# Could a fertilizer breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore Lab spark the next Green Revolution? > Source: > Published: 2026-06-28 11:30:30+00:00 **Getting your** [Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...GILROY – Next to seemingly endless rows of bell peppers, sweet corn and leafy greens at B & T Farms stand thousand-gallon drums of nitrogen fertilizer, the cost of which has [increased 125% since 2020](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU325311325311) amid supply shocks and wars around the world. As these costs have trickled down to consumers at grocery stores, an innovation from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seeks to cut California farmers’ reliance on global supply chains with a new type of agricultural alchemy that turns wastewater into nitrogen fertilizer — sometimes called “black gold” in the ag industry. “Whether it was 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, or if it’s this year with the war in Iran, when those imports get disrupted, the cost of fertilizer just skyrockets,” said Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Jeremy Feaster. “That can really break the economics of a farm.” Though the United States is a massive producer of nitrogen fertilizer due to its large natural gas industry, the cost of it is still subject to global market variations. Geopolitical shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic or overseas wars can choke supply chains, create more demand for the limited supply and cause prices to spike, said UC Davis agricultural economist Dan Sumner. That’s especially important for farmers because nitrogen fertilizers serve as a key nutrient for crops that accelerates growth and enhances yields during harvest, Sumner added. Without it, few California crops would produce the yields that farmers need to survive. At B & T Farms, co-owner Paul Mirassou oversees 4,000 acres of crops, from sweet corn and broccoli to poblano peppers and Napa cabbage. He estimated that his operation spends approximately $1 million per year on fertilizer. “If we didn’t have (nitrogen), we’d have a tenth of the yield,” Mirassou said. “We wouldn’t be able to farm.” As critical as nitrogen is to plants’ growth, only half of the nitrogen from applied fertilizer is actually used. The nitrogen that fails to be absorbed by plants ends up as wastewater, where it is unsafe to be consumed by people. But what if there was a process that could reclaim nitrogen and clean wastewater? That’s the question that Feaster asked himself at Site 300, a former bomb-testing site during the Cold War at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The lab’s Environmental Restoration Department had been working to remediate the site and clean groundwater that had been contaminated with nitrates, a nitrogen compound found in bombs. “Being able to remove nitrates from water was a huge challenge for them. The technologies they currently have don’t really work great,” Feaster said. “It kind of sparked our thought, like, ‘What if we were able to concentrate that nitrate and then be able to actually recover it?’” A sample of nitrate-contaminated groundwater from Site 300 was sent to Feaster to test the theory. Feaster applied an electrochemical reactor to the contaminated water sample and turned on the voltage, sparking a targeted chemical reaction that separated the nitrates from the water, he said, mirroring the basic concept of splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gas. After an hour of the reactor’s application, 20% of the nitrates were removed from the contaminated water sample as ammonia, Feaster said, though he added there are diminishing returns after that. Feaster said he is now seeking additional funding to research the continuous application of the electrochemical reactor for a longer period of time, as well as scale up the process to be viable at a commercial farm within the next few years. But the ag industry takes time to adopt new technologies, Sumner said. The “Green Revolution” of the mid-20th century – which ushered in the adoption of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and high-yielding, disease-resistant crops like rice and dwarf wheat – took multiple decades for scientific advances to spread across the globe. Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, the “Father of the Green Revolution,” estimated the agricultural advances in the mid-20th century have saved 1 billion lives from starvation. “It doubled and tripled (yields) and did a lot to completely change the world’s path when it came to food production with massive jumps in the 1960s and 70s,” Sumner said. “And that happened in the blink of an eye for science, which means two or three decades.” “What (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) is talking about is something that may be commercially viable in 2037, not 2027,” Sumner added. Still, Feaster hopes to have a scalable electrochemical reactor for commercial farms within the decade, he said. There is a clear path for the innovation to become immediately cost-competitive with the current production of nitrogen fertilizers. “We want to actually make something that’s impactful,” said Feaster. “The dream is by 2028, we have a working device that’s scaled up to the size where it can actually operate and be able to produce enough fertilizer to grow food and be able to recover nitrogen.”