A Roadmap for Plasma‐Enabled Electrocatalysis in Urea Production

Abstract

Abstract Conventional Haber–Bosch/Bosch–Meiser routes link global urea production to fossil fuel‐based ammonia, accounting for ≈2% of the world's energy use and ≈1.5% of CO 2 emissions. A modular, fully electrified alternative is charted that cleaves the problem at its natural fault line: a non‐thermal plasma first upgrades air to nitrate, then a CO 2 /NO 3 − co‐electrolyzer stitches the two C─N bonds of urea at ambient conditions. The lens is deliberately cross‐disciplinary: every bottleneck is probed with the question, “Has a cognate field already cracked this?” If so, how can the solution be mirrored here? Plasma physics contributes to vibrational pumping, power modulated reactors, and in water quenching; CO 2 and nitrate electro‐reduction supply relay‐site catalyst design, vacancy tuning, and pulsed‐bias choreography; flow‐battery engineering guides carbonate‐resilient gas‐diffusion electrodes (GDEs) and zero‐gap membrane‐electrode assemblies (MEAs); and analytical chemistry adds two‐probe assays that unmask false‐positive amine/amide signals. Stitching these advances together, techno‐economic modeling shows that sub‐megajoule plasmas, ≥70% urea‐selective in the electrolyzer, and renewable electricity (RE) at ≤3.5¢ kWh −1 can push green urea below the fossil‐based benchmark.