Breaking the strongest bond in the air
Nitrogen fertilizer is made by pulling nitrogen out of the atmosphere and turning it into something a plant can absorb. The chemistry is well understood. What is hard — and what Harvora is building — is doing it at the size of a farm rather than the size of a factory.
The Harvora process
The Submerged Bubble-Arc Corona Reactor
Most plasma fixation runs the discharge through open air, then has to capture the reactive gas afterwards and dissolve it into water — a second stage, with losses at each step. Harvora runs the discharge underwater instead. Air is bubbled through a submerged electrode gap, and a combined arc and corona discharge fires inside those bubbles, at the boundary between gas and liquid.
Because the reaction happens inside the water, nitrate dissolves the moment it forms. There is no separate absorption stage and no reactive gas to handle — what leaves the reactor is already nitrate solution, ready to irrigate with.
01 — Air in
Nitrogen is everywhere, and locked
Air is about 78% nitrogen. Every molecule is two nitrogen atoms held together by a triple bond — one of the strongest bonds in chemistry. Plants cannot use it in this form.
Nitrogen is everywhere, and locked. Air is about 78% nitrogen. Every molecule is two nitrogen atoms held together by a triple bond — one of the strongest bonds in chemistry. Plants cannot use it in this form.
Why nitrogen is hard to unlock
A nitrogen molecule is two atoms bound by three shared pairs of electrons. That triple bond takes roughly 941 kJ/mol to break — among the strongest bonds in nature. It is the reason the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen and almost none of it is available to crops.
Nature solves this with bacteria, slowly. Industry solves it with the Haber-Bosch process, which forces nitrogen and hydrogen together under extreme heat and pressure. Haber-Bosch works — it feeds a large share of the world — but it only makes economic sense at enormous scale, which is why fertilizer is made in a few places and shipped everywhere else.
A plasma discharge takes a different route. Rather than heating and compressing the gas, it accelerates electrons to energies high enough to break the bond on impact. That shifts the problem from one of pressure vessels to one of electricity — and electricity is something a farm can have.
The same chemistry, at very different scales
Both approaches end with usable nitrogen. What differs is what each one demands of the infrastructure around it.
The industrial standard since 1913
Haber-Bosch
- Needs 400–500°C and several hundred atmospheres of pressure
- Requires a hydrogen feedstock, usually from natural gas
- Only economic at very large scale, so production is centralised
- Output has to be shipped, trucked, and distributed to reach a farm
Harvora's approach
Plasma fixation
- Runs at ambient pressure, driven by an electrical discharge
- Feedstock is air and water — no hydrogen supply chain
- Works at small scale, so a single farm is a viable unit
- Produced at the point of use, so there is nothing to ship
Plasma nitrogen fixation is not a new idea — an arc-based version, the Birkeland-Eyde process, ran commercially in Norway from 1905 before Haber-Bosch displaced it on efficiency. The chemistry has never been in question. What has changed is the cost of electricity, the availability of solar generation, and the engineering needed to make a small unit practical.
One process, two deployments
The same Submerged Bubble-Arc Corona Reactor sits inside both products. FarmRover carries it to the crop; NitroFab keeps it fixed alongside a greenhouse and feeds existing irrigation.
- Production rate
- 150 L
- solution per hour
- Concentration
- 12–18
- ppm NO₃⁻
- Power draw
- 1.3 kW
- production only
