Producing ammonia & fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

Click to learn more. Online renewable ammonia demonstrator, powered by wind turbines in Morris, Minnesota, USA. Source: University of Minnesota.

A pioneering facility has come online for its first season of low-carbon ammonia production in Minnesota, USA. The plant is being turned on gradually, with a target of one ton per day of low-carbon ammonia production for local fertiliser offtake. Wind energy powers the electrolysers that supply hydrogen to a Haber Bosch plant. To manage the fluctuating renewable energy supply, the rate of ammonia production can be adjusted using new modeling and control systems.

The plant is located at University of Minnesota’s (UMN) West Central Research and Outreach Center in Morris, rural Minnesota. It is a collaboration between UMN, Research Triangle Institutes International (RTI International) as well as Casale. The project aims to address high fertiliser prices and supply chain instability, while creating revenue streams within the state. This facility is an upscale of 2013’s successful pilot plant, and can be expanded further to a network of commercial, renewable ammonia generation hubs owned by farmer cooperatives. The ammonia produced can be stored in nurse tanks and/or coupled with carbon dioxide by-products from ethanol production to produce urea, the most common form of fertiliser used in Minnesota.

It seemed like an elegant concept when we were first looking at it that you could take a wind turbine, and that’s producing energy from wind above a cornfield, or small grain field, and then produce a nutrient that you can use right underneath the wind farms in rural Minnesota… There are no ammonia or nitrogen fertilizer production facilities in the state other than our small systems here. If you can produce a moderately priced nitrogen fertilizer that’s consistent, year in and year out, then farmers can budget for it, and they can market crops to that point in time.

Michael Reese, Green Ammonia Research Lead, University of Minnesota Twin Cities press release, 26 Jun 2026

Essentially, the wind or the sun is our feedstock. We typically design a chemical plant to run at steady state and produce at a constant rate, assuming that we have a constant supply of our feedstock. That’s not the case with green chemicals or green ammonia specifically. In order to somehow absorb the fluctuations in wind availability, you need to have a significant storage of hydrogen to be able to absorb these fluctuations, which is very costly. On the other hand, if you allow the plant to operate dynamically, you minimize the demand for storing hydrogen or storing power and hence, you can have a much tighter design, a much, much more economical design. It’s about the economic development of the state… One can see a model of co-ops that will come together and hopefully develop these plants with support and loans and credits from the state.

Prodromos Daoutidis, Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Minnesota Twin Cities press release, 26 Jun 2026

In AEA’s December 2025 episode of Project Features, project partners explained the Morris facility in detail among other ammonia energy R&D pioneering demonstration plants and start-up companies originating from the UMN. The recording and presentations can be found here.