About the research

The global production of NH3 is about 200 M tons/year, and increasing. About 2% of the world´s energy production is used for NH3 production, causing ca. 1% of the global CO2 emission. The proposed project will use electro-catalytic methods to produce ammonia from N2(g) (and from air) and H2O at ambient conditions. Collaboration between specialists in material physics, analytical chemistry, electrochemistry and computational chemistry has opened up the possibility for a combined optimisation of surface structures and electrochemical conditions to systematically design a reactor for this process.

We build on the results from calculations of Prof. Egill Skúlason and his group, which have predicted that at least two metal nitrides (VN and ZrN) are catalytically active, efficient and stable for this process. Those catalysts will be tested and optimized to achieve the highest possible reaction rate, efficiency and stability. The results will be used for process scale up in a second phase.

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