Discover the future of agriculture with our Founder and CEO Gustaf Forsberg, as he narrates the inception of NitroCapt and the exciting vision that drives us forward.
”Agriculture is the basis for human civilization and we need to strengthen its role. My passion is to combine technology and biology to make agriculture both highly-productive and sustainable. Nitrogen fertilizers are an essential component for producing enough food for the world’s population, but today’s production has significant environmental drawbacks. The development of novel nitrogen fertilizer processes and fertilizer field management are therefore of essence to being able to achieve both productivity and sustainability”, says Gustaf Forsberg.
Founding journey
Gustaf Forsberg’s farming roots sparked a passion for innovation. It led him to a double Masters in engineering physics and agronomy, and a PhD in a project that later became the successful ThermoSeed® technology. Here Gustaf had key roles in R&D, product development and international marketing and sales. He left his employment in 2016 and started NitroCapt, based on a new idea of how to achieve a more efficient and climate-friendly method for nitrogen fixation. Partnering with Peter Baeling, a brilliant retired chemical engineer and former colleague from Lantmännen R&D, together they developed the SUNIFIX® process concept.
After an inventory of disciplines necessary to realize the technology was made, an intense scouting for the right competences among European researchers followed, which led to the creation of a dedicated research consortium together with several world-leading professors and their teams. With two patent applications filed 2020/21 and support from InnoEnergy, the team wrote NitroCapt’s first business plan and succeeded to get approximately EUR 3m in grants and investor funding in early 2022.
Vision of NitroCapt
NitroCapt’s vision is “Decarbonizing plant nutrition to produce the world’s most environmentally and economically sustainable nitrogen fertilizer”.
The goal is to ensure that highly-productive agricultural practices go hand in hand with a sound and thriving environment in a number of ways:
- NitroCapt’s electrification of nitrogen fixation with a close to zero-emission production process removes the dependency of fossil-fuel based energy feedstocks and, which today are significant contributors to the greenhouse effect and a source of cross-border political strife.
- The energy efficiency of the SUNIFIX® technology will make it the most economically attractive technology thus accelerating the decarbonization of the nitrogen fertilizer industry.
- NitroCapt’s SUNIFER® nitrate fertilizer with its positive influence on soil fertility (contrary to the most common fertilizers that acidify soils) and advantages for precision farming thanks to a very high nutrient efficiency,unlocks substantial potential for reducing soil-related GHG emissions.
- NitroCapt’s modular size, already on a moderate scale, makes an attractive, new, distributed business model for creating resilient fertilizer production cost effectively and close to end-users, where everything needed is available locally. This is a great advantage in a world where there are increasing risks for supply shortages due to various kinds of remote trade disturbances.
The future of Agriculture
Food industry actors are highly concerned and engaged in:
- The importance of the decarbonization coupled with the worries about the high cost of the green fertilizers.
- The dependency of remotely produced fossil gas for production, where one country alone can create urgent shortages threatening food production.
“NitroCapt is addressing all of these concerns. As we speak with our future customers, this is perfectly understood and embraced, as well among actors in Europe as in other parts of the world. We have also encountered several organizations that see our technology as a solution for increasing food production in developing countries with poor infrastructure but with good potential for renewable electricity”, says Gustaf.
“It is incredibly motivating to develop solutions to so many important global challenges all at the same time. I’m very proud of the milestones we are achieving together on this journey every day. It fills my life with meaning that we can help our children by doing what we can to give them a better world”, continues Gustaf. “And I am enormously proud and impressed by our team and all of our partners making this happen”.
