Christopher Voigt, the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering and co-director of MIT’s Synthetic Biology Center, is leading a Climate Grand Challenges flagship project that aims to reduce emissions from agriculture, largely from fertilizer, and boost yields of major food crops.
“Our focus is on decarbonizing agriculture,” Voigt says. “And underlying that is biotechnology. How do we use plant and microbial engineering, and biotechnology, to chip away at carbon emissions from agriculture? That’s one piece. The other [focus of our project] is developing crops that are more resilient.”
Through six related sub-projects, the Voigt-led interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers will tackle one of the greatest challenges the world faces as the global population heads toward 10 billion. That is expected to happen by 2050, and demand for food is expected to double over the next century.
“MIT is not historically known as a leader in the agricultural research space,” team member Mary Gehring, a plant biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and an associate professor of biology at MIT, said in a public presentation of the group’s project in April. “But we are a leader in many other disciplines that are crucial for facing the climate crisis, from synthetic biology to economics.”
Roughly one-third of all agriculture-derived greenhouse-gas emissions come from the production of nitrogen-based fertilizer, so figuring out a way to reduce those emissions became an obvious target.
Ammonia, the main ingredient of synthetic fertilizer, is made through the Haber-Bosch process, which takes nitrogen from the air and mixes it with hydrogen at high temperatures. “The addition of nitrogen fertilizer to soils has been absolutely critical for huge gains in crop productivity,” Gehring said. “But it has come at a cost.”
“Haber-Bosch requires high temperatures and big infrastructure to do in cost-effective ways,” Voigt says. “Synthetic nitrogen has to be made in large factories, and it doesn’t scale down.”
What’s more, a primary source of the required hydrogen is natural gas, and the fertilizer production process itself is energy intensive: it consumes as much as 2% of the world’s energy and 5% of its natural gas.
