Nium
Nium makes ammonia cheaper and cleaner than the Haber Bosch process.
Summary
Nium aims to produce ammonia cheaper and cleaner than the Haber Bosch process. The Haber Bosch process is a two-step process that makes hydrogen by reacting methane with steam at high temperatures and pressure, then reacting the hydrogen with nitrogen at high temperature and pressure to create ammonia. Most of the energy consumption in this process is due to the creation of hydrogen. Still, every step requires significant energy due to the environmental conditions that must be maintained. Nium claims to have developed a new catalyst first theorized at Stanford that takes hydrogen and nitrogen as inputs and creates ammonia at low pressure and temperature, thereby significantly reducing the power consumption of the second step.
Why we invested
- Large global market with a technology that can completely change the unit economics of ammonia production.
- Soluton has the possibility to plug directly into hydrogen producers and it's expected that over $500b will be invested in hydrogen by 2030.
- Strong founders that complement each other well.
- In the everything goes right scenario Nium has the possibility to make ammonia viable as an energy carrier.
Contact Nium
Team
Lewis Jenkins
CEO
Before co-founding Nium, Lewis served as COO of Generation, a McKinsey & Company education to employment social enterprise, and co-founded Experience Something Different (ESD), a bootstrapped climate and sustainability education company. Previously, he built an international training company in Australia and later became the Global Head of Programs at The Intern Group in 2016. Lewis has a BA from King’s College and a Master’s in International Relations and Affairs from Cambridge.
Yubiao Niu
CTO
After a BSc in Chemical Engineering (4-year program) at Shandong University in his home province of China, Yubiao was accepted for a 3 year MSc in Applied Chemistry at Zhejiang University. Zhejiang is one of the C9 group, the top 9 Universities in China which are the equivalent of Oxbridge in the UK. In 2014 he joined Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory at University of Birmingham (the first center for nanoscience in the UK), for a PhD under the European “Catsense” doctoral training network (http://www.catsense.eu/), with the theme of novel nanocatalyst for water electrolysis and heterogeneous catalysis. Since 2015, he has co-authored 25 scientific publications with >290 citations. In 2017, Yubiao moved to Swansea University and helped Prof. Richard Palmer establish the Nanomaterials Lab and a satellite lab at Diamond Light Source at Harwell. He won a Welsh Government Industry Fellowship in 2020, working on low-energy ammonia synthesis. This work laid the foundation for Nium.
Phil Hunter
COO
Phil is an entrepreneur and before starting Nium started and grew companies across Automotive, Data, Insurance and Retail. The largest was Nimbla, which scaled up from 4 to 25 people. He built the early production risk and pricing engine in Python and then moved into a more Operational role to grow out the other teams.
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