- Energy is the foundation of everything the global economy runs on, from manufacturing to transportation to food production.
- The United States has made real progress reducing its reliance on imported ammonia, with net import reliance falling to about 5% in 2025.
- Frontieras North America is supporting that trend toward diversification with a technology it calls Solid Carbon Fractionation, branded FASForm(TM).
American farmers depend on nitrogen fertilizer, and nitrogen fertilizer depends on energy. That bridge is why fertilizer security at its core is actually an energy story … and problem. It is also why Frontieras North America is positioning its coal-based FASForm(TM) technology, along with the designer carbon product the technology yields, FASCarbon(TM), as part of the answer.
From manufacturing to transportation to food production, energy is the foundation of everything the U.S. economy runs on. When domestic energy supply is squeezed, the effects ripple outward fast, and agriculture feels it as directly as any sector. Nitrogen fertilizer is made from ammonia, and ammonia is made by combining hydrogen with nitrogen from the air. That hydrogen almost always comes from natural gas. Natural gas typically accounts for more than 60% of the levelized cost of producing ammonia through the conventional process, so when gas prices move, fertilizer prices move with them.
This year, we saw the effects of that exposure, bringing it from the theoretical to the real world. In spring 2026, conflict in the Middle East disrupted the Strait of Hormuz, a corridor that handles roughly 20% of global natural gas exports and half of global urea and sulfur exports. Anhydrous ammonia prices climbed past $1,126 per ton by mid-May, a jump of more than 25% in a matter of months. Nitrogen fertilizer already represents 33 to 44% of total corn production costs, so a spike of that size lands directly on farm margins and, eventually, on grocery bills.
The United States has made real progress reducing its reliance on imported ammonia, with net import reliance falling to about 5% in 2025, down from 13% just a few years earlier. But domestic production still runs almost entirely on natural gas, which means American fertilizer costs stay tied to a single, globally traded commodity. A supply chain built around one input and one production pathway is a supply chain with one point of failure. Diversifying the energy inputs behind fertilizer production is now a matter of both economic stability and national security, since food production cannot pause while energy markets sort themselves out.
Frontieras North America is building toward that diversification with a technology it calls Solid Carbon Fractionation, branded FASForm(TM). The process runs coal through thermal cracking and distillation, without combustion, to separate it into hydrogen, methane, naphtha, diesel, aviation fuel and FASCarbon, a low-sulfur solid carbon product. A single FASForm facility processes 7,500 tons of coal a day, or roughly 2.7 million tons a year. The closed-loop process also produces more than 20 million standard cubic feet of hydrogen daily, which Frontieras uses to power its facilities, making the company’s first plant potentially the first hydrogen-powered plant in the United States.
Hydrogen is the input ammonia production needs, and FASForm generates it from coal rather than natural gas. Frontieras built the technology because of what coal is worth as a feedstock, not as a response to how conventional coal combustion is viewed. The company holds patents in nine countries, including the U.S. and Canada, covering roughly 85% of the global coal market. Coal still meets nearly 40% of global electricity demand, and Frontieras’ position is straightforward: Coal has never been the problem; underuse of its full value has been.
The environmental results follow from the process rather than driving it. FASCarbon runs at less than 1% sulfur and is free of heavy metals, and the FASForm process produces zero waste. Those outcomes matter, but they are a byproduct of extracting more value from a domestic resource, not the reason the technology exists.
The $850 million Mason County project gives the company a working example of what a coal-based hydrogen platform looks like at industrial scale. It also provides a case study for how domestic feedstock diversity can steady an agricultural input market that has shown, repeatedly, how exposed it still is to energy shocks half a world away. As construction moves forward, the facility will serve as an early test of how coal-derived hydrogen can compete with natural gas as a fertilizer input at commercial scale. When it does, Frontieras will have built more than a single plant — the company will have laid out a domestic alternative for an industry that has few of them.
For more information about Frontieras, visit the company’s website at www.Frontieras.com.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to Frontieras are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/Frontieras
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