A macadamia farm near Nairobi is about to change how the world thinks about fertilizer. The Kenya Nut Company is set to become the first farm anywhere to produce ammonia fertilizer on site using no fossil fuels — a small but significant step toward breaking agriculture’s deep dependence on natural gas.
At a glance
- Green ammonia: The plant will produce 1 ton of liquid ammonia per day by using solar power to extract hydrogen from water, then bonding it with nitrogen from the air.
- Fossil-free fertilizer: Traditional ammonia production isolates hydrogen from natural gas, releasing large volumes of greenhouse gases — a process whose global climate impact rivals that of aviation.
- Talus Renewables: The U.S. startup built the plant and designed it specifically for small-scale, on-site production, aiming to serve farms in regions where fertilizer supply chains are long and fragile.
Why fertilizer supply chains matter
For most of the world, fertilizer arrives after a long journey. Talus founder Hiro Iwanaga told Bloomberg that the average bag of fertilizer in sub-Saharan Africa travels 10,000 kilometers before reaching a farm. That distance means cost, delay, and vulnerability to disruption.
Those vulnerabilities became painfully visible after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia is the world’s second-biggest ammonia producer, and sanctions on its exports drove fertilizer prices up sharply. Farmers across Africa were among those hit hardest — many reduced applications or skipped fertilizer altogether, squeezing yields at a time when food security was already under pressure.
A locally produced alternative changes that equation. When a farm generates its own ammonia from sunlight, water, and air, it steps outside the global supply chain entirely.
How solar turns water into fertilizer
The Talus plant works through a process called electrolysis. Solar panels generate electricity, which splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is then combined with nitrogen drawn from the surrounding air — a reaction that produces ammonia, the nitrogen compound at the heart of most crop fertilizers.
The result is what the energy industry calls green ammonia — chemically identical to conventional ammonia, but made without burning any fossil fuels. One ton per day is modest by industrial standards, but it is enough to serve the needs of a working farm and to prove the concept at real scale.
Conventional ammonia production, by contrast, uses the Haber-Bosch process, which has relied on natural gas as its hydrogen source for more than a century. Researchers estimate that ammonia synthesis accounts for roughly 1–2% of global energy use and generates comparable greenhouse gas emissions to the entire aviation sector.
A model for smallholder regions
The Kenya Nut Company project is notable not just for what it produces, but for where and how. Decentralized green ammonia plants could be especially valuable across sub-Saharan Africa, where grid infrastructure is uneven, import logistics are costly, and smallholder farmers have the least buffer against price shocks.
Talus Renewables is positioning its technology as a tool for exactly these settings — small enough to deploy on a single farm, powered by the abundant solar resource that much of the continent enjoys. If the Kenya pilot operates as planned, it offers a template that could be replicated across the region.
Still, scaling green ammonia faces real obstacles. The upfront cost of electrolysis equipment remains high, financing is difficult for many smallholder cooperatives, and 1 ton per day covers only a fraction of a large farm’s annual needs. The Kenya Nut Company site is a proof of concept, not yet a mass-market solution.
What it does prove is that the pieces exist. Solar costs have dropped dramatically over the past decade, electrolysis technology is improving, and the geopolitical case for local production has never been clearer. The Kenya Nut Company is the first farm to put those pieces together on working agricultural land — and that matters.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Yale Environment 360
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- Ghana protects key marine habitat at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on Kenya
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