Green Chemistry Challenge: 2024 Specific Environmental Benefit—Climate Change

PhoSul^®

PhoSul^® is being recognized for developing enhanced phosphate rock fertilizer, which avoids hazards associated with traditional phosphate fertilizer production and improves performance compared to existing rock fertilizers. Phosphate fertilizers improve crop health and yield but need to be in specific forms to be usable by plants. Currently, usable phosphate is produced from phosphorus-containing rock, which must be processed with strong acids, creating a waste (gypsum) that is contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive material from the raw material. PhoSul has developed a method to use phosphate rock directly by enhancing it with other materials, avoiding the need for acid processing and the associated wastes.

Summary of Technology

PhoSul^® has developed an enhanced phosphate rock fertilizer, which avoids hazards associated with traditional phosphate fertilizers, while showing significantly better performance than existing phosphate rock fertilizers. PhoSul’s fertilizer consists of spherical granules of phosphate rock with other materials that improve phosphate availability for plants. The additional materials allow the tricalcium phosphate in the phosphate rock, which is not available to plants, to be converted into available forms in the soil. This avoids traditional phosphate processing in chemical plants, where strong acids like sulfuric acid are used to convert the tricalcium phosphate into a usable form. Acid processing generates hazardous gypsum waste, which contains concentrated heavy metals and radionucleides from the phosphate rock and can release fluorine into the atmosphere in fluorine-containing gasses such as hydrofluoric acid. Further, PhoSul minimizes phosphate leaching in the field, eliminating phosphate runoff and its associated ecological damage.

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