Addis Energy

Here is a fact that took the chemical industry about a century to find embarrassing: ammonia, the compound that fertilizes roughly half the food on Earth, is made in enormous steel plants that heat gas to around 400 degrees Celsius and squeeze it under crushing pressure. This is the Haber-Bosch process, it is one of the most important inventions in human history, and it is responsible for more than 1% of global carbon dioxide emissions. You cannot feed the planet without it, and you cannot decarbonize the planet with it. That is an awkward place to be.

Addis Energy, a company founded in 2024 and headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, has a proposal that sounds, at first, like a category error. What if you did not build the reactor at all? What if you found a place that was already hot, already under pressure, and already full of the right chemistry, and simply used it?

That place, according to Addis, is the ground. Not any ground - iron-rich rock, of which there is a great deal, several thousand feet down. The company's pitch is that you can inject nitrate-bearing water into these formations, let the ferrous iron in the rock hand off its electrons to nitrogen, and produce ammonia in place. No hydrogen feedstock. No external electricity. No added heat or pressure, because the Earth supplies both for free. And, the company says, no CO2.

The chemistry that was hiding in plain sight

The science came out of MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, where professor Iwnetim Abate and colleagues showed in the lab that ammonia could form in a matter of hours under conditions that are, by industrial standards, almost gentle - as low as about 130 degrees Celsius and a little more than two atmospheres of pressure. Those are conditions you can reach with drilling equipment that already exists.

"Earth can be a factory for chemical production."Iwnetim Abate, Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer

Abate's line about the economics is even more telling, because it is the entire business model compressed into eight words: as you dig, you get heat and pressure for free. Conventional ammonia plants spend enormous sums manufacturing those exact conditions. Addis wants to stop paying for them.

Novel chemistry in an oil-and-gas package

This is where the company gets genuinely interesting, because Addis did not try to escape the fossil-fuel industry. It borrowed its toolbox. Drilling, fluid injection, subsurface engineering, reservoir mapping - these are mature, well-understood disciplines, and Addis has staffed itself to use them. CEO Michael Alexander, who spent years as a chemical engineer in oil refining before earning an MBA at Harvard, describes the product as "novel chemistry that's wrapped in an oil and gas package."

"There's novel chemistry that's wrapped in an oil and gas package."Michael Alexander, Co-Founder & CEO

It is a useful reframing. The clean-energy world tends to treat oil-and-gas expertise as the enemy. Addis treats it as an underused asset - the same instinct that let geothermal and carbon-storage ventures recruit from the drilling world. The founding team splits neatly down this seam: two MIT professors who found the chemistry, Abate and materials scientist and serial cleantech entrepreneur Yet-Ming Chiang; and two operators, Alexander and COO Charlie Mitchell, a former petroleum engineer who oversaw drilling and production across conventional and unconventional assets.

The number that makes investors lean in

Conventional low-carbon ammonia can run around $1,150 per metric ton and consume roughly 16 gigajoules of net energy per ton. Addis projects its geologic ammonia at $200 to $500 per ton - potentially a third of the cost - and describes the process as net energy-positive rather than energy-hungry. Whether those figures survive contact with a real field pilot is the open question, and the company is refreshingly clear that it is still pre-commercial. But the direction of the arrow is what attracted capital.

In December 2025, Addis closed an oversubscribed $8.3 million seed round led by At One Ventures, with Engine Ventures and Pillar VC returning from an earlier $4.25 million pre-seed. Add $4.5 million from ARPA-E's Vision OPEN 2024 program - the US Department of Energy classifies stimulated geologic ammonia as a potential new primary energy resource - and the company has drawn together government and venture money around the same bet.

What happens next is a hole in the ground

For now the work is unglamorous and essential: core flood tests that recreate subsurface pressure in the lab using rocks pulled from the field, and a US-wide mapping effort to find formations with the right iron content, temperature, and pressure. The in-house geologists are hunting for a pilot site. The lab reaction works; the question is whether it works in a reservoir, at rate, for a price that a fertilizer buyer will pay.

That is a real risk, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. Subsurface chemistry is famously less obedient than a lab bench. But the appeal of Addis Energy is not that it has already won. It is that it noticed something obvious in hindsight - the reactor might already exist - and assembled exactly the right mix of chemists and drillers to go check. Ammonia is invisible infrastructure, in the food you ate today. Addis wants to keep the ammonia and lose the smokestack.