Yes, it is nothing like 2022 yet. But the concerning thing is that this may be just a beginning of a protracted event, plus the world, and especially Western Europe, is less resilient today to the disruptions in gas supply.
One of those is an absolute value (urea $) and one is a rate of change (food price inflation). Maybe I’m being dumb, but why are they tracking almost 1:1, both with linear Y axis?
I can compare Urea $ to Crude Oil $ and get an even closer 5 year correlation. Are we actually indexing against something else here?
Edit: that is, perhaps urea prices are driven mostly by energy costs, which in turn drives inflation rates.
Yes. Nat gas -> ammonia -> urea. Theres some efficiencies that vary by site but its a hundred year old process of a true commodity. The price per therm _is_ the input.
Was listening to a fertilizer analyst the other day. She thought corn:urea was the better comparison. Nitrogen is the cost of marginal yields. And corn:urea shows the farmer being squeezed between their commodity output price and the required input cost. At some point its just not cost effective to grow corn, so you go soy, and reduced supply should pish up future prices. Oh look! More commodity price inflation pressure!
And that was specifically due to the (ongoing) Russian Invasion of Ukraine. After the 2022 spike, most large countries began building alternative supply chains to reduce impacts from these kinds of hits.
For example, the US and Europe largely doesn't use urea unlike Brazil, India, and China.
This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.
Edit: can't reply
> Is it really hydrogen energy if your plan for the hydrogen gas is turning it into ammonia? Would give you another use for it, I suppose
The whole point of building a hydrogen energy market is becuase hydrogen electrolyzers are dual use, and the methodology to leverage and produce "green" ammonia is similar to "green" hydrogen.
A non-LNG method to mass produce ammonia has always been called out in most countries Hydrogen energy roadmaps such as Japan [0], China [1], and India [2].
A lot of the hate for hydrogen is for a vehicle fuel where it's strictly inferior to batteries, partly because it's such a pain to handle, and partly because it's a "submarine" for natural gas derived H2.
Evolving hydrogen from electrolysis and then immediately turning it into ammonia is a much better idea; ammonia is easier to handle than H2 gas and already has a market.
The Economist was recently citing hydrogen as "deep tech" [1] (meaning long R&D cycles, sometimes unproven techniology no short term profitability, heavy investment, industry-wide transformative power).
Most of your sources have plans focused on hydrogen production, but I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers. There are some in the Hydrogen Roadmap Europe, but it seems focused on transportation [2].
> I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers
It's primarily in Asia and North Africa. For example, India has begun building a 7GW green hydrogen project specifically for urea production [0] and as a technical demonstration. An Egypt-Germany-Norway JV is also expected to be completed by 2027 explicitly for this usecase [1]
There were plans to build a hydrogen plant near Whyalla in South Australia, a famous steel-making site; see e.g. [1]. The tl;dr uses were export (I expected ammonia but the whole thing was vague enough to include hydrogen) on boats, reduction of iron ore ("decarbonisation", apparently requires magnetite) and while all the financial engineering that didn't happen was going to happen, energy storage for the grid, soaking up S.A.'s over-abundant solar.
Someone observed that this was the entirety of the presently-outgoing (but sure to be re-elected) state regime's story about reducing electricity bills in the state.
2022 was abnormally high, caused largely by the disruption of gas supplies to Western Europe after sanctions on Russian gas and the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipeline.
Really interesting. It made me curious to dig in and learn that urea production starts with natural gas. And if you add natural gas to the chart as well urea and natural gas prices generally track together without a lag either way, except natural gas doesn't have the recent uptick seen in urea.
I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply?
> I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply
One of India's SOEs recently paused Urea production at some plants due to NatGas issues from the ongoing conflict [0].
Additonally, India began reducing purchasing of Russian LNG in late 2025.
India also launched a tender to purchase urea on the global market in February [1].
This led to a double whammy for urea in the short term given how Indian agriculture is heavily Urea dependent (around 70-80% of all fertilizers used in India are Urea).
But the same SOE recently announced it's restarted operations earlier today [2] and India has restarted spot purchases of what appears to be Russian LNG [3][4] that was originally destined for Europe (especially Hungary and Slovakia).
Edit: can't reply
I'm not a god damn LLM and I do not use AI to write my comments. If you can't engage with an argument, then fuck off.
Not sure which natural gas that’s referencing, but looks to be a US index (Henry Hub or so) - note the peak corresponds to a cold snap, not the Iran war. Natgas is tricky because it’s: difficult to store and difficult to transport (aside from well-established pipelines), so you have a massively disjointed market between various deliver markets (look at NY Henry Hub vs Dutch TTF), and also a massively disjointed market between delivery delivery dates (natgas calendar spread trades has been nicknamed “widowmakers”)
1. if you’re a natgas producing country with lots of farms (hi USA and Canada) , your mega farm is probably injecting ammonia directly into soil as its nitrogen source, not urea. Pdf pg10, labelled pg5: https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/pub...
80-90% of US nitrogen fertilization is ammonia (because it’s almost entirely nitrogen and the rest are bonded to heavier molecules than hydrogen).
