The world runs on ammonia. We spray 188 million tonnes of it on fields every year to grow our food, and we’re starting to burn it in ships and power plants to move our goods and light our cities. The problem is how we make it. The century-old Haber-Bosch process is a marvel of industrial chemistry and a monster of emissions, consuming about 2% of the world’s energy and belching out nearly 500 million tonnes of CO2 annually. It’s a centralized, capital-intensive beast, locked to the grid and the gas pipeline.
Nium, a climate tech startup operating out of San Francisco and Singapore, thinks the answer isn’t to rebuild the beast, but to shrink it. The company, founded in 2016, is developing a chemical reactor that uses nanotechnology to synthesize ammonia at dramatically lower temperatures and pressures. The pitch is simple: decentralize production, eliminate emissions, and deliver the molecule on demand, anywhere you have renewable power and air. It’s a bet on turning a global commodity into a local utility.
A wedge in a $75 billion market
The ammonia market is notoriously sticky. It’s a textbook example of industrial inertia, where massive scale and entrenched infrastructure create a moat around incumbents like BASF and Yara. The cost of a new Haber-Bosch plant is measured in the billions, locking production to a few strategic locations close to cheap natural gas. Nium’s wedge is unit economics at a radically different scale. By using proprietary nanocatalysts, their reactor operates at a fraction of the traditional process’s 450°C and 200 atmospheres of pressure. Lower pressure means less energy to compress hydrogen. Lower temperature means you can use intermittent renewable electricity more efficiently, without the constant baseload demand.
For a farmer in a remote region or a port operator looking to bunker green fuel, the promise is a container-sized unit that makes ammonia when the sun shines or the wind blows, sidestepping the complex and carbon-intensive logistics of shipping it from an industrial hub. The total addressable market isn’t just the existing $75 billion fertilizer trade, but the emerging markets for ammonia as a zero-carbon fuel and hydrogen carrier. Nium isn’t trying to out-BASF BASF. It’s trying to make them irrelevant for the next wave of demand.
The team and the traction
Nium was founded by Lewis Jenkins, Mike Bermingham, and Phil Hunter, a trio with backgrounds spanning entrepreneurship, business development, and a deep technical drive to apply science to climate problems. Jenkins, the CEO, is a serial entrepreneur with over two decades of experience. The company is lean, with just 12 employees, suggesting a focus on R&D and proving the core technology before scaling manufacturing.
Their progress has attracted a climate-focused syndicate of investors, including the deep-tech fund DCVC, agrifood tech investor AgFunder, and the climate accelerator Carbon13. To date, they’ve raised a disclosed $4.17 million. Perhaps more telling than the check size is the validation from the Earthshot Prize, which nominated Nium for its 2025 cycle,a signal that the project’s ambition is being taken seriously on a global stage.
| Founder | Role | Background Note |
|---|---|---|
| Lewis Jenkins | Co-Founder & CEO | Serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience. |
| Mike Bermingham | Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer | Focused on commercial strategy and partnerships. |
| Phil Hunter | Co-Founder | Driven by applying science and engineering to climate change. |
Where the chemistry gets hard
The ambition is vast, but the path is paved with chemical and commercial challenges that Nium must navigate. The risks aren’t hidden; they’re the fundamental hurdles of any deep tech climate startup.
- Catalyst lifetime. The magic is in the nanocatalyst. Its performance, stability, and cost over thousands of operating hours will make or break the unit economics. A catalyst that degrades quickly turns a capital expense into a recurring consumable cost, eroding the value proposition.
- Hydrogen logistics. While the reactor simplifies ammonia synthesis, it still needs hydrogen feedstocks. Green hydrogen production remains expensive and geographically limited. Nium’s model depends on the parallel, and uncertain, scaling of cheap, distributed electrolyzers.
- Industrial adoption. Fertilizer and shipping are conservative industries. Convincing a farmer to trust a desktop box over a tanker truck from a century-old supplier requires not just a price advantage, but proven reliability and a robust service model. First-of-a-kind deployments are slow and expensive.
The company’s most plausible answer to these concerns is focus. They are not trying to retrofit a coal plant or build a gigafactory. Their reactor is designed to be modular and scalable from the ground up, aiming to prove the model in niche, high-value applications first,perhaps a pilot with a research institution or a forward-thinking co-op,before tackling the commodity market head-on.
The competitive landscape
Nium is not alone in seeing ammonia’s potential. The field includes well-funded players like Starfire Energy, which is also developing modular, renewable-powered ammonia systems, and Atmonia, which is exploring electrochemical synthesis pathways. Jupiter Ionics is another contender using electrolytic methods. The competition validates the market opportunity but also means Nium’s nanocatalyst approach must demonstrate a clear advantage in efficiency, cost, or simplicity to capture meaningful market share.
The real competitor, however, isn’t another startup. It’s the entrenched, optimized, and heavily subsidized fossil-based incumbents. The Haber-Bosch process, for all its faults, is a devil we know. It works at a staggering scale. For Nium to win, its back-of-the-envelope math must hold: the combined cost of intermittent renewable power, their efficient reactor, and any hydrogen feedstock must undercut the cost of natural gas, the Haber-Bosch plant, and the carbon price,or the customer’s willingness to pay a premium for green credentials.
A simple calculation illustrates the hill to climb. The global ammonia industry emits roughly 2.6 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of product. At a carbon price of $100 per tonne, that’s a $260 embedded cost advantage for a truly green process. Nium’s reactor needs to close the remaining gap between its production cost and the fossil alternative’s production cost plus that carbon penalty. It’s a tight margin, but one that gets wider every time a wind turbine gets cheaper or a carbon tax gets more serious.
For now, Nium’s task is to move from the lab to a pilot that can generate hard performance data. The next twelve months will be about proving the nanocatalyst works not just in a paper, but in a box, making ammonia day after day. If they can do that, they won’t just be building a better reactor. They’ll be building a plausible exit ramp for one of the world’s dirtiest industries. Their box must beat the plant.
Sources
- [We Are Nium] Clean Ammonia on Demand | https://wearenium.com/
- [We Are Nium] Nano Climate Tech | https://wearenium.com/about
- [We Are Nium] Clean Ammonia Nanotechnology | https://wearenium.com/technology
- [We Are Nium] Nium nominated for The Earthshot Prize 2025 | https://wearenium.com/news/entry/nium-has-been-nominated-for-the-earthshot-prize-2025
- [We Are Nium] Nium Team Profiles | https://wearenium.com/team