imagine you are out in the countryside
driving on a warm sunny spring day you
have the windows open the birds are
singing and you smell every year
farmers spread on their fields in
order to fertilize their soils but
actually the fresh or the natural cow
manure is not a very good fertilizer so
increasingly around the world in many
regions farmers regard it as such a poor
fertilizer that I don’t bother spreading
it the result is mountains of manure
constituting a considerable
environmental problem more than 22
million tons of ammonia is lost from
livestock farms around the world every
year that’s a mission problem at the
same time on the other hand without
nitrogen fertilizer produced from
fossils merely 40% of the world
population could be kept alive on
today’s diet we want to fundamentally
improve global food production we want
to enable farmers to recirculate their
nitrogen to prevent the loss of nitrogen
the low levels of ammonia and to make
farmers produce their own fertilizer
from manure air and renewable energy
this is possible now in our time because
the cost of producing renewable energy
is plummeting
so with renewable energy and some
element of some fascinating new
technology I’ll explain to you what we
do I start from a macro perspective and
this cow eat grass and in the grass we
have the nitrogen the paradox is that
when the cow and it end of his life end
up at the slaughterhouse only ten
percent of the nitrogen is part of the
meat and the milk that has been produced
through the cow’s life the rest of the
nitrogen is wasted and it’s part of the
manure and from this manure 30% of the
nitrogen evaporates to air 10% of the
nitrogen runs off into water and one to
two percent of the nitrogen disappears
as laughing gas
n2o and even if the percentage here is
really low laughing gas is the climate
gas 300 times stronger than co2
so everyone occupied the dacra culture
works are very concerned about laughing
yes in total this is explains why in
manure manure contains too little
nitrogen to serve as an efficient
fertilizer in its raw form it has lost
all of this for the farmer this is a
nutrition loss for society at large
this is polluting or very polluting
emissions with a very very bad smell
harmful to livestock and harmful to man
but if we take them the farmers
perspective he has lost these nutrients
so when he spread the manure in his
field in order to grow new grass he has
to replenish the nitrogen he has lost
and the farmer does that approximately
here 50% the farmer does this by
purchasing mineral fertilizer produced
from fossil gas or coal in North Africa
in the Middle East or in China this is a
cost for the farmer this is how the
the solution to a I have to add this is
a really good business model for the
fertilizer companies every year you lose
all of this and since the world needs
food you produce all of this every year
this happens so what could a solution be
if we were able to take the manure and
enrich it with the needed nutrients and
put and then convert it into fertilizer
grade manure that could be a solution
and on the farm where the farmer produce
the food we have what is needed to do
exactly that
we have the air and in air it’s 78%
nitrogen and it’s 28 not 21% oxygen when
we take this air we channel it into a
plasma reactor with an electric arc the
electric arc take the air dissolves
splits the molecules recombines them in
order to create an old gas the reactor
is the size of a refrigerator it’s
installed on the farm in this table and
it runs on electricity primarily or
preferably green electricity but then if
I’m kind of electricity will work
nowadays when farmers have windmills in
their fields they have solar panels on
the roofs they have biogas plants in
their stables and since we started
working on this technology in 2010 the
price of solar energy today is
one-fourth of us it was eight years ago
and this is continuing the price of
locally produced electricity is
plummeting that gives this trend really
gives the basis for an agricultural
revolution the enno can be used for many
different applications
I get back to some of them but the
lowest hanging fruit is the livestock
farmer if we take the mo gas coming out
of the plasma reactor we take it into
the manure we let the mo react with the
ammonia and we create a salt a stable
storable salt ammonium nitrate
when we create a monument rate we can
influence the pH that’s a really
important thing if you think about
phosphates or other things to dissolve
in the manure but most of all when this
when we eliminate the ammonia loss we
have eliminated the the farmers loss of
nutrients and then he no longer needs to
purchase order replenish his nitrogen so
he can eliminate his largest variable
cost on the farm in this way the farmer
recirculates nitrogen on this farm he
takes the fossil element out of the
world’s food production he transforms a
major climate gas emission source from
the back of the cow into recirculated
nitrogen and for every tonne of nitrogen
he produced in his plasma reactor he
fixes one ton of ammonia here that’s
really good news for the farmer it’s
good news for the world food production
and it’s really good news for the
climate in a – in addition to the
livestock part of this if we are talking
about a biogas plant a biogas plant has
a bio rest if we in many cases that’s
just treated as organic waste if we add
the nitrogen to the bio rest the biogas
plant has gotten a second revenue stream
and the large volumes of organic waste
that’s not only dumped us trash could be
used as fertilizer it didn’t we would
avoid the transport and we would avoid
the cost of getting rid of it
