Facet Amtech was founded in 2024 by Dr Peter Richardson and James Bradley at the University of Newcastle. They just raised A$3 million, backed by Main Sequence and Uniseed.
Why ammonia matters
Ammonia is the base ingredient in nitrogen fertiliser. That means it sits underneath a huge share of the world’s food supply.
The old way
Making ammonia normally takes a full industrial plant:
- An electrolyser to split hydrogen out of water
- An air separation unit to pull nitrogen out of the air
- A reactor to force the two together
Facet’s way
Facet’s catalyst does all of that in one step, using water (or steam) and air as the inputs. That cuts out both the electrolyser and the air separation unit.
The road ahead
The first pilot runs in early 2027 at 1kg of ammonia a day. They want 4 tonnes a day by the early 2030s. The plants they are designing for run 500 to 3,000 tonnes a day.
My read
That gap between the lab and the plant is where most catalyst startups die. But Facet is licensing the design instead of building plants itself, so it only needs one big producer to say yes. That is a much smarter path than trying to out-build the incumbents.