The future of land management is going to be cultivating, curating, and generally taking care of the living, mostly fungal, part of the soil which will displace some or all of the straight up chemical additions instead enhancing the natural symbioses between root, fungus, and bacteria on an industrial scale... but until then chemical additions are fine. The issue going forward is going to be cost not an existential threat.
Look, the hard truth is, nitrogen is the limiting nutrient. A square kilometer of plants can fix only so much of it on its own via symbiotic bacteria (and maaaaybe archaea), fungi can NOT fix nitrogen on their own.
You can optimize, curate, cultivate, paint yourself in dog shit and chant at the full moon however long you want, but there's a hard practical limit on that amount. And that's it.
Animals can concentrate nitrogen into manure, but they don't produce more of it.
That's why fertilizers are absolutely essential, as long as the Earth's population is above ~2B.
It all just comes out of the air. High temperature, high pressure, air, hydrogen, and a catalyst. Methane is just a cheaper source of hydrogen than water.
Hard to tell if this startup is really something because all you can find is articles built from press releases.
The part about transportation is mostly moot, in the Midwest the fertilizer plants are local, there was one like twenty miles away from the farm i grew up on.
Decoupling from the energy markets would be nice, but it’s doubtful anybody really wants to become a pricecutting commodity here. Farm inputs have the tendency to be as expensive as farmers can afford.
Sure. The approach is very likely to be viable (we know that electric arcs produce fixed nitrogen), the reason to point to the specific technology is that they think the pricing just about works.