in combination of solar farms in the
parts of the world where Sun is abundant
in Asia and in Africa but the batteries
are filled up the Sun is still shining
you have a plasma reactor you produce
the liquid fertilizer you have it there
where the farmer needed in order to grow
soils combination with sewage treatment
it’s important in Norway we have the
fish farming there’s a lot of organic
waste from the fish farming it
constitute a lot of phosphates if we
could add the nitrogen it’s a great
source great resource we turned the
waste into the value but everything here
comes down to the economic value of what
we are producing this summer
a number of test installations and
agronomic valley beautification were
done we did it in the UK in Denmark and
in Norway we did it in cooperation with
universities and with independent
validators we install a reactor at the
at the Binyam farm in northern ireland
we produced enriched fertilizer from the
manure of the milking cows at george
binghams farm and we spread it we made
test field plots out in his field to
grow grass we compared our enriched
manure with standard industrial
fertilizer and with untreated manure and
I’m very pleased to reveal that the plot
with the enriched fertilizer
outperformed the alternatives proving
the concept we did the same or a
parallel testing in Denmark at the farm
with 50,000 pigs
where he was producing barley in his
fields that was an interesting exercise
as well and now later this month we will
be sending our first test reactor to
South Africa to run tests at the fair
Cape Farm during their winter or their
summer or winter
and we do this in cooperation with
Stellenbosch University and with local
partners and the objective is to gain as
much experience as we can with the
African soil and the African produce
what we do now is to continue our
testing to continue optimisation of this
this idea this technology in essence
what we are are doing we combine four
moves into one we substitute chemistry
with plasma we substitute for the second
one we substitute the Hobbit wash the
fossil technology with the electric arc
the third thing we do is we combine the
resource accounting from organic farming
with the crops Isis from traditional
farming and the last thing we take
advantage of the falling cost of
renewable local energy and we use that
advantage into creating distributed
process industry we disrupt the
fertilizer value chain we turn it from
we go from a linear model to a circular
model a shift in agriculture enabled by
local renewable energy and we change the
world in another way too if you drive
past the test farms you will notice
something interesting remember I said
that when we use this process to enrich
the manure use the plasma reactors we
remove the smell and not only that we make manure smell like dark chocolate
driving on a warm sunny spring day you
have the windows open the birds are
singing and you smell every year
farmers spread on their fields in
order to fertilize their soils but
actually the fresh or the natural cow
manure is not a very good fertilizer so
increasingly around the world in many
regions farmers regard it as such a poor
fertilizer that I don’t bother spreading
it the result is mountains of manure
constituting a considerable
environmental problem more than 22
million tons of ammonia is lost from
livestock farms around the world every
year that’s a mission problem at the
same time on the other hand without
nitrogen fertilizer produced from
fossils merely 40% of the world
population could be kept alive on
today’s diet we want to fundamentally
improve global food production we want
to enable farmers to recirculate their
nitrogen to prevent the loss of nitrogen
the low levels of ammonia and to make
farmers produce their own fertilizer
from manure air and renewable energy
this is possible now in our time because
the cost of producing renewable energy
is plummeting
so with renewable energy and some
element of some fascinating new
technology I’ll explain to you what we
do I start from a macro perspective and
this cow eat grass and in the grass we
have the nitrogen the paradox is that
when the cow and it end of his life end
up at the slaughterhouse only ten
percent of the nitrogen is part of the
meat and the milk that has been produced
through the cow’s life the rest of the
nitrogen is wasted and it’s part of the
manure and from this manure 30% of the
nitrogen evaporates to air 10% of the
nitrogen runs off into water and one to
two percent of the nitrogen disappears
as laughing gas
n2o and even if the percentage here is
really low laughing gas is the climate
gas 300 times stronger than co2
so everyone occupied the dacra culture
works are very concerned about laughing
yes in total this is explains why in
manure manure contains too little
nitrogen to serve as an efficient
fertilizer in its raw form it has lost
all of this for the farmer this is a
nutrition loss for society at large
this is polluting or very polluting
emissions with a very very bad smell
harmful to livestock and harmful to man
but if we take them the farmers
perspective he has lost these nutrients
so when he spread the manure in his
field in order to grow new grass he has
to replenish the nitrogen he has lost
and the farmer does that approximately
here 50% the farmer does this by
purchasing mineral fertilizer produced
from fossil gas or coal in North Africa
in the Middle East or in China this is a
cost for the farmer this is how the
the solution to a I have to add this is
a really good business model for the
fertilizer companies every year you lose
all of this and since the world needs
food you produce all of this every year
