Cracking Ammonia's Century-Old Cost Problem with Ammobia's Karen Baert

Karen Baert is co-founder and CEO of Ammobia, a climate tech startup developing a lower-cost, lower-pressure process for clean ammonia production.

What's your background, and what led you to start Ammobia?

I'm originally from Belgium and grew up on the sea as a sailor. Being close to the ocean made me want to devote my life to preserving our planet, which brought me to decarbonizing heavy industry. These are unsexy sectors that have a huge contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions, but considering they also act as a major economic levers, they don't get nearly enough attention.

I studied chemical engineering in Belgium, then moved to Germany to focus on renewable energy engineering. That's where I joined my first climate tech startup and got excited about the entrepreneurial ecosystem. After that, I became a strategy consultant at Bain, where I worked on decarbonization strategies for large energy and chemical companies. I learned a lot, but I also saw that without cost-effective technologies to decarbonize, nothing really happened. The bottom line and profitability was still the main driver in technical, operational, and growth decisions. That realization pushed me to focus specifically on technology innovation that specifically lowers costs while also unlocking lower-carbon solutions.

I moved to the Bay Area to do an MBA at Stanford and was lucky to be there at the start of the hydrogen hype. I helped Stanford set up their hydrogen initiative, started a hydrogen student club, launched a hydrogen podcast, and interviewed 250 people in the hydrogen space. I also spent time as an investor at Breakthrough Energy Ventures working on hydrogen and its derivatives. Throughout all of that work, I came across ammonia and was immediately hooked by the opportunity. When I started looking at ammonia, there was one startup globally doing anything related to ammonia production innovation. There were already hundreds working on hydrogen.

I used my Stanford email to reach out to every lab and university globally doing research on ammonia production innovation and evaluated them from a purely technical standpoint: What can actually be cheaper than what we're using today? Only one technology checked that box. I then brought in my co-founder, Tristan Gilbert, who was doing his Ph.D. at Stanford working on these exact materials. That's how we started building Ammobia together.

What is the ammonia challenge?

Ammonia is a huge challenge and a huge opportunity at the same time. Today, 100% of large-scale ammonia  production uses natural gas or coal through a process that runs at extremely high temperatures and pressures. It's extremely polluting and represents up to 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

But ammonia is also already a $100 billion market. It feeds half of the world's population in the form of nitrogen fertilizer. Going forward, once we figure out how to produce it cost-effectively and cleanly, ammonia is going to be much more than just a fertilizer. The market is expected to grow up to five times, from $100 billion to $500 billion, driven by two major new use cases.

The first is ammonia as a maritime shipping fuel. Ammonia contains no carbon, so when you burn it, there are no CO2 emissions. For maritime shipping, it's one of the only scalable clean fuels available. That alone could double the size of the ammonia market and mitigate another 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The second new use case is ammonia as a power vector, a way to redistribute renewable energy across the world. You can produce ammonia wherever you have cheap gas or cheap renewables, then transport it by ship to areas that need clean energy, like Europe, Japan, and Korea.

The existing Haber-Bosch process has been around for over a century. What does the status quo of ammonia production look like today?

Ammonia is produced through the Haber-Bosch process, which was invented in 1914 and hasn't substantially changed in over a hundred years. It runs on natural gas or coal. In China, it's mainly coal. The process itself requires very high temperatures and pressures, around 200 bar and 500 to 600 degrees Celsius, which means it has to be run at massive scale. We're talking billion-dollar facilities that take 10 minutes to drive around. As a result, the ammonia market is extremely centralized, typically far from where demand actually exists.

What is Ammobia building to change that?

We're developing technology to produce ammonia at lower cost, and to decentralize production using modular designs at flexible scale. We like to call our process Haber-Bosch 2.0. The key difference is that we can produce ammonia at an order of magnitude lower pressure. Instead of 200 bar, we operate at around 30 bar. We also significantly reduce the temperatures and increase conversion efficiency.

That comes with several advantages. First, the plant itself is much cheaper. The capital cost can be up to half that of a conventional system. Second, because we operate at lower pressure, our process is much more flexible and rampable, which makes it a good fit for renewable hydrogen. We can use any energy source. We favor low-carbon, but we're compatible with any type.

The third advantage is modularity. We can produce ammonia at medium scale, enabling distributed production closer to the customer or a phased buildout of new plants. Today, because you can only produce ammonia at massive scale, you need a billion dollars and gigawatt-scale energy input to build a new plant. Our technology removes those barriers.

How dependent is Ammobia's technology on the evolution of the hydrogen market?

Not at all, and that's a really important point. We make ammonia production cheaper regardless of the energy source. Even if you don't believe in any of the new hydrogen use cases, ammonia production today is a $100 billion market that will only grow as we have more mouths to feed, and more ships that need affordable fuel. Ammobia's technology makes ammonia production cheaper with any type of energy, including existing installations where there are opportunities for retrofits as well as new builds.

What is Ammobia's core technical innovation?

The key innovation is a breakthrough in materials science. We use new materials in the reactor system that enable that step change in producing ammonia at lower pressure and lower temperature. The core of our innovation and intellectual property sits in the new active materials, but also in the innovation around the reactor and process design.

We've had our pre-pilot up and running for more than a year with strong performance. That's at technology readiness level five. With our recent funding, we've already started building a pilot that will hit TRL 6 at our facilities in San Francisco. The next step is our first industrial demonstration in the field with a customer, producing at the tonnes-per-day scale with ammonia being used commercially.

What are the biggest misconceptions about ammonia or hydrogen that you'd like to correct?

Two come to mind. The first is the idea that hydrogen is dead, and therefore ammonia is dead by association. During the hydrogen hype, the industry came up with a bunch of use cases that didn't make sense from a techno-economic or even a safety perspective. It's actually good that those projects are being canceled so we can focus on the ones that do make sense. Hydrogen and ammonia will always be important in B2B applications, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors such as deep sea shipping where you can't directly electrify and you need something energy-dense for long distances or long-duration storage.

The second misconception is that ammonia itself is somehow dangerous or bad. One reason nobody talks about ammonia the way they talk about hydrogen is because ammonia smells terrible. But we actually think that's a feature. You can detect a few parts per million of ammonia in the air long before it becomes a health or safety hazard. Like every industrial chemical, ammonia requires trained labor and the right procedures. It can be corrosive and toxic. But compared to other fuels like hydrogen or hydrocarbons, it's much more energy-dense and far less explosive or flammable. More education and awareness are needed so that we start using ammonia in the use cases where it makes sense.

How are you thinking about go-to-market, and which applications are you targeting first?

There are really four industry use cases for ammonia: agriculture and fertilizers, chemicals where it's used as a feedstock, maritime shipping fuel, and energy transport and storage. We're not choosing between them because we're developing the same product for all of them. We're listening to the market and following the strongest pull.

Right now we're seeing strong traction from the maritime industry, where the first ammonia-fueled ships are in the water and operators are looking for clean ammonia. We're also seeing strong interest from the chemicals and agriculture space, where there are existing use cases and growing demand for cleaner, more localized production. It's something of a race between these two for our first commercial project.

In terms of location, the most important factor is co-location with the hydrogen source because hydrogen is extremely difficult to transport. If it's traditional hydrogen, we'll most likely be at an industrial facility where hydrogen is already produced at scale. If it's green hydrogen, we go where the clean energy is. Whatever the energy source, we can adjust our location and scale to produce ammonia at the lowest possible cost.

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