I had the honor of spending the first four months of 2025 as a Fulbright Scholar in India. I was hosted by Professor Nandula Raghuram at the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University in New Delhi. Following upon collaborative work at UMCES (see the NICCEE program led by Prof. Xin Zhang), I studied India’s development of “green ammonia” –  ammonia synthesized using renewable energy for use either as fuel or fertilizer. I learned that India is already a leader in developing green ammonia technology.

India is rapidly developing its abundant solar and wind power potential, and start-up tech companies are investing billions of dollars in new green ammonia production plants. Most are intended for making fuel to replace diesel for marine shipping, which would help decarbonize that industry by greatly reducing its carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Some companies are also exploring green ammonia as a source of fertilizer, which could replace fertilizers currently synthesize with expensive, imported natural gas. That would save India import costs, reduce its food security vulnerability to abrupt price swings, and reduce its CO₂ emissions. Another key point is that the government heavily subsidizes the price for urea fertilizer, which disincentivizes farmers from using it efficiency. As a consequence, over-fertilization is very common and contributes to widespread degradation of soils and air and water quality. When the government attempted to reduce those price subsidies, there were mass protests by farmers. If fertilizers synthesized in small, village-based green ammonia plants were cost competitive, they could become a substitute for the wastefully used urea and its multiple financial, social, and environmental costs.

A few such decentralized green ammonia fertilizer plants have been built in Canada, the USA, and Kenya, but green ammonia’s future viability for fertilizers there and in India remains uncertain. Since I finished my fellowship, I see that the Indian government is continuing to procure green ammonia for both fuel and fertilizer, and a company is experimenting with converting ammonia to other forms that farmers can use more easily as fertilizer.

An additional surprising finding was that another use for green ammonia is being developed by a start-up in India to add protein directly to human food and livestock feed. Previously, I had assumed that such technological innovation on “alternative proteins” would happen first in high income countries, but I learned that the start-up arena, including private and public sector funding for technology and a friendly regulatory environment, may be more favorable in India. As shown in the figure below, which is from a new paper that Prof. Raghuram and I published in the journal Communications Sustainability, ammonia produced from renewable energy can be fermented with corn syrup (or other carbon sources) to grow fungi rich in highly digestible protein, called mycoprotein. It is added to flour for making chipatis, a common tortilla-like staple food in India, to enrich its protein content. Some of the mycoprotein not fit for human consumption can go into livestock feed. More efficient enrichment of digestible livestock feed is one of the crucial pillars of Spark’s Nitrogen2.0 vision for redesigning more targeted and circular nutrient management in our food production systems.

 

I am deeply grateful to the US-India Education Foundation and my host, Professor Raghuram, for enabling my Fulbright Fellowship. I also thank the numerous institutions across the country that hosted me to give talks about nitrogen cycling, such as the faculty and students of the Kerala Agricultural University pictured here.

More recently, I am a coauthor on a paper that analyzes the potential for green ammonia technology for fertilizers in Sub-Saharan Africa: https://rdcu.be/fALLy (open access).