China’s ‘super catalyst’ turns waste water into fertiliser building block, tripling output

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Researchers transform nitrate pollution into ammonia, used to create plant food, which could strengthen China’s fertiliser supply chain

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Zhang Tongin BeijingPublished: 12:00pm, 10 May 2026A team in China has designed a catalyst that can transform nitrate pollution from agricultural and industrial waste water into ammonia – the chemical backbone of urea fertiliser – with nearly three times the efficiency of conventional catalysts.

The study detailing this breakthrough was published on March 18 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, where it was showcased on the front cover.

It has opened the door to a low-energy waste-to-resource technology that could one day strengthen China’s fertiliser supply chain.Advertisement

The innovation centres on dual-atom catalysts, or DACs. Unlike their single-atom cousins, DACs feature two adjacent metal atoms able to work together drive complex, multi-step reactions, such as turning nitrate into ammonia or converting carbon dioxide.

But making them has long been a painstaking trial-and-error affair, with little theoretical guidance, low metal loadings and the lack of an easy way to fit in different metal pairs.

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Han Lili and her colleagues at the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, relied on deep learning to train an AI model to pinpoint metal pairs with high pairing rates – those that readily lock together.

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