NSF Engineering Research Center for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production (CASFER)

The NSF Engineering Research Center for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production (CASFER) will strive to solve one of the most pressing problems facing humankind: how do we feed the growing world population while protecting and sustaining our environment? By 2050, the world population will exceed 10.5 billion, increasing the demand for food by 70%, with only an additional 10% land available for agriculture.

To meet this demand, nitrogen-based fertilizers (NBFs) are required for the formation of plant proteins. Currently, more than 50% of the world population is supported by synthetic NBFs, produced via the Haber-Bosch process (HB) a carbon intensive process, however, the high volatility of prices remains a challenge in the US and developing countries. Furthermore, only 20% of NBFs produced translate into food with 80% lost to the environment creating significant environmental, health, and socioeconomic impact.

Therefore, society requires new cost effective, resilient, and secure ways to produce NBFs with minimum environmental and socioeconomic impacts. CASFER will enable resilient and sustainable food production by developing next generation, modular, distributed, and efficient technology for capturing, recycling, and producing decarbonized NBFs. CASFER will create a transformative engineered system that takes the US from nitrogen cycle pollution to a Nitrogen Circular Economy (NCE), from a linear economy to a circular economy with multidimensional social, environmental, and economic growth.

CASFER will capture and recycle nitrogen from waste to reach over 50% of the US NBF consumption. Instead of expending resources, energy, and money to deactivate diluted reactive nitrogen from waste streams, nitrogen from waste will be captured and recycled for crop production.

CASFER brings together a diverse leadership and the convergence of a multidisciplinary team drawn from Texas Tech University, Florida A&M University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Case Western Reserve University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. CASFER convergence research will advance modeling, monitoring and distributed control; capture and recycling; and modular and distributed production and delivery of NBFs.

CASFER will enable an organic but synthetic approach to NBF production, with ingredients, predictability, and reliability designed to stimulate plant growth. CASFER technologies will integrate nanotechnology, electrochemical science, and data science for modularity, synthesis, and separations, and resolve economic pressures, logistics issues, public and industry acceptance, regulatory, and safety issues.

CASFER will advance fundamental knowledge in key areas of interfacial processes, separations, catalysis and electrocatalysis, and properties of materials to tolerate heterogenous and harsh environments to enable synthetic chemistry pathways to convert waste into NBF. CASFER will lead to advances in sensor science and multiscale modeling to deliver NBF near point of use by farmers.

CASFER Innovation Ecosystem will bring together key industry members, agriculture cooperatives, facilitators, investors, regulatory advisory boards, and Society Visionary Champions to commercialize CASFER research discoveries and maximize benefits to society. CASFER will train the next generation of engineers and technical workforce at the intersection of engineering, agricultural sciences, and environmental science with the skills to advance the NCE.

CASFER will empower agents of change and influencers to promote the NCE targeting formal and informal education along the K-gray spectrum. CASFER will engage a diverse range of communities underrepresented in STEM through the NCE by acknowledging the varied backgrounds and experiences of each participant and facilitating their engagement in engineering through multimodal, multilevel entry points and cut across socioeconomic and cultural boundaries.

CASFER will establish a fully sustainable innovation ecosystem to expand fundamental knowledge and leverage CASFER platform technologies to recover phosphorous, nutrients, and other resources from waste streams. Through all these activities, CASFER will lead the US toward a Nitrogen Circular Economy, fertilizer independence, an affordable and resilient price range for NBF, while sustaining and preserving the environment.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.