WASHINGTON—U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) closed a loan to support independent, American-made, and coal-powered fertilizer production.

The $1.5 billion loan to Wabash Valley Resources, LLC, will help finance a coal and ammonia fertilizer facility in West Terre Haute, Indiana. The project will restart and repurpose a coal gasification plant idled since 2016 to produce 500,000 metric tons of anhydrous ammonia per year by using coal from a nearby Southern Indiana mine and petcoke as feedstock.

WEST TERRE HAUTE, Ind., September 16, 2024 – In a groundbreaking move to bolster
American agriculture and improve air quality, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs
Office has announced a conditional commitment of a $1.559 billion loan—toward a total
investment of $2.4 billion—to Wabash Valley Resources (WVR), a pioneer in low-carbon
anhydrous ammonia fertilizer production. This historic investment is one of the single largest
efforts to increase the supply of domestically produced fertilizer and displace imported
ammonia supply to the Eastern Corn Belt.

WVR’s innovative approach of utilizing industrial waste in combination with carbon capture
has the potential to be the United States’ first carbon-negative ammonia production process.

Founded in 2016, Wabash uses a byproduct of oil refining to make ammonia and says it has an advantage over competitors because its facility is close to the farms where fertilizer will be used to grow corn. It expects to produce 500,000 metric tons of ammonia a year.

By the time it’s expected to come online in 2026, a West Terre Haute-based fertilizer plant will have the capacity to capture and store as much as 1.65 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, making it one of the largest carbon-sequestration projects in the country.