And much of it gets applied in the fall, not spring
2. Nitrogen fertilizer varies by crop. Beans crops (soy, kidney beans, chickpeas) fixate their own nitrogen and have zero/minimal applied. Corn and grains, particularly the higher protein varieties need among the most applied.
3. If you like to eat farmed land animals, you’re going to have a bad time from high fertilizer prices. Of traditional edibles: cattle is going to be the worst impacted. Chicken the least. Pork is in the middle. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2022/03/feed-conv...
I don't know if I agree with their conclusion on #3, beef is fed 90% alfalfa grass which is literally cheaper than dirt and fixates its own nitrogen. Yeah they eat more feed per pound of meat, but alfalfa is literally the cheapest and easiest crop to grow. Sow it, mow it, bail it, now you have good ground to plant grains in without artificial fertilizer next year. You only feed cows grains during their last month to finish them to increase marbling/fat content.
If you produce less beef, you grow less alfalfa, and you end up using more artificial fertilizer which might even raise grain prices.
Funnily enough, leather tanners and pee is where the terms "piss poor" (being so poor that you need to sell your pee to tanners for cash) and "doesn't have a pot to piss in" (can't even afford a thing to hold your pee to bring to tanners) came from.
The nitrogen cycle can be short-circuited really easily at scale.
No need to wait for algal blooms to turn into oil.
Its usage in tanning is pretty wasteful in comparison as it was just used for its high pH and presumably thrown away afterwards.
Getting only the urea-rich golden liquid might require some coöperation like back in the day, but it is idiotic to synthesize ammonia from oil without recycling the vast amounts we have in our bladders; a mistake we have been committing for the past 100 years.
We have known how to do it for a long time, the problem is the energy cost. It takes 10x as much electrical power to produce fertilizer without fossil fuels as an input, and fertilizer production already consumes 1% of total world energy output. So to decarbonize it we need to increase worldwide electrical output by atleast 10% to cover the energy requirements, and it has to be all done with clean energy. Because otherwise you lose 70% of that energy in the fuel-electricity conversion, while the direct fossil fuel to fertilizer conversion is much more efficient.
It does need to be done, but to me it seems like it should be a second priority after not just cleaning up electrical production but increasing electrical production overall.
There are probably some efficiency gains to be made in synthesizing fertilizer from the air, but as far as I can tell there is limited room for improvements because creating nitrogen from air is basically the same thing as creating fuel from the air and that energy has to come from somewhere.
I am rather pessimistic. Unless petroleum prices go really bonkers, efuels are in for a rough few years. The synthesized fuels required cheap energy and benefited from subsidies while they are still optimizing the technology.
Energy use in the country has been basically flat for decades, so the increasing glut of renewables seemed well timed to allow for siphoning off that free mid-day power. Cue massive data center build out, and prices have massively shot up and blown the economics of efuels apart.
You additionally have an administration which hates anything done by Biden and/or alternative energies, so the bountiful incentives for such programs are/will be neutered.
There is no stopping the ultimate carbon free transition, but the stars really need to align to see any meaningful amount of synthetic generation to happen soon.
Saw posters on /r/Truckers complaining that truck stops were taking advantage of situation to gouge for DEF too on top of diesel before someone pointed out that Iran is the second largest producer of urea, the primary component of DEF. They are not happy right now with $5.00 / gal fuel and higher DEF as well.
Worried the administration will use it as an excuse to rollback NOx emissions regulations that mandated DEF usage in diesel engines. They are already not enforcing "deletes" of the emissions systems which is a federal crime.
There are three main emissions control systems in diesels, the Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR), Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) and Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) which uses Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF).
Any or all can be "deleted" and is a crime to do so. All 3 systems add complexity and potentially reduce performance which is why those who don't care about emissions like to get rid of them.
Before DEF NOx regulations steadily went up engine manufacturers relied on increasing amounts of EGR to control NOx until it was not tenable, once DEF systems where implemented they could back off EGR increasing performance but not as much as ripping it all out and tuning for no care of emissions.
There are EGR free engines that rely entirely on DEF to control NOx but they are not for on-road use in the US thus far.
Of course, but mostly it's just recirculation that causes costly engine rebuilds. If it wasn't so expensive no one would delete.
Most regulations target emissions at point of sale but don't give a toss if such systems are practical or maintainable. It's sometimes better for the environment to have more emissions but not so much waste from having to buy a new thing more frequently.
I've got a 2011 BMW X5 diesel with 189k miles on it. The DPF went out at around 150k, which is roughly the expected lifetime from my understanding. The part alone is ~$4000. Regardless of living in CA, I'd have replaced it anyway because I think it's the right thing to do. (I didn't want a non-DPF diesel that was emitting lots of PM2.5s when I made my purchase).
That said, many people would prefer the money in their bank account. And if I had decided to sell it rather than fix, no doubt it would have gone to someone looking to delete the DPF.
The diesel particulate filter (DPF) forces the engine to burn more fuel periodically in order to burn off the particles in the filter. The net result is more CO2 than would be produced ordinarily.
