In the latest issue of Bændablaðið, is an interview with Helga Dögg Flosadóttir, CEO of Atmonia. The article states that the innovation company Atmonia has recently reached an important milestone on its journey to develop equipment for environmentally friendly production of nitrogen fertilizer from air, water, and electricity through electrolysis.
For the first time, ammonia has now been produced in Atmonia’s laboratory using this method in their new system. Atmonia was founded in 2016 and became part of the Kria's Venture Fund’s portfolio in 2022. Since its founding, the most challenging part of this ambitious and globally unique project has been the development of a special “catalyst” that converts raw materials—air and water—into ammonia using electricity via electrolysis. “Catalysis” refers to when a substance accelerates a chemical reaction.
Atmonia’s first results on such catalysis were published in peer-reviewed journals in 2021, and now they have been realized in experiments. The basic idea is to transform nitrogen gas, which makes up about 80 percent of the atmosphere, into a solid and usable form of nitrogen—ammonia. The Haber–Bosch process has long been used for fertilizer production through such a process, including here in Iceland at the fertilizer plant in Gufunes. However, that technology is not environmentally friendly, as it is energy-intensive and has a large carbon footprint. Atmonia’s fertilizer production will be carbon-neutral.
Helga Dögg Flosadóttir, CEO of Atmonia and one of the company’s founders, says this represents a major milestone that has been pursued very systematically over the past year.
“This system we now have is a small-scale version of the system we plan to scale up eventually. This summer, after improving all components, we ran an experiment using isotope labeling, which allows us to distinguish between ammonia produced by catalyst breakdown and ammonia produced by nitrogen gas splitting. Naturally, we want to produce ammonia from nitrogen gas, not from the catalyst. This experiment demonstrated that, in this improved system, we are indeed producing ammonia from nitrogen gas through a reaction mechanism known as ‘Mars–van Krevelen.’ This result enables us to move to the next steps: first, optimizing the system’s energy efficiency, and then scaling up. We expect it will take about five years to produce the first full-scale system, which should be capable of producing around 150 tons of ammonia per year.”
