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UK Company Says It Has Found The Green Fertilizer SweetSpot
Aug 14
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As the global community strives to achieve net-zero by 2050emissions targets, efforts to decarbonize the fertilizer industry have assumeda high priority status. Attempts to simply outlaw the use of syntheticfertilizers and force farmers to convert to using organic substitutes like dunghave proven difficult, and even catastrophic, as the nation of Sri Lanka experienced in 2022.
This lack of scalable natural alternatives is one major driverfor the need to create green synthetic alternatives. The other key driver isthe scale of the emissions themselves.
“Emissions from fertilizers, one of the hard-to-abateindustries, total to more emissions than from aviation and shipping combined,” ATOME CEO Olivier Mussat, CEO at UK-listed ATOME, told me in a recent interview. Combine that with the finding in a 2023 study by the University of Cambridge that 48% of the world’s crops are grown using synthetic fertilizers, and it becomes clear that abating fertilizer emissions is a big challenge that must be resolved for the global net zero by 2050 goals to have any chance of success.
[Note: This story is also published at Forbes.com]
Green fertilizer refersto a type of fertilizer that is produced using renewable energy sources, suchas hydropower, wind, or solar power, rather than relying on natural gas orother carbon-based fuel. This approach drastically cuts the carbon footprintassociated with traditional fertilizer production...