I watched some farming videos, and the farmers calculate the hourly cost of their combine, it's in the 100's of dollars per hour. They hate it when the engine goes into the regen cycle, and they are forced to let the engine run.
No the DEF systems tend to break down and its mandated the engine go into limp mode when they do, this is hated by those that do not care for emissions and one of the biggest reason to delete by truckers. Also costly to fix the systems out of warranty.
You can find instructions on how to make DEF simulators using raspi's to fool the ECU into think the DEF system is working, people who do care about emissions will still carry these for emergency so they continue on their trip and get to a shop later. The derate was over zealous for sure and was a bad policy.
Also DPF is a performance issue since it blocks the exhaust to some degree, same with catalytic converter with def nozzle so no its not just EGR at all. DPF also consumes more fuel for regens.
2027 diesel regulations was to mandate even more NOx control but also specified manufacturers were required to have 100,000 mile 10 year warranty on emissions systems, its 5 year, 50k now. I believe thats dead in the water now.
A diesel engine with a deleted SCR system puts out 40 times the NOx of a working one. Thats 40 trucks going down the road to 1 equivalent. NOx causes asthma and acid rain, its not for the environment as much as for you directly.
And what percent of diesel emissions are from diesel passenger vehicles?
Emissions reduction efforts would be better spent ensuring repairability. The sunk cost emissions of landfills filled with junk created by planned obsolescence is much worse.
Diesel pick ups are not practical vehicles. Let's be honest, it's a hobby. It's always going to be niche and cutting down the last 10% is always the hardest. General aviation still uses lead.
Not sure what your point is, I was talking primarily about Class 8 heavy duty commercial trucks (semi) and other medium duty commercial use.
All the stuff that makes up emissions gear is highly recyclable and in fact some of it very desirable which is why people are getting catalytic converters stolen. So I do not worry about it filling up a land fill.
I also don't worry about EV batteries filling landfills because again they are very high grade ore for new batteries, once we have enough in circulation we no longer need to mine much lithium or rare earth.
I agree it should be reliable and repairable and forcing the manufacturers to have very long warranties on it seems like a good way to do that, having followed the various generations of DEF systems for the last decade the manufacturers have been making big strides because it costs them otherwise and has.
I also think airplanes using lead is stupid, but that is a fraction of even private diesel pickup usage let alone commercial trucking. Diesel pickups are at least 10% of all pickup sales now days.
It's not that you cant recycle emissions equipment, it's that mechanically totalling and landfillimg cars once they hit 10 years old and are no longer supported by the OEM is stupid and environmentally detrimental.
Take appliances for example, the government basically mandates that they're energy efficient but the new linear compressors break. Cars got more efficient by tightening tolerances. There's always going to be an engineering tradeoff between reliability and efficiency. I just think the environmentalist types have been laser focused on creating efficient by non durable products that fill landfills.
I'm worried about South Asia - between this and the immediate impact of LPG availability, the coming months and years seem scary - I don't see the strait returning to "risk-free" transit for years (not months) after this war. lettsss goooo $8/gallon gas for the rest of admin.
On another hand, everybody (or at least I want to believe) in the region knew in the back of their mind that the whole situation was a powder keg with a short fuse, and should have done more to diversify energy sources beforehand.
Excellent in-depth article and it's 6 years old. If this gets solved it will be a very big deal.
We found a way to turn urine into solid fertiliser – it could make farming more sustainable
https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-way-to-turn-urine-int...
350 was late last year. The text at the top of the linked page says prices are up about 30% over the past month. Directly prior to the war starting the price was about 470
American Urea production is orthogonal to LNG production in the Gulf - most American NatGas is sourced domestically, from Canada, or the Carribean [0].
This will be a shock, but mostly in Asia where LNG is dependent on Gulf sourcing, but most of the larger Asian countries began investing in building alternative supply chains and the financial buffer to ride out these kinds of shocks.
This isn't the first system shock to have happened in the past 5 years - the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a similar shock, and larger countries began building redundancies as a result.
You will see this in the graph linked above as well - urea prices are well below their 2022-23 peaks.
Additionally, the North American farming uses significantly less urea than other countries [1]
Most of the worlds bio fuel that we use to reduce emission in transportation comes from crops farmed to be turned into bio fuel. How will the increase in LNG then do to the price of bio fuels?
Very simplified: farming and distillation is so extremely energy intensive, it's not clear whether producing one ton of bio ethanol fuel consumes more or less than one ton of diesel (or equivalent).
So producing bio ethanol is not a sustainability/ecology thing, it mostly gives farmers something to do.
If you wanted to save CO2 you'd slap solar panels on the fields instead of growing corn or whatever. Plants are rather bad at capturing solar energy and they need fertilizer and pesticides to grow and diesel to be planted and harvested. Then you lose a good part of the energy the plant captured until you have a product that you can burn in an engine.
With solar panels you get like 20x the energy out and you can have a meadow with high biodiversity around the panels. Growing a nice little forest, maybe with a couple of wind turbines in it if the location is windy, would probably also save more CO2.
That will depend country to country. The US doesn't use urea to the same degree that Brazil, India, and China do. And Brazil (just like the US) doesn't rely on NatGas from the Gulf.