this happens so what could a solution be
if we were able to take the manure and
enrich it with the needed nutrients and
put and then convert it into fertilizer
grade manure that could be a solution
and on the farm where the farmer produce
the food we have what is needed to do
exactly that
we have the air and in air it’s 78%
nitrogen and it’s 28 not 21% oxygen when
we take this air we channel it into a
plasma reactor with an electric arc the
electric arc take the air dissolves
splits the molecules recombines them in
order to create an old gas the reactor
is the size of a refrigerator it’s
installed on the farm in this table and
it runs on electricity primarily or
preferably green electricity but then if
I’m kind of electricity will work
nowadays when farmers have windmills in
their fields they have solar panels on
the roofs they have biogas plants in
their stables and since we started
working on this technology in 2010 the
price of solar energy today is
one-fourth of us it was eight years ago
and this is continuing the price of
locally produced electricity is
plummeting that gives this trend really
gives the basis for an agricultural
revolution the enno can be used for many
different applications
I get back to some of them but the
lowest hanging fruit is the livestock
farmer if we take the mo gas coming out
of the plasma reactor we take it into
the manure we let the mo react with the
ammonia and we create a salt a stable
storable salt ammonium nitrate
when we create a monument rate we can
influence the pH that’s a really
important thing if you think about
phosphates or other things to dissolve
in the manure but most of all when this
when we eliminate the ammonia loss we
have eliminated the the farmers loss of
nutrients and then he no longer needs to
purchase order replenish his nitrogen so
he can eliminate his largest variable
cost on the farm in this way the farmer
recirculates nitrogen on this farm he
takes the fossil element out of the
world’s food production he transforms a
major climate gas emission source from
the back of the cow into recirculated
nitrogen and for every tonne of nitrogen
he produced in his plasma reactor he
fixes one ton of ammonia here that’s
really good news for the farmer it’s
good news for the world food production
and it’s really good news for the
climate in a – in addition to the
livestock part of this if we are talking
about a biogas plant a biogas plant has
a bio rest if we in many cases that’s
just treated as organic waste if we add
the nitrogen to the bio rest the biogas
plant has gotten a second revenue stream
and the large volumes of organic waste
that’s not only dumped us trash could be
used as fertilizer it didn’t we would
avoid the transport and we would avoid
the cost of getting rid of it
in combination of solar farms in the
parts of the world where Sun is abundant
in Asia and in Africa but the batteries
are filled up the Sun is still shining
you have a plasma reactor you produce
the liquid fertilizer you have it there
where the farmer needed in order to grow
soils combination with sewage treatment
it’s important in Norway we have the
fish farming there’s a lot of organic
waste from the fish farming it
constitute a lot of phosphates if we
could add the nitrogen it’s a great
source great resource we turned the
waste into the value but everything here
comes down to the economic value of what
we are producing this summer
a number of test installations and
agronomic valley beautification were
done we did it in the UK in Denmark and
in Norway we did it in cooperation with
universities and with independent
validators we install a reactor at the
at the Binyam farm in northern ireland
we produced enriched fertilizer from the
manure of the milking cows at george
binghams farm and we spread it we made
test field plots out in his field to
grow grass we compared our enriched
manure with standard industrial
fertilizer and with untreated manure and
I’m very pleased to reveal that the plot
with the enriched fertilizer
outperformed the alternatives proving
the concept we did the same or a
parallel testing in Denmark at the farm
with 50,000 pigs
where he was producing barley in his
fields that was an interesting exercise
as well and now later this month we will
be sending our first test reactor to
South Africa to run tests at the fair
Cape Farm during their winter or their
summer or winter
and we do this in cooperation with
Stellenbosch University and with local
partners and the objective is to gain as
much experience as we can with the
African soil and the African produce
what we do now is to continue our
testing to continue optimisation of this
this idea this technology in essence
what we are are doing we combine four
moves into one we substitute chemistry
with plasma we substitute for the second
one we substitute the Hobbit wash the
fossil technology with the electric arc
the third thing we do is we combine the
resource accounting from organic farming
with the crops Isis from traditional
farming and the last thing we take
advantage of the falling cost of
renewable local energy and we use that
advantage into creating distributed
process industry we disrupt the
fertilizer value chain we turn it from
we go from a linear model to a circular
model a shift in agriculture enabled by
local renewable energy and we change the
world in another way too if you drive
past the test farms you will notice
something interesting remember I said
that when we use this process to enrich
the manure use the plasma reactors we
remove the smell and not only that we make manure smell like dark chocolate
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