NitroCapt: How a Swedish Startup is Harnessing the Power of Lightning to Revolutionize Agriculture 

A small reactor in Uppsala may hold the key to cutting the fertilizer industry’s massive carbon footprint—by replicating nature’s own nitrogen fixation process.

UPPSALA, Sweden –

On a January morning in the Swedish university town of Uppsala, a group of scientists gathered in a laboratory within a modest cluster of buildings known as the Green Innovation Park and activated a small electromagnetic reactor. They watched through a window as the reactor, enclosed in a hermetically sealed room, began to heat up, cycling plasma and gases through an intricate system of tubes and machinery that has the potential to reshape the future of agriculture. 

“See where the tubes are coming out like a flower around the reactor? It’s extremely intense inside,” said Gustaf Forsberg, the Swedish physicist-turned- startup-founder who dreamed up the core technology behind the reactor. “The temperature in the plasma, we cannot measure it, but we know it goes above 3000 degrees. Look, there is a little fluorescence coming out on the lower left house.” 

“If we hadn’t just changed the adaptor, you’d see florescence coming from the tubes,” said Sankha Nanayakkara, a young scientist who became obsessed with electromagnetics as a child when his father’s ice cream shop in Sri Lanka kept being struck by lightning. Nanayakkara is part of the 20-person team behind NitroCapt, the company Forsberg founded in the belief that it could represent a watershed moment for the global food system. 

The process inside the reactor room is producing nitrate, a key component in fertilizer. This technology, which uses plasma to break apart nitrogen molecules, mimicking the way lightning naturally fixes nitrogen in the atmosphere, has the potential to revolutionize the fertilizer industry, which is currently responsible for around 2.7 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. 

“That’s the same range as the entire aviation industry,” says Forsberg. “Most people are aware of the impact of aviation, and not so many are aware of this.” It’s a staggering statistic. The very thing that feeds the world, that props up agriculture from Kansas to Kenya, does as much damage to our planet as all the planes in the sky. For decades, this has been the price of abundance. Nitrogen fertilizers have helped sustain billions, yet their production depends on fossil fuels, belching out carbon at an astronomical scale. But what if that price didn’t have to be paid? 

That’s the proposition behind NitroCapt, which aims to disrupt one of agriculture’s biggest carbon culprits. Its proprietary technology uses only oxygen, water, and renewable energy to fix nitrogen directly from the air, eliminating the need for hydrogen, a costly and energy-intensive component in traditional fertilizer production. This breakthrough makes the process far more sustainable than both conventional ammonia-based fertilizers and emerging green hydrogen alternatives. If the technology can scale, it could not only slash emissions but also change the balance of global food security. 

“There are grey alternatives with a decent price, and there are green alternatives that are still quite far from cost-efficient,” says Forsberg. NitroCapt, he explains, is “the only alternative which is both green and exceptionally cost efficient.” 

Forsberg, a charismatic, slightly eccentric figure, isn’t your typical startup founder. He grew up on a farm in Sweden, still cultivates grains on his family’s century-old farmstead, and speaks about electromagnetics with a childlike enthusiasm. Before starting NitroCapt in 2016, he was one of the key people behind ThermoSeed, which pioneered a chemical-free alternative for seed disinfection, reducing the industry’s reliance on pesticides. 

Forsberg came up with the idea that led to NitroCapt while contemplating an entirely different topic: a process used by the combustion industry to combat acid rain, which involves removing nitrogen from the atmosphere. 

“As an agronomist and a farmer, I felt that that’s a big waste of nitrogen,” he says. 

Forsberg brought the idea to his former colleague, Peter Baeling, who offered indispensable advice, leading to the incorporation of electrically generated plasma. Through a series of investigations, the two ended up with the process behind NitroCapt’s core technology. They went on to become co-founders of the company. 

NitroCapt’s pilot reactor has been running in their Uppsala lab since early 2024, and space is already set aside for their first commercial-scale reactor. Here, the team has been refining their process, ensuring their system is not just functional but modular and scalable. And while the technology is still at a pilot scale, interest is growing. The company has already secured 9 letters of intent for 33 full-scale production units, representing a future commercial value of more than €1 billion—a sign that the industry is paying attention.

A Cleaner Alternative to Conventional Fertilizer 

Despite its outsized contribution to the warming of our planet, the fertilizer industry flies under the radar. “Even as a farmer, one doesn’t think much about where nitrogen fertilizers come from and how they affect the environment,” says Henrik Lillje, a Swedish farmer and crop consultant. “But you scratch the surface, and you see that they are causing a huge amount of emissions.”