It's mostly China and India that are impacted, but both have the Russian option.
This isn't our first rodeo with elevated urea and NatGas prices - the same thing happened during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (and is reflected in the same dataset OP linked).
This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.
It's not automatically obvious. There could (theoretically) be domestic gas fields that are solely supplying pipeline "islands" (connected to domestic gas powerplants and fertilizer factories) under long-running contracts. Those should/would be more stable in price, since liquefying that gas and selling it elsewhere would not be trivial.
But in reality, that's not the case for any large US gas fields. They are all connected to the national pipeline "grid", and their gas can go wherever it is most expensive right now.
But it's the case for e.g. many Russian gas fields. They are much more segmented, and they have nowhere close to the liquefaction infrastructure necessary to export a significant fraction of their total output on LNG carriers.
> For use in industry, urea is produced from synthetic ammonia and carbon dioxide. As large quantities of carbon dioxide are produced during the ammonia manufacturing process as a byproduct of burning hydrocarbons to generate heat (predominantly natural gas, and less often petroleum derivatives or coal), urea production plants are almost always located adjacent to the site where the ammonia is manufactured.
To be clear, the CO2 is captured from the fuel burned in producing the ammonia?
No, capturing CO2 from combustion is hard. Ammonia plants might burn methane for heat, but they don't capture its output.
The actual Haber–Bosch process for reaction directly spits methane into Hydrogen (which is combined with Nitrogen from the air) leaving CO2 as a byproduct.
The resulting CO2 is relatively pure, and it's already captured. You can feed it into anther process (such as Urea) or sell it for carbonisation of drinks.
> The resulting CO2 is relatively pure, and it's already captured. You can feed it into anther process (such as Urea) or sell it for carbonisation of drinks.
Makes for a pretty good refrigerant as well (R-744):
If possible that would seem ideal, however we don't exactly have tons of excess fossil fuel free methane just sitting around waiting to be used, atleast compared to the absolutely massive amount of fertilizer we need to produce to feed farmland. And if you are eliminating the fossil fuel from production, you might as well eliminate the methane component too and produce hydrogen on-site from water.
The main problem is just the energy cost because ammonia and urea both contain an ass ton of energy, 90% of which is coming from the the fossil fuel sourced methane. 1% of total world electrical production already goes into fertilizer production, and eliminating the fossil fuel component increases energy requirements near 10x over.
I had understood that e.g. landfill methane capture was this promising new (and cheap) idea that people just aren't executing because of a lack of political will. Is it not so straightforward?
To be honest, the Fell for it again award goes to a lot of voters across the world. It has become a routine part of politics. What is fascinating is how confidently repeating almost any claim, over and over, is often enough to make people eventually believe it.
"He wouldn’t have lied to us"
For the core of his base certainly, but he can't win with just them, it's not enough. He won because of the median voter that was mad at the incumbent party for inflation.
You know what else will blow your mind? Mass media excusing Trump from blame, followed by a good Republican showing in the midterms. Trump will be the only president to escape punishment for inflation. Mark my words.
The administration didn't even bother manufacturing consent this time and yet the media is acting like they did during the Iraq war. Democratic leaders are weakly pretending like they opposed the war but they really stalled the war powers resolution so it would happen before they forced the vote. Now they get to spend the first half of their statements condemning Iran and the second half weakly protesting about procedural issues and lack of an "exit strategy".
> administration didn't even bother manufacturing consent this time and yet the media is acting like they did
Which might suggest holes in Chomsky’s hypotheses.
> they really stalled the war powers resolution so it would happen before they forced the vote
The war’s timeline was moved back so materiel could be relocated and moved up because of Khamenei’s meeting. Democrats don’t control the Supreme Leader’s calendar.
This was an opportunistic war of choice pursued by one man. Partisan politics mean anything he does will be popular with Republicans and hated by Democrats, with all the electoral action happening at their margins while all the rhetoric is dominated by their cores. (The polling on this war isn’t black and white, either.)
It’s tempting to try and shoehorn this into one of the old narratives about there being a master plan. But sometimes nobody has a plan, they just sort of have a vibe.
This was an opportunistic war of choice pursued by one man
Completely agree. My problem is with his use of the entire nation's war fighting system and materials. We should at least have our elected representatives vote, after the Senate deliberates. None of that happened as you note. One guy, one vibe, one nation.
I expect a very bad showing for Republicans in the midterms. They will almost certainly lose the House, and it's actually becoming possible that they will lose the Senate (which seemed laughable to even consider a year ago).
It's really not about them "believing" it. They tend to "believe" any new reality they are presented with if given by the "right" person. And they will just as quickly discard those "beliefs" if they are told something different by the "right" person. Trump is that person for them right now. Ultimately there is no value that "conservatives" aren't willing to abandon other than maintaining the hierarchy. Everything else seems to be in service to that end. They fight hardest when new groups are receiving rights they didn't previously enjoy. It's never been about "fiscal responsibility". It's never been about "small government" or "states rights". They are quite happy to abandon all of those if a trans person might be be able to use a bathroom in peace.
