We are running a series of blogs on hydrogen’s critical role in food, steel, and energy security, and what the absence of affordable, safe, and scalable storage means for each. Check out our last post to see the overview of the series. Here, we turn to the most fundamental supply chain on earth: the one that feeds us.
The World Runs on Ammonia
There is a molecule that sits between the world’s population and starvation. It is not grain, and it is not water. It is ammonia — the feedstock for nitrogen fertilisers that sustain roughly half of all human life on earth today.1
The Haber–Bosch process, which combines atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen to produce ammonia (NH₃), is one of the most consequential industrial inventions in human history. It is also one of the most carbon-intensive. Today, approximately 100 million tonnes of hydrogen are produced annually worldwide.2 Around half of that — approximately 50 Mt/year — goes directly into ammonia production, and almost all of it is produced via Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) of natural gas, a process that releases CO₂ at a rate of roughly 10 kg per kg of hydrogen produced.2 The result: hydrogen for food production alone generates approximately 500 million tonnes of CO₂ per year.
Decarbonising ammonia production is therefore one of the largest single opportunities in the entire net-zero agenda. It is also one of the most structurally complex — because the shift from fossil-fuel hydrogen to green electrolytic hydrogen does not simplify the supply chain. It fundamentally restructures it, and in doing so creates a new and underappreciated vulnerability: the need for large-scale bulk hydrogen storage.
Today’s Supply Chain Has No Storage Problem
The architecture of today’s ammonia industry was designed around a single, stable hydrogen source: natural gas. SMR plants are typically co-located with ammonia synthesis units, and their output is engineered to match the continuous, predictable consumption of the Haber–Bosch reactor. The result is a closed, tightly coupled system that requires almost no intermediate hydrogen storage.3
Gas arrives via pipeline. Hydrogen is produced continuously. Ammonia flows out. The system is exposed to gas price risk and geopolitical pipeline risk — as the European energy crisis of 2021–23 made painfully clear — but it is not exposed to storage risk. There is simply very little hydrogen inventory to manage.
Green ammonia changes all of this.
Green Ammonia Creates a Storage Imperative
Green ammonia uses the same Haber–Bosch synthesis process, but replaces SMR-derived hydrogen with hydrogen produced by electrolysis powered by renewable energy. In principle, the chemistry is identical. In practice, the supply chain is radically different.
Three structural features of green hydrogen supply chains create unavoidable storage requirements:
- Intermittency of renewable generation. Electrolysers are powered by wind and solar, which are variable by nature. A Haber–Bosch plant, by contrast, requires steady hydrogen input to operate efficiently. Without a hydrogen buffer, any drop in renewable output — a cloudy week, a wind lull — forces a production curtailment or shutdown. Restarting ammonia synthesis is not trivial: it takes time and energy, and repeated cycling degrades plant economics significantly.3
- Geographic dislocation. The best renewable energy resources — high-capacity-factor wind and solar — are rarely co-located with existing ammonia infrastructure. Green hydrogen projects in Australia, the Middle East, Chile, and northern Africa are being developed in locations chosen for wind and solar yield, not proximity to legacy ammonia plants.4 This means hydrogen will increasingly need to be transported — by pipeline, by ship as liquid hydrogen or ammonia, or as a carrier compound — introducing transit time and supply variability that the current system simply does not face.
- Supply chain complexity and new points of failure. As hydrogen supply chains lengthen and involve more steps — production, compression, transport, reconversion — each link becomes a potential disruption point. A shipping delay, a port closure, a compressor failure: each of these events can interrupt hydrogen delivery to an ammonia plant that has no buffer stock and therefore no resilience.
The IEA’s Future of Hydrogen report (2019) identifies hydrogen storage as a critical enabling infrastructure for the entire green hydrogen economy, noting that the absence of affordable large-scale storage is one of the primary barriers to deployment.2 For ammonia and food security, this is not an abstract concern. It is a structural feature of every green ammonia project currently under development.
The Storage Problem Is Well Known. The Solution Has Not Existed.
Compressed gas storage — the dominant incumbent technology — is cost-effective at small scale for short durations, but becomes economically prohibitive at the volumes required to buffer a large ammonia plant through days or weeks of reduced renewable output. The capital cost of a compressed hydrogen system scales near-proportionally with storage volume: more capacity requires more pressure vessels, more compressors, more civil infrastructure. At meaningful scale, the economics do not work.5
Cryogenic liquid hydrogen storage is even more capital-intensive, requires continuous energy input to maintain temperature, and incurs boil-off losses over time.5 For long-duration storage at the scale required to buffer ammonia supply chains, neither incumbent technology is viable.
This is the gap that Hydrilyte® is designed to fill.
Hydrilyte®: Safe, Scalable Storage for Green Ammonia Supply Chains
Hydrilyte® is a safe, pumpable hydrogen storage material: low-cost magnesium powder suspended in a low-cost carrier oil. It is handleable at ambient temperature and pressure using standard liquid-fuels infrastructure — the same tanks, pumps, and handling equipment already deployed at industrial sites worldwide. It requires no high-pressure vessels, no cryogenic plant, and no specialist safety protocols.6
The key commercial distinction lies in its cost structure. With incumbent technologies, increasing storage capacity requires near-proportional increases in capital expenditure — more vessels, more compressors, more infrastructure. Hydrilyte® behaves more like a commodity liquid: storage capacity scales with volume of material, not with expensive containment hardware. The marginal cost of additional storage capacity is therefore low — fundamentally changing the economics of large-scale, long-duration hydrogen storage.6
Because hydrogen is stored in solid state within suspended magnesium particles, there is no hydrogen loss even over decades of storage. The material is inherently stable and presents none of the ignition or pressure-related hazards associated with gaseous or cryogenic storage.6 For ammonia plant operators, port logistics teams, and project developers working on green hydrogen supply chains, this combination of safety and low incremental CAPEX is precisely what the system requires.
The Strategic Imperative
The decarbonisation of ammonia production is not a distant ambition. Projects are already under development across Australia, the Middle East, and Europe, with billions of dollars committed to green hydrogen and green ammonia infrastructure.4 The Haber–Bosch plants of the 2030s will run on electrolytic hydrogen. Their resilience — and therefore the resilience of the food systems they underpin — will depend on the availability of affordable bulk hydrogen storage.
Decarbonising ammonia production will eliminate approximately 500 million tonnes of CO₂ per year. It will also, for the first time, make the hydrogen supply chains that feed the world dependent on storage buffers that do not yet exist at scale and at cost.
Hydrilyte® is the technology that makes those buffers viable. It is safe — no high-pressure vessels, no cryogenic hazards. It is low-cost to scale — incremental storage at marginal incremental CAPEX. And it is infrastructure-compatible — deployable today, using assets that exist today.
An investment in Hydrilyte® is an investment in the resilience of the supply chains that feed the world.