{"id":238943,"date":"2026-06-14T01:39:27","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T06:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/ai-guided-catalyst-turns-co%e2%82%82-and-waste-into-fertilizer-at-industrially-relevant-rates"},"modified":"2026-06-14T01:39:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T06:39:27","slug":"ai-guided-catalyst-turns-co%e2%82%82-and-waste-into-fertilizer-at-industrially-relevant-rates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/ai-guided-catalyst-turns-co%e2%82%82-and-waste-into-fertilizer-at-industrially-relevant-rates","title":{"rendered":"AI-guided catalyst turns CO\u2082 and waste into fertilizer at industrially relevant rates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ai-guided-catalyst-turns-coe28282-and-waste-into-fertilizer-at-industrially-relevant-rates.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a computation-guided strategy to produce urea more efficiently from carbon dioxide and nitrate. By combining large language models, density functional theory calculations and experiments, the approach identified a cadmium-modified iron oxide catalyst that maintains high urea selectivity at practical current densities.<\/p>\n<p>Urea is one of the world\u2019s most widely used fertilizers, but its conventional production comes at a heavy environmental cost. The industrial process accounts for more than two percent of global energy consumption and releases over 200 million tons of carbon dioxide each year.<\/p>\n<p>A cleaner alternative is to produce urea electrochemically, using low-carbon electricity to convert carbon dioxide and nitrate into a useful product. However, this approach has been difficult to scale up. At the high current densities needed for practical production, the catalysts often favor competing side reactions, such as hydrogen gas formation or carbon dioxide reduction to other products.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a computation-guided strategy to produce urea more efficiently from carbon dioxide and nitrate. By combining large language models, density functional theory calculations and experiments, the approach identified a cadmium-modified iron oxide catalyst that maintains high urea selectivity at practical current densities. Urea is one of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-robotics-ai","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}