China’s ‘super catalyst’ turns waste water into fertiliser building block, tripling output

A team from the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has developed a dual-atom catalyst (DAC) that transforms nitrate pollution from agricultural and industrial wastewater into ammonia, the key building block of urea fertilizer. Unlike single-atom catalysts, DACs use two adjacent metal atoms working together to drive complex multi-step reactions. The challenge has been designing stable metal pairs efficiently. Using deep learning, the team trained an AI model to predict metal pairs with high pairing rates, streamlining the trial-and-error process and achieving nearly three times the efficiency of conventional catalysts.

The innovation, published on March 18, 2026, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (front cover), opens the door to a low-energy waste-to-resource technology. By converting pollution into a valuable fertilizer precursor, it could strengthen China's fertilizer supply chain while reducing environmental harm. The AI-guided approach also accelerates discovery of dual-atom catalysts for other reactions, such as converting carbon dioxide. This breakthrough demonstrates how AI can revolutionize materials science for sustainability.