Texas Tech University on Aug. 10 announced a partnership with four other institutions of higher education and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to create the NSF Engineering Research Center for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production (CASFER).
CASFER, headquartered at Texas Tech, received a $26 million grant from the NSF for an initial five-year period, with the possibility of renewing the grant for five more years and another $25 million. Texas Tech will lead the collaborative center, and is joined by Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Case Western Reserve University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“This is a tremendous opportunity to solve one of the largest problems in the world: how we feed the growing population while protecting and sustaining our environment,” said CASFER Center Director Gerri Botte. “We are going to enable resilient and sustainable food production, and we’re going to do that by making the next generation of technology to produce nitrogen-based fertilizer (NBF) more efficiently while implementing waste streams. We’re going to transform the United States and the world from a nitrogen pollution economy to a nitrogen circular economy in which we’re going to recycle nitrogen-based fertilizer and use it to produce crops and food. With CASFER, we are moving toward a nitrogen circular economy.”
Texas Tech said the CASFER engineered system will revolutionize the capture, recovery, and recycling of NBFs using byproducts from untapped sources of waste, including concentrated animal feeding operations, municipal wastewater treatment plants, and runoff. CASFER also will deliver synthetic methods that use waste and sustainable resources for decarbonized NBF production.