Paris, France, November 4, 2026 — Renaissance Philanthropy’s Chimaera Fund today announced Catalyst: Sub-Saharan Africa at H-NAT 2026. The program will assess geologic data in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria to identify where a small-scale testbed could produce at least 100 tons of hydrogen per year, with the goal of demonstrating a pathway to that output by 2030. While small, that much local hydrogen could reduce costs and import dependence on ammonia for thousands of small farms. The program opens with a public Request for Information (RFI).
Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa import nearly 90% of their fertilizer, at a cost 2 to 15 times higher than U.S. Gulf market prices. That dependence leaves them acutely exposed to geopolitical and energy market disruptions, and the smallholders farthest from ports and rail pay the most.
Producing fertilizer locally could help, but it is constrained by hydrogen availability and upfront capital. The lowest-cost conventional ammonia plants produce more than 2,000 tons per day and cost billions of dollars to build. Making clean hydrogen by splitting water requires significant electricity, which accounts for 50 to 80 percent of the cost of green fertilizer.
Geologic hydrogen could avoid both the cost and the scale problem, but its potential in sub-Saharan Africa remains largely untested and understudied. The only producing field, in Bourakébougou, Mali, has supplied power to a nearby town for more than a decade. Since then, nearly $1 billion has been invested across more than 100 companies working to find and develop new fields. These private-sector efforts are focused on large-scale production, with frontier startups concentrating on lower-risk markets such as the United States, Europe, and Japan. A testbed producing 100 tons of hydrogen per year would be small by industry standards, but it could meet the fertilizer needs of thousands of smallholder farms while de-risking the region’s geology for larger-scale commercial investment.
Three-quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas, and most of them farm, which is why gains in agriculture tend to do more to reduce poverty than growth almost anywhere else. We’re excited to see whether geologic hydrogen could make fertilizer even a little cheaper. Market players have little reason to look for a small, local well, which is exactly the kind of gap our philanthropy is built to fill. We want to find out if the opportunity is real and help accelerate it if it is.
Ishan Sharma · Director, Chimaera Fund
You can read more about the program and respond to the Request for Information here. The Chimaera team will also host virtual webinars on the RFI on November 17 and November 30; register here to attend.
About Renaissance Philanthropy and the Chimaera Fund
Renaissance Philanthropy is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fuel a 21st-century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists, and innovators. The organization builds time-bound, thesis-driven funds, enabling philanthropists and foundations to support ideas that advance entire fields. The Chimaera Fund is a fund of Renaissance Philanthropy that aims to rapidly and responsibly scale geologic hydrogen by the 2030s. Chimaera does not invest in companies. Instead, learning from what unlocked the shale and geothermal industries, the program sponsors three compounding interventions: open-science demonstration wells, coordinated data platforms and breakthrough R&D programs, and effective public policy.
