Landus Cooperative is celebrating the grand opening of a new 75,000-square-foot fertilizer production and distribution facility in Boone, Iowa, this week.
According to the cooperative, the $15 million sustainable fertilizer facility will produce an 82-0-0 slow-release nitrogen product that is less expensive and as efficient as conventional nitrogen fertilizer.
Today, a significant source of the global nitrogen supply is produced offshore in places such as China, Russia and the Middle East and then shipped to the Midwest, resulting in high carbon intensity (CI) scores impacting the farms that use it. That is especially problematic for farmers trying to lower the CI metrics on their farms to become eligible for carbon credit and other downstream incentive programs.
Landus isn’t diving headfirst into the deep, murky waters of domestic fertilizer production on its own: the cooperative has partnered up with green ammonia startup TalusAg on the Boone project.
TalusAg is an energy technology company that has pioneered the world’s first commercial scale, fully contained, automated and modular, zero carbon (solar powered) green ammonia production system. USDA also provided a $4.9 million grant to support the green field project.
Basically, TalusAg’s talusTen system, the largest system the company currently offers, creates fertilizer anywhere that can host a facility. The modular, easy to setup systems are mostly built out of repurposed shipping containers and can create plant nutrients literally out of thin air: only air, water, and sun inputs are required.
According to Talus CEO Hiro Iwanaga, the concept started to grow roots in sub-Saharan Africa. The startup’s philanthropic mission of improving nitrogen access for small farms in the developing world is what sparked the impetus to create the system. African continent fertilizer prices are often double or even triple what a farmer in Iowa would pay for the same product, he says.
Now, with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Clean Hydrogen Production Tax Credit in place and providing a 10-year tax incentive for clean hydrogen production of up to $3.00/kilogram produced, the economics pencil out.
“We can go to a Landus or a Wilbur Ellis, or even to large farmers that want to host nitrogen production locally so it’s close to their operations and make the argument that our green ammonia is 20% to 30% cheaper than commodity ammonia,” Talus CEO Hiro Iwanaga says.
Iwanaga says Landus and Wilbur Ellis are among its initial U.S. market launch partners. The modular systems only take four months of lead time to manufacturer and install, so plans to deploy more systems across the Corn Belt are already underway. A second Landus-TalusAg facility, in Eagle Grove, Iowa, is expected to come online this fall.
By 2025, the company plans to install another ten talusTen systems. Looking further out, TalusAg is evaluating an additional 78 potential sites for its systems over the next three to five years.
“We can produce 20 tons per day and 7,000 tons per year with one of our talusTen systems,” Iwanaga says, adding that Landus and other ag retailers are ideal launch partners due to the operational scale and storage capacities already in place at most ag retailers.
Farmers that make the switch to green ammonia have much to gain, even beyond the advantage of having an inexpensive, localized source of nitrogen production available on-demand in the heart of rural America.
“If you use basic carbon free nitrogen fertilizer our research shows that we can reduce the CI score of corn by 25%-30%,” Iwanaga says. “That’s an enormous reduction with no change to the farmer’s workflow or agronomic practices.”
With many corn and soybean farmers keen on reducing on-farm CI scores considerably – mostly to unlock the ability to provide biomass at a higher premium to sustainable airline fuel (SAF) programs and other downstream alternative fuel and fiber programs – Landus CEO Matt Carstens sees this possibly disruptive force to the global fertilizer market as a win-win for farmers and the entire ag value chain.
“With Talus our farmers are going to reap all of these great benefits, not only in what they’re doing for the planet – farmers are the original conservationists, after all – but now they can go downstream and be able to tell that story, whether it’s for the 45Z credits or a food company, that they improved the carbon intensity of their operation by using green ammonia,” Carstens says.
