"For the past century, nitrogen fertilizer has been produced as ammonia (NH3) in Haber-Bosch facilities often situated very far from farmers who need and use fertilizer. State-of-the-art Haber-Bosch factories require hydrogen production via coal or methane reforming and use high-pressure and temperature reactors to transform hydrogen and nitrogen gas into ammonia. "

"The distributed production and fertilization with nitric acid is relatively underexplored. Known nitric acid production methods require about 3 times more energy per pound of nitrogen than ammonia processes."

"In the current study, we focus on a plasma-based production process that fixes nitrogen as nitric acid on-site for a plot of irrigated processing tomatoes."