Every decision with impact in mind
At Windfall Bio, impact is not just a part of our business, it is core to our mission. A necessary feature of creating real impact is developing and executing a profitable business model. Our core strategy is focused on converting currently wasted, low-value methane to high-value organic fertilizer. Windfall’s technology allows this conversion to happen effectively at small scale with significantly less capital requirements than other competing technologies. Coupled with the fact that fertilizer demand is essentially universal, this approach creates a highly scalable business model that can rapidly grow to global beneficial impacts.
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Reducing methane emissions to the atmosphere, thereby reducing global warming and climate change.
Creating domestic sources of organic fertilizer production, thereby improving local food security especially in developing countries.
Displacing use of synthetic fertilizers, resulting in improved local soil, water, and air quality.
Creating additional sources of revenue and efficiency for a variety of industries to support local economies and quality of life.
Why is Windfall focused on methane?
Methane, despite accounting for less than 1% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by mass, is responsible for over a third of global warming to date. On a 20-year timescale, methane is 86x more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. As of 2024, annual global methane emissions are estimated at .58 gigatons (GT) or 50 GT CO₂e, including emissions from natural and anthropogenic sources. Importantly, because of methane’s short lifetime in the atmosphere and outsized impact on warming, mitigation of methane emissions represents the fastest and most cost-effective method to have immediate impacts on global warming.
To effectively mitigate methane at scale, we need flexible and profitable solutions that can address methane across the full concentration spectrum—from 98% (e.g., natural gas) to 2ppm (e.g., atmospheric concentration)—and across both anthropogenic sources (e.g., oil & gas, landfills, agriculture) and natural sources (e.g wetlands). Nature based technologies (such as Windfall Bio’s mems) are uniquely capable of capturing methane at a range of concentrations, making them an ideal approach. Mems are naturally-occurring microbes that consume methane as a source of food, capturing the energy from the methane and using it to produce nitrogen-rich biomass that serves as a valuable organic fertilizer.
Why is Windfall focused on fertilizer?
Due to the growing human population, agriculture and food production have risen steadily over the past few centuries. Modern agriculture has far outstripped the capability of normal soils to support, and farmers depend heavily on the use of fertilizers to supply needed food to people around the world. Today, the vast majority of fertilizer is produced by the Haber-Bosch process, which results in approximately 240 million tons of synthetic ammonia per year. While critical for nations’ food security, synthetic ammonia-based fertilizers also have significant downsides.
The highly soluble nature of ammonia causes generally less than 50% of the nitrogen in these fertilizers to be absorbed by crops, with the remainder lost to the environment through leaching, volatilization or runoff. The consequences of this excess nitrogen include degradation of long-term soil quality and microbiomes, algae blooms and marine dead zones in downstream waterways, and production of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with warming potential 265 times greater than carbon dioxide. As one example, nitrogen losses from farms in the mid-Western United States cause an estimated $2.4 billion in annual damage to Gulf fisheries and marine habitats.
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Windfall’s Commitment
As we scale Windfall Bio’s nature-based solution to transform waste methane to fertilizer, we are committed to transparently reporting the impact of operations and efforts through this annual impact report.
This inaugural impact report outlines the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Windfall Bio will use to track progress and hold ourselves accountable in the years ahead. Importantly, we are sharing both what we know and what we are still learning. Where available, we present quantitative data on metrics like GHG emissions, employee diversity, and product carbon intensity. We are also committed to measuring the company’s overall impact through total methane captured and fertilizer produced. We will report best estimates of impacts in areas where data is currently developing. This report is a commitment to transparency and a roadmap for our future impact.