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
~ Maya Angelou
I tried an experiment a few years back. I peed into a small bucket and watered my curry leaf plant with it, not realizing that it need to be diluted. The plant "died" within a few weeks. I just left the pot and plant be. A few weeks later it started sprotuing again and that was the healthiest curry leaf plant I had ever seen. It had leaves double the size and it grew so fast that we had to give away curry leaves to neighbours
Yes urea is used in fertilizer. Yes, the price is going up relative to May 13, 2024 (lowest in 5 years).
look at the chart in the article, then click 5Y on the bottom of the chart.
Click the + sign between the calendar and wrench icon
Type in "US Food inflation". It will overlay the "urea" price with the "US food inflation".
Yes, urea seems to be a leading indicator. It is nothing like in 2022, yet.
Yes, it is nothing like 2022 yet. But the concerning thing is that this may be just a beginning of a protracted event, plus the world, and especially Western Europe, is less resilient today to the disruptions in gas supply.
One of those is an absolute value (urea $) and one is a rate of change (food price inflation). Maybe I’m being dumb, but why are they tracking almost 1:1, both with linear Y axis?
I can compare Urea $ to Crude Oil $ and get an even closer 5 year correlation. Are we actually indexing against something else here?
Edit: that is, perhaps urea prices are driven mostly by energy costs, which in turn drives inflation rates.
Yes. Nat gas -> ammonia -> urea. Theres some efficiencies that vary by site but its a hundred year old process of a true commodity. The price per therm _is_ the input.
Was listening to a fertilizer analyst the other day. She thought corn:urea was the better comparison. Nitrogen is the cost of marginal yields. And corn:urea shows the farmer being squeezed between their commodity output price and the required input cost. At some point its just not cost effective to grow corn, so you go soy, and reduced supply should pish up future prices. Oh look! More commodity price inflation pressure!
> 2022
And that was specifically due to the (ongoing) Russian Invasion of Ukraine. After the 2022 spike, most large countries began building alternative supply chains to reduce impacts from these kinds of hits.
For example, the US and Europe largely doesn't use urea unlike Brazil, India, and China.
This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.
Edit: can't reply
> Is it really hydrogen energy if your plan for the hydrogen gas is turning it into ammonia? Would give you another use for it, I suppose
The whole point of building a hydrogen energy market is becuase hydrogen electrolyzers are dual use, and the methodology to leverage and produce "green" ammonia is similar to "green" hydrogen.
A non-LNG method to mass produce ammonia has always been called out in most countries Hydrogen energy roadmaps such as Japan [0], China [1], and India [2].
[0] - https://grjapan.com/sites/default/files/content/articles/fil...
[1] - https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2022/09/china...
[2] - https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/1033081/...
A lot of the hate for hydrogen is for a vehicle fuel where it's strictly inferior to batteries, partly because it's such a pain to handle, and partly because it's a "submarine" for natural gas derived H2.
Evolving hydrogen from electrolysis and then immediately turning it into ammonia is a much better idea; ammonia is easier to handle than H2 gas and already has a market.
The Economist was recently citing hydrogen as "deep tech" [1] (meaning long R&D cycles, sometimes unproven techniology no short term profitability, heavy investment, industry-wide transformative power).
Most of your sources have plans focused on hydrogen production, but I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers. There are some in the Hydrogen Roadmap Europe, but it seems focused on transportation [2].
[1] - https://www.economist.com/business/2026/03/01/at-last-reason... [2] - https://www.clean-hydrogen.europa.eu/media/publications/hydr...
> I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers
It's primarily in Asia and North Africa. For example, India has begun building a 7GW green hydrogen project specifically for urea production [0] and as a technical demonstration. An Egypt-Germany-Norway JV is also expected to be completed by 2027 explicitly for this usecase [1]
[0] - https://fuelcellsworks.com/2026/02/04/fuel-cells/india-s-7gw...
[1] - https://www.thyssenkrupp.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/pres...
Is it really hydrogen energy if your plan for the hydrogen gas is turning it into ammonia?
Would give you another use for it, I suppose.
There were plans to build a hydrogen plant near Whyalla in South Australia, a famous steel-making site; see e.g. [1]. The tl;dr uses were export (I expected ammonia but the whole thing was vague enough to include hydrogen) on boats, reduction of iron ore ("decarbonisation", apparently requires magnetite) and while all the financial engineering that didn't happen was going to happen, energy storage for the grid, soaking up S.A.'s over-abundant solar.
Someone observed that this was the entirety of the presently-outgoing (but sure to be re-elected) state regime's story about reducing electricity bills in the state.
[1] https://research.csiro.au/hyresource/south-australian-govern...
It looks like it's been pretty stable for three years, after what looks like a spike in the end of 2021.
I can't see past 5Y without paying, so I don't know if the past three years was an abnormal low, or if that's the regular cost.
2022 was abnormally high, caused largely by the disruption of gas supplies to Western Europe after sanctions on Russian gas and the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipeline.
:( Food is already so expensive in Canada. It doesn’t seem like it ever recovered after 2022.
Really interesting. It made me curious to dig in and learn that urea production starts with natural gas. And if you add natural gas to the chart as well urea and natural gas prices generally track together without a lag either way, except natural gas doesn't have the recent uptick seen in urea.
