Science Tokyo Catalyst Makes Ammonia Without Precious Metals

Almost every loaf of bread on the planet owes something to ammonia. It is the starting point for nitrogen fertiliser, and a growing number of energy planners also see it as a practical way to store and ship hydrogen. The catch is that making it is one of heavy industry’s dirtiest jobs. Now a team at the Institute of Science Tokyo says it has built a catalyst that makes ammonia under noticeably milder conditions, without any precious metals, and does it faster than the benchmark catalysts it was tested against.

According to Science Tokyo’s announcement on November 2, 2026, the new material outperformed both a ruthenium-based benchmark and a conventional industrial iron catalyst at 300 °C and 0.9 MPa. The work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on October 28, 2026.

Why ammonia is such a hard molecule to make

The problem starts with nitrogen gas itself. The two nitrogen atoms in an N₂ molecule are held together by one of the strongest bonds in chemistry, and pulling them apart takes a lot of energy. That is why the century-old industrial process for making ammonia runs at high temperatures and high pressures, and why it leans so heavily on fossil fuels.

The scale is striking. The International Energy Agency’s Ammonia Technology Roadmap estimates that ammonia production uses around 2% of the world’s total final energy consumption and produces about 450 million tonnes of direct CO₂ emissions a year, roughly the entire energy-system footprint of South Africa. Per tonne, the IEA puts ammonia at about 2.4 tonnes of CO₂, nearly twice as emissions-intensive as crude steel. Roughly 70% of ammonia goes into fertilisers, and the agency expects demand to keep rising.

Chemists have long tried to find catalysts that can split nitrogen more gently. Some of the best performers rely on ruthenium, a rare and expensive noble metal. Barium-based materials looked like a cheaper alternative, but, as the Science Tokyo team notes, the most active barium compounds, such as barium subnitride, tend to break down in hydrogen during the reaction itself. The question the researchers set out to answer was how to build a barium-based catalyst that stays stable while still doing the hard work of activating nitrogen.

Inside the new catalyst

The team, led by Dr. Yihao Jiang, Professor Hideo Hosono and Professor Masaaki Kitano of the MDX Research Center for Element Strategy, created a new compound with the formula Ba₃AlO_4−xN_yH_z. It has what chemists call an anti-perovskite crystal structure. (This is a catalyst story, not a solar-cell one: the name describes how the atoms are arranged, not what the material is used for.)

That crystal arrangement turns out to be unusually accommodating. According to the university, it can hold several kinds of negatively charged species at once: oxide, nitride, hydride, and, most importantly, molecular dinitrogen anions written as (N₂)⁻. In this form the nitrogen-nitrogen bond is already weakened, which makes the molecule much easier to split.

The researchers then made the material work harder through clever architecture:

An ultrathin shell. The compound was grown as a very thin coating on aluminium oxide nanorods, greatly increasing the surface area available for reactions.
Self-organising cobalt. Cobalt added during synthesis arranged itself into small clusters on the outer shell, with no need for an expensive noble metal.
Stability. The finished structure, which the team describes as remarkably stable, avoids the degradation problem that has held back other barium-based catalysts.

The optimised catalyst reached an ammonia synthesis rate of 15.9 millimoles per gram of catalyst per hour at 300 °C and 0.9 MPa. “The optimized Co/Ba₃AlO_4−xN_yH_z/Al₂O₃ catalyst achieved NH₃ synthesis rates surpassing benchmark ruthenium-based and industrial iron catalysts,” Professor Kitano said in the announcement.

A new way of breaking nitrogen

Beyond the headline numbers, the more interesting result may be the mechanism. Using isotope labelling, spectroscopy and computer simulations, the team found that activated (N₂)⁻ ions sitting at the interface between cobalt, barium and aluminium are central to the reaction.

In plain terms, the elements divide the labour. The barium-containing sites weaken the nitrogen bond, letting the activated nitrogen split easily and then quickly replenishing it with fresh N₂ from the gas stream. The cobalt and aluminium sites then help carry out the later steps that turn nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. The university describes this as a previously unknown ammonia synthesis route mediated by dinitrogen anions.

That matters because it offers a design recipe, not just a single material. If chemists can deliberately build stable structures that store nitrogen in an already “loosened” form and pair them with the right cooperating metals, they have a new lever for designing catalysts that work at lower temperatures and pressures.

What it means

For businesses watching the energy transition, the significance falls into a few areas:

Cheaper ingredients. Replacing ruthenium with cobalt, barium and aluminium could reduce exposure to scarce, price-volatile noble metals if the approach scales.
Milder operating conditions. Lower temperatures and pressures generally mean less energy spent per tonne, simpler equipment and, potentially, smaller plants.
A better fit for renewables. The IEA notes that electrolysis-based ammonia faces challenges when it relies on variable wind and solar power. Smaller plants that run under gentler conditions are often seen as easier to pair with intermittent clean electricity, though that remains to be shown for this catalyst.
Hydrogen logistics. Science Tokyo highlights ammonia’s growing role as a carbon-free hydrogen carrier. Making it more efficiently strengthens the case for ammonia as a way to move clean energy across oceans.

Some caution is warranted. The reported results are laboratory-scale catalyst measurements. The announcement does not describe pilot-plant testing, long-term operation in an industrial reactor or production costs, and those are the hurdles that decide whether a promising catalyst ever reaches a fertiliser plant. A catalyst is also only one part of the emissions picture: the hydrogen fed into the reaction must itself be produced cleanly for the ammonia to be genuinely low-carbon.

The bottom line

Ammonia sits at the crossroads of food security and clean energy, and its production remains one of industry’s biggest climate headaches. The Science Tokyo team has shown that a carefully structured, noble-metal-free material can beat established benchmarks under milder conditions, and has uncovered a new chemical pathway that others can build on. As Professor Kitano put it, the findings “open new opportunities for the development of highly active NH₃ synthesis catalysts capable of operating efficiently under mild conditions without the use of precious metals.” The next test is whether that promise survives the journey from lab bench to industrial scale.