Australian startup Facet Amtech has developed a multifunctional catalyst that it claims can make ammonia directly from air and water, eliminating dedicated hydrogen production and air separation and dramatically simplifying the design of an ammonia plant.
If the tech performs at industrial scale, Facet believes it could undercut grey ammonia on cost without relying on carbon pricing, lowering the cost and carbon footprint of a key building block for nitrogen fertilizers.
Speaking to AgFunderNews as it announced a A$3 million ($2.1 million) seed round from Main Sequence and Uniseed, cofounder Peter Richardson, PhD, said the cash would help fund a pilot producing 1 kilo of ammonia per day in early 2027.
If this is a success, the plan is to build a second pilot producing 100 kilos a day about two years later, and a 4 tons/day pilot in the early 2030s that would be of sufficient scale to de-risk industrial scale production, said Richardson.
“If we can prove this [at scale], this could be a major disruption [to the ammonia market], not just an incremental improvement from a slightly better catalyst.”
“Facet Amtech is tackling a problem that sits at the intersection of energy security and industrial resilience. The company is building exactly the kind of deep tech, sovereign capability play we look for.” Emerald Scofield, investment manager, Main Sequence Ventures
Why it matters
Whether you’re making “grey” or “green” ammonia, most routes today still involve initial steps to source the two core inputs: nitrogen and hydrogen.
Grey ammonia typically derives hydrogen from natural gas via steam methane reforming, while nitrogen is separated from air before the two gases are combined using the high-heat, high-pressure Haber-Bosch process. Green ammonia replaces fossil-derived hydrogen with hydrogen produced from water via electrolysis but still requires a dedicated hydrogen production system.
Facet strips out these costly upstream steps with a catalyst that simultaneously extracts hydrogen from water or steam and reduces nitrogen from air, combining the two to form ammonia, said Richardson, who cofounded Facet Amtech in 2024 with fellow mechanical engineer James Bradley.
“Effectively our catalyst takes the water and does the separation of hydrogen from the water itself, and then separately does the ammonia formation on the same catalyst surface. It does those two reactions concurrently.”
At the bench scale, Facet’s catalyst is “highly active,” but the proof will be in the pudding at larger scales, said Richardson. One of the goals for the next pilot, meanwhile, is to achieve 2,000+ hours of continuous operation, “which is what we’ve found from our industry conversations is a good benchmark to try to hit.”
‘We’re replacing all of those catalysts with just one’
The process can operate using either filtered liquid water or steam, with Facet still determining which configuration offers the best economics at scale.
“We can run it as either,” said Richardson. “It’s something we are still working through from an optimization perspective, because it obviously takes energy to convert water into steam.”
The process requires heat and pressure, albeit at “milder conditions” than the Haber-Bosch process, he said. Renewable electricity could provide much of the thermal input, while waste heat could potentially be used in some installations.
The potential advantage is therefore not simply a more efficient ammonia catalyst, but a simplified plant design, he stressed, noting that a conventional Haber-Bosch plant uses multiple catalysts across the upstream hydrogen-production and ammonia-synthesis stages.
Facet manufactures its catalyst in-house from pure metal powders, which are blended in proprietary ratios and heat-treated in a furnace. It does not use platinum-group metals or rare earths and should cost only modestly more than traditional iron-based ammonia catalysts, he said.
“We anticipate that overall catalyst costs will be roughly on par or potentially even a bit cheaper than at a normal Haber Bosch plant.”
The economics: removing the hydrogen plant
The bigger economic prize, however, comes from removing dedicated hydrogen production.
“Today, the majority of the cost of making ammonia is from the natural gas or from the electricity that goes into making the green hydrogen, which we’re not doing. So we take out a bunch of that capital cost, and we’re replacing that with one big reactor and one large batch of relatively cheap catalyst.”
Facet also sees an efficiency advantage in collapsing multiple chemical steps into a single reactor, reducing opportunities for energy to be lost as waste heat.
“We don’t have multiple different reactors, each of them losing a bit of energy in the form of waste heat. We have much simpler waste heat recovery because we’ve only got basically the one reactor.”
He added: “What comes out of our reactor at the moment is an aqueous ammonia [as opposed to an ammonia gas mixture]. It’s basically ammonia dissolved in water, so there would need to be a separation step to get to pure ammonia gas, which you can then pressurize, store, and chill, just like you would in a traditional plant.
“And then it can be used either to go into [other formats for certain types of] fertilizer production or used directly as ammonia.”
Targeting fossil economics, not a green premium
Facet is not building its business case around carbon credits or a green premium, said Richardson.
“What we’re striving for is being cheaper than grey ammonia without including any carbon pricing. It’s a pure economic play.”
As for scale, Facet Amtech is not pursuing the small-scale, distributed ammonia model championed by some other startups, and instead envisages plants comparable in scale with the incumbent industry, ranging from roughly 500 to 3,000 tons of ammonia per day.
The plan is to license the plant design and supply its proprietary catalyst rather than owning and operating its own commercial ammonia facilities, said Richardson.
“We’re basically looking to slot into the existing value chain in the traditional role of a technology provider, where we would license our design to a [large fertilizer company such as] Yara, Nutrien, or CF Industries, who’s then going to be the plant owner operator.”
The latest seed round—which follows a small pre-seed round that got the firm off the ground—will take Facet through the first scale-up tests, says the firm, which recently moved out of the University of Newcastle campus to its own industrial site nearby.
Beyond that, Richardson expects funding to shift progressively from venture capital toward strategic industry investors and government support as the cost of building successive pilot plants rises.
Facet Amtech has engaged with global ammonia producers, technology providers, engineering, procurement and construction companies, and offtakers, said Richardson.
Multiple ammonia majors have also offered to help validate the technology through in-house catalyst testing, plant capital cost estimates, and participation in a small-scale pilot.
“For a lot of investors that we’ve spoken to, and a lot of industry, they say this is really really exciting, but they want to see pilot data before they are ready to jump in.”
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