I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply?
Or it's just noise \_(ツ)_/
> I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply
One of India's SOEs recently paused Urea production at some plants due to NatGas issues from the ongoing conflict [0].
Additonally, India began reducing purchasing of Russian LNG in late 2025.
India also launched a tender to purchase urea on the global market in February [1].
This led to a double whammy for urea in the short term given how Indian agriculture is heavily Urea dependent (around 70-80% of all fertilizers used in India are Urea).
But the same SOE recently announced it's restarted operations earlier today [2] and India has restarted spot purchases of what appears to be Russian LNG [3][4] that was originally destined for Europe (especially Hungary and Slovakia).
Edit: can't reply
I'm not a god damn LLM and I do not use AI to write my comments. If you can't engage with an argument, then fuck off.
[0] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/gas-shortage-halts-...
[1] - https://www.rfdtv.com/india-urea-tender-tightens-global-fert...
[2] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/bathinda/nfl-bathinda-plan...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-securing-addit...
[4] - https://interfax.com/newsroom/top-stories/116517/
[flagged]
What is a WITCH or AFS?
[flagged]
Not sure which natural gas that’s referencing, but looks to be a US index (Henry Hub or so) - note the peak corresponds to a cold snap, not the Iran war. Natgas is tricky because it’s: difficult to store and difficult to transport (aside from well-established pipelines), so you have a massively disjointed market between various deliver markets (look at NY Henry Hub vs Dutch TTF), and also a massively disjointed market between delivery delivery dates (natgas calendar spread trades has been nicknamed “widowmakers”)
So a couple things:
1. if you’re a natgas producing country with lots of farms (hi USA and Canada) , your mega farm is probably injecting ammonia directly into soil as its nitrogen source, not urea. Pdf pg10, labelled pg5: https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/pub...
80-90% of US nitrogen fertilization is ammonia (because it’s almost entirely nitrogen and the rest are bonded to heavier molecules than hydrogen).
Ammonia prices always have big geographic variations because it’s a pain to ship a hazardous gas versus liquids or solids. https://businessanalytiq.com/procurementanalytics/index/ammo...
And much of it gets applied in the fall, not spring
2. Nitrogen fertilizer varies by crop. Beans crops (soy, kidney beans, chickpeas) fixate their own nitrogen and have zero/minimal applied. Corn and grains, particularly the higher protein varieties need among the most applied.
3. If you like to eat farmed land animals, you’re going to have a bad time from high fertilizer prices. Of traditional edibles: cattle is going to be the worst impacted. Chicken the least. Pork is in the middle. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2022/03/feed-conv...
I don't know if I agree with their conclusion on #3, beef is fed 90% alfalfa grass which is literally cheaper than dirt and fixates its own nitrogen. Yeah they eat more feed per pound of meat, but alfalfa is literally the cheapest and easiest crop to grow. Sow it, mow it, bail it, now you have good ground to plant grains in without artificial fertilizer next year. You only feed cows grains during their last month to finish them to increase marbling/fat content.
If you produce less beef, you grow less alfalfa, and you end up using more artificial fertilizer which might even raise grain prices.
I wondered about the prevalence of this in Europe: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cultivation-area-of-alfa...
Looks like Ireland is mostly grass-fed and it's southern Europe which has significant alfafa growth. I don't think I've ever seen it in the UK.
My first thought from this is that (if my napkin math is right) I'm apparently pissing away a penny a day.
There was a time when leather tanners used to collect the urine from bars - I guess the tanners paid for it.
Funnily enough, leather tanners and pee is where the terms "piss poor" (being so poor that you need to sell your pee to tanners for cash) and "doesn't have a pot to piss in" (can't even afford a thing to hold your pee to bring to tanners) came from.
The given origins for these phrases seem to be considered a modern myth:
https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2019/07/a-pot-to-piss-in.html
https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/piss-poor-pot-t...
Serves me right for collecting facts from Instagram memes.
The nitrogen cycle can be short-circuited really easily at scale.
No need to wait for algal blooms to turn into oil.
Its usage in tanning is pretty wasteful in comparison as it was just used for its high pH and presumably thrown away afterwards.
Getting only the urea-rich golden liquid might require some coöperation like back in the day, but it is idiotic to synthesize ammonia from oil without recycling the vast amounts we have in our bladders; a mistake we have been committing for the past 100 years.
Adding to PlunderBunny, the Romans also used urine collected from public toilets to make detergents to whiten clothes.
Yeah, unless you’re a growing person, that’s where it all goes (depending on the bioavailability of your protein).
Sooner rather than later we need to decarbonize fertilizer production. Maybe this will speed the process up a bit.
We have known how to do it for a long time, the problem is the energy cost. It takes 10x as much electrical power to produce fertilizer without fossil fuels as an input, and fertilizer production already consumes 1% of total world energy output. So to decarbonize it we need to increase worldwide electrical output by atleast 10% to cover the energy requirements, and it has to be all done with clean energy. Because otherwise you lose 70% of that energy in the fuel-electricity conversion, while the direct fossil fuel to fertilizer conversion is much more efficient.
