The Center for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production (CASFER) is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. CASFER brings together a diverse leadership and the convergence of a multidisciplinary team drawn from Texas Tech University, Florida A&M University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Case Western Reserve University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Center is headquarted, here, at Texas Tech University under the Institute for Sustainability and Circular Economy in the Maddox Engineering Research Center. 

CASFER's Vision

The CASFER vision is to enable resilient and sustainable food production by developing next generation, modular, distributed, and efficient technology for capturing, recycling, and producing decarbonized nitrogen-based fertilizers (NBFs).

CASFER's Mission

CASFER is developing a transformative, engineered system that takes the US from nitrogen cycle pollution to a Nitrogen Circular Economy, allowing food production while mitigating environmental and socioeconomic problems.

More than 50% of the world population is supported by synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizers (NBFs), produced via the carbon-intensive Haber-Bosch process. However, the high volatility of prices remains a challenge in the US and developing countries.

Furthermore, only 20% of NBFs produced translate into food, with 80% lost to the environment. This creates significant environmental, health, and socioeconomic impacts.

CASFER's engineered system takes activated nitrogen from waste streams such as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTP), and agricultural runoff, capture, and convert them into precise NBF, passing them directly to the end users/farmers.

 

 

Contact CASFER

CASFER Website: casfer.us

CASFER Email: casfer@ttu.edu 

CASFER Address: 

Maddox Engineering Research Center

Office 209

1010 Boston Ave, Lubbock, TX 79409