The problem lies in how nitrogen fertilizer is made. Since the early 20th century, the Haber-Bosch process has been the foundation of industrial agriculture, pulling nitrogen from the air and turning it into ammonia using massive amounts of natural gas. The result is a product that brings necessary plant nutrients into fields, lending them high productivity but at the price of a massive carbon footprint. 

And yet, the world has grown to depend on it. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers led to enormous yield increases during the Green Revolution and are a key component of modern conventional farming systems. Without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, global food production would plummet by close to 50 percent if no alternatives were used, meaning we could only feed a fraction of the planet’s current population. The industry itself is massive—with an annual sales value of more than $80 billion—and deeply entrenched in geopolitics. 

The geopolitical nature of the industry came to the fore in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when fertilizer prices skyrocketed, exposing just how fragile the global supply chain is. 

“There’s an urgent need in developing countries for domestic production of fertilizer,” said Kristina Mastroianni, a consultant who has worked for on large-scale agricultural development aid projects and sees enormous potential in NitroCapt’s model. “The opportunity I see here with their modular system is that they can be placed anywhere,” she says. “You can have smaller entities that supply the region to avoid supply chain issues.” 

For smallholder farmers in developing nations, access to fertilizer is precarious and unaffordable. Recent supply chain issues, Mastroianni explains, “have had great impact everywhere, but a much higher impact on the poor farmers in these countries. They don’t have access at all to something that is life or death.” 

By decentralizing production and cutting reliance on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, NitroCapt’s model could provide a way for countries to secure domestic production, insulating them from market volatility. With 80 percent of nitrogen fertilizer currently produced in a handful of politically fraught regions, the ability to produce fertilizer locally would be a game-changer. 

Henrik Lillje, the Swedish farmer, is skeptical but hopeful. “It’s a beautiful product… It’s almost too good to be true,” he says. “If they can make it economically competitive, I would say it should sweep the market.” 

Can Green Fertilizer be Competitive in the Market? 

That’s the key question: Can they make it competitive? Right now, green fertilizers are more expensive to produce than traditional ones, largely because of the high cost of green hydrogen, the usual alternative to fossil fuel-based ammonia production. NitroCapt’s method, however, bypasses hydrogen entirely by converting oxygen and nitrogen from the air into nitrate through a plasma-chemical process. The hope is that once the company reaches industrial scale, its costs will drop below traditional methods. 

Forsberg explains that NitroCapt’s roadmap focuses first on scaling the technology from small to large-scale production, a step that will already make them competitive in markets like Europe. Over the next few years, NitroCapt plans to increase energy efficiency further by integrating advanced heat recovery technologies. 

He sees an even greater shift ahead. “When we go to these levels, there will not be any reason anymore to produce fertilizer with any other technology,” says Forsberg. “This is basically zero-emission from the nitrogen fixation process,” he says. “And in addition, we are making the best fertilizer for agriculture, because ammonia-based fertilizers acidify the soils, whereas the pure nitrate- based fertilizers slightly increase the pH of the soil. They are actually increasing, successively, the fertility of the soil.” 

In an era where sustainability is the watchword, NitroCapt represents a huge opportunity. The European Union has introduced policies like Red III, which mandates that 42 percent of fertilizers in Europe be green by 2027. But skepticism runs high. “No one believes this will be possible,” says Björn Lindh, NitroCapt’s strategy director. “They put their heads in the sand.” 

Forsberg is well aware of the skepticism. The fertilizer industry is dominated by giants who have been operating the same way for a century, and they aren’t eager to upend their model. “There are hundreds of announcements about green fertilizer plants,” says Lindh. “But to my knowledge, no one has gotten funding.” 

Why? Because they aren’t yet able to be competitive in the market. Even with looming regulations and carbon taxes, many producers are making the calculation that it’s cheaper to take the fines than to invest in a technology that will significantly increase production cost. 

An Unstoppable Innovation 

But Forsberg and his team believe they have something that changes the equation. Their reactors are already operational, producing nitrogen fertilizer with a radically lower environmental impact. With a first commercial unit on the horizon and interest from major agricultural players like VIVESCIA, a French cooperative that supports 9,000 farmers and oversees 750,000 hectares of farmland, NitroCapt’s moment may be coming faster than even Forsberg anticipated. 

Forsberg knows the road ahead is steep, but he believes the momentum for green innovations like NitroCapt is unstoppable. 

“The sustainable technologies will become more competitive. It will go the right way. The question is just how many bumps we shall jump over,” says Forsberg. “Ultimately, I’m optimistic.” 

Learn more about NitroCapt.

Author: Charly Wilder
Photographer: Emily Wilson