It does need to be done, but to me it seems like it should be a second priority after not just cleaning up electrical production but increasing electrical production overall.
There are probably some efficiency gains to be made in synthesizing fertilizer from the air, but as far as I can tell there is limited room for improvements because creating nitrogen from air is basically the same thing as creating fuel from the air and that energy has to come from somewhere.
Indeed, I did some work on that with regards to renewable ammonia production, interesting field to look into if you're curious
Resources on the topic you would recommend?
I am rather pessimistic. Unless petroleum prices go really bonkers, efuels are in for a rough few years. The synthesized fuels required cheap energy and benefited from subsidies while they are still optimizing the technology.
Energy use in the country has been basically flat for decades, so the increasing glut of renewables seemed well timed to allow for siphoning off that free mid-day power. Cue massive data center build out, and prices have massively shot up and blown the economics of efuels apart.
You additionally have an administration which hates anything done by Biden and/or alternative energies, so the bountiful incentives for such programs are/will be neutered.
There is no stopping the ultimate carbon free transition, but the stars really need to align to see any meaningful amount of synthetic generation to happen soon.
Saw posters on /r/Truckers complaining that truck stops were taking advantage of situation to gouge for DEF too on top of diesel before someone pointed out that Iran is the second largest producer of urea, the primary component of DEF. They are not happy right now with $5.00 / gal fuel and higher DEF as well.
Worried the administration will use it as an excuse to rollback NOx emissions regulations that mandated DEF usage in diesel engines. They are already not enforcing "deletes" of the emissions systems which is a federal crime.
Here's a trucker explaining other costs of the unnecessary Iran war.
https://youtu.be/BtAZ1jAV57s
The deletes are for recirculation systems not DEF. Recirculation was always a bad idea and anyone who wants diesel for some reason should use DEF.
There are three main emissions control systems in diesels, the Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR), Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) and Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) which uses Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF).
Any or all can be "deleted" and is a crime to do so. All 3 systems add complexity and potentially reduce performance which is why those who don't care about emissions like to get rid of them.
Before DEF NOx regulations steadily went up engine manufacturers relied on increasing amounts of EGR to control NOx until it was not tenable, once DEF systems where implemented they could back off EGR increasing performance but not as much as ripping it all out and tuning for no care of emissions.
There are EGR free engines that rely entirely on DEF to control NOx but they are not for on-road use in the US thus far.
Of course, but mostly it's just recirculation that causes costly engine rebuilds. If it wasn't so expensive no one would delete.
Most regulations target emissions at point of sale but don't give a toss if such systems are practical or maintainable. It's sometimes better for the environment to have more emissions but not so much waste from having to buy a new thing more frequently.
I've got a 2011 BMW X5 diesel with 189k miles on it. The DPF went out at around 150k, which is roughly the expected lifetime from my understanding. The part alone is ~$4000. Regardless of living in CA, I'd have replaced it anyway because I think it's the right thing to do. (I didn't want a non-DPF diesel that was emitting lots of PM2.5s when I made my purchase).
That said, many people would prefer the money in their bank account. And if I had decided to sell it rather than fix, no doubt it would have gone to someone looking to delete the DPF.
The diesel particulate filter (DPF) forces the engine to burn more fuel periodically in order to burn off the particles in the filter. The net result is more CO2 than would be produced ordinarily.
I watched some farming videos, and the farmers calculate the hourly cost of their combine, it's in the 100's of dollars per hour. They hate it when the engine goes into the regen cycle, and they are forced to let the engine run.
No the DEF systems tend to break down and its mandated the engine go into limp mode when they do, this is hated by those that do not care for emissions and one of the biggest reason to delete by truckers. Also costly to fix the systems out of warranty.
You can find instructions on how to make DEF simulators using raspi's to fool the ECU into think the DEF system is working, people who do care about emissions will still carry these for emergency so they continue on their trip and get to a shop later. The derate was over zealous for sure and was a bad policy.
Also DPF is a performance issue since it blocks the exhaust to some degree, same with catalytic converter with def nozzle so no its not just EGR at all. DPF also consumes more fuel for regens.
2027 diesel regulations was to mandate even more NOx control but also specified manufacturers were required to have 100,000 mile 10 year warranty on emissions systems, its 5 year, 50k now. I believe thats dead in the water now.
A diesel engine with a deleted SCR system puts out 40 times the NOx of a working one. Thats 40 trucks going down the road to 1 equivalent. NOx causes asthma and acid rain, its not for the environment as much as for you directly.
And what percent of diesel emissions are from diesel passenger vehicles?
Emissions reduction efforts would be better spent ensuring repairability. The sunk cost emissions of landfills filled with junk created by planned obsolescence is much worse.
Diesel pick ups are not practical vehicles. Let's be honest, it's a hobby. It's always going to be niche and cutting down the last 10% is always the hardest. General aviation still uses lead.
Not sure what your point is, I was talking primarily about Class 8 heavy duty commercial trucks (semi) and other medium duty commercial use.
