture, its promise as a clean energy carrier for heavy industry and transportation relies on abundant renewable electricity—which is becoming more challenging given the growing competition for clean power resources. “Ammonia will be a big part of our path to net zero, but only if we can decarbonize its production,” says Michael Alexander, co-founder and CEO of Addis Energy. “To do that efficiently, we need a fundamentally new pathway.”

Using technology developed by Professor Iwnetim Abate at MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and leveraging Professor Yet-Ming Chiang’s decades of tough tech start-up experience, Addis Energy is commercializing a novel process to manufacture ammonia using the earth’s subsurface as a chemical reactor. Its approach resembles so-called “geologic” or “natural” hydrogen, which extracts hydrogen gas found in its natural form in subsurface reservoirs. But rather than rely on exploration to identify existing deposits, Addis Energy uses proprietary catalysts to stimulate hydrogen production from ferrous rock, and then adds nitrogen to extend that reaction to create ammonia—all in a single subsurface process. “Rather than looking for deposits of hydrogen, all we need is the right kind of rock, and we can stimulate the production ourselves,” says Charlie Mitchell, co-founder and COO. “We’re not drilling for ammonia—we’re making ammonia underground,” adds Alexander. Addis Energy’s approach replaces Haber-Bosch with a net-energy-positive process that leverages the thermal and chemical potential of the earth.

Professor Abate began exploring the challenge of stimulating the production of geologic hydrogen in response to a request from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E development program. Through experimental investigations and theoretical calculations, his laboratory identified the fundamental chemical process enabling its production. The key was the presence of ferrous iron rich rock, whose natural reactive potential could be leveraged with the correct catalysts to create hydrogen. Whereas earlier attempts at stimulating geologic hydrogen took more than a thousand hours, these newly applied catalysts reduced the time to less than ten. And whereas other researchers addressing the same challenge were satisfied with hydrogen—which is difficult to transport and store—Abate and his colleagues recognized the high pressure and temperature environment in the subsurface as an opportunity to extend the reaction. They discovered that the addition of nitrogen could drive a cascading reaction that would synthesize ammonia from water and in-situ rock. ”Our work demonstrates that the earth’s subsurface could be used as a reactor with extremely abundant rocks as feedstock to produce sufficient ammonia,” writes Abate and his co-authors in a scientific paper published in Joule.

Following the success of laboratory-scale pilots, Addis Energy is identifying geologic deposits of ultramafic rocks, ideally located near existing ammonia demand centers. Adapting the oil and gas industry’s highly refined drilling methods, they will induce a chemical reaction between the rock and the water underground, and then mechanically displace the ammonia-containing solution to be collected on the surface. “Our process takes advantage of decades of oil and gas experience at efficiently pumping fluids—rather than mining and moving hundreds of thousands of tons of iron,” says Alexander.

“What we’re really doing is harnessing the chemical potential that’s beneath our feet,” says Mitchell. “If we can revolutionize the ammonia production process, we can substantially meet the pressing need for efficient, carbon-free energy—and we can do it almost anywhere.”