All the stuff that makes up emissions gear is highly recyclable and in fact some of it very desirable which is why people are getting catalytic converters stolen. So I do not worry about it filling up a land fill.
I also don't worry about EV batteries filling landfills because again they are very high grade ore for new batteries, once we have enough in circulation we no longer need to mine much lithium or rare earth.
I agree it should be reliable and repairable and forcing the manufacturers to have very long warranties on it seems like a good way to do that, having followed the various generations of DEF systems for the last decade the manufacturers have been making big strides because it costs them otherwise and has.
I also think airplanes using lead is stupid, but that is a fraction of even private diesel pickup usage let alone commercial trucking. Diesel pickups are at least 10% of all pickup sales now days.
It's not that you cant recycle emissions equipment, it's that mechanically totalling and landfillimg cars once they hit 10 years old and are no longer supported by the OEM is stupid and environmentally detrimental.
Take appliances for example, the government basically mandates that they're energy efficient but the new linear compressors break. Cars got more efficient by tightening tolerances. There's always going to be an engineering tradeoff between reliability and efficiency. I just think the environmentalist types have been laser focused on creating efficient by non durable products that fill landfills.
Wars open a lot of opportunities, especially for the worst people.
Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast did an episode on this today.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096?...
I'm worried about South Asia - between this and the immediate impact of LPG availability, the coming months and years seem scary - I don't see the strait returning to "risk-free" transit for years (not months) after this war. lettsss goooo $8/gallon gas for the rest of admin.
On another hand, everybody (or at least I want to believe) in the region knew in the back of their mind that the whole situation was a powder keg with a short fuse, and should have done more to diversify energy sources beforehand.
Excellent in-depth article and it's 6 years old. If this gets solved it will be a very big deal. We found a way to turn urine into solid fertiliser – it could make farming more sustainable https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-way-to-turn-urine-int...
One of the most interesting recurring themes in Neal Stephenson's _Baroque Cycle_ novels are the innovative uses of this stuff
Up 30% is not “nearly doubles”.
Where are you pulling this number from? I see a clear change from 350 to 585
350 was late last year. The text at the top of the linked page says prices are up about 30% over the past month. Directly prior to the war starting the price was about 470
Someone's taking the piss
LNG -> urea (fertilizer) -> food
About half of all fertilizer is artificially created using fossil fuels.
There is no undoing of this price shock because the planting and growing season has already arrived in the Northern Hemisphere.
Expect grains to become more expensive and downstream food products like milk and cheese to increase a lot.
American Urea production is orthogonal to LNG production in the Gulf - most American NatGas is sourced domestically, from Canada, or the Carribean [0].
This will be a shock, but mostly in Asia where LNG is dependent on Gulf sourcing, but most of the larger Asian countries began investing in building alternative supply chains and the financial buffer to ride out these kinds of shocks.
This isn't the first system shock to have happened in the past 5 years - the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a similar shock, and larger countries began building redundancies as a result.
You will see this in the graph linked above as well - urea prices are well below their 2022-23 peaks.
Additionally, the North American farming uses significantly less urea than other countries [1]
[0] - https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_move_impc_s1_a.htm
[1] - https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/decarbonizing-urea-produc...
Most of the worlds bio fuel that we use to reduce emission in transportation comes from crops farmed to be turned into bio fuel. How will the increase in LNG then do to the price of bio fuels?
It's debatable whether biofuels reduce CO2. I think it's better to understand them as subsidies for agriculture.
Could you elaborate?
Very simplified: farming and distillation is so extremely energy intensive, it's not clear whether producing one ton of bio ethanol fuel consumes more or less than one ton of diesel (or equivalent).
So producing bio ethanol is not a sustainability/ecology thing, it mostly gives farmers something to do.
If you wanted to save CO2 you'd slap solar panels on the fields instead of growing corn or whatever. Plants are rather bad at capturing solar energy and they need fertilizer and pesticides to grow and diesel to be planted and harvested. Then you lose a good part of the energy the plant captured until you have a product that you can burn in an engine.
With solar panels you get like 20x the energy out and you can have a meadow with high biodiversity around the panels. Growing a nice little forest, maybe with a couple of wind turbines in it if the location is windy, would probably also save more CO2.
That will depend country to country. The US doesn't use urea to the same degree that Brazil, India, and China do. And Brazil (just like the US) doesn't rely on NatGas from the Gulf.
It's mostly China and India that are impacted, but both have the Russian option.
This isn't our first rodeo with elevated urea and NatGas prices - the same thing happened during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (and is reflected in the same dataset OP linked).
This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.
I thought the US primarily got it's LNG supply from fracking. Is this incorrect?
US domestic fossil gas consumers compete with global LNG buyers willing to pay premiums for LNG exported from the US.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/tracking-lng-flows-key-globa...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-natural-gas-prices-rise-130...
Doh! That makes a lot of sense. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks for the links, they are great reads.
It's not automatically obvious. There could (theoretically) be domestic gas fields that are solely supplying pipeline "islands" (connected to domestic gas powerplants and fertilizer factories) under long-running contracts. Those should/would be more stable in price, since liquefying that gas and selling it elsewhere would not be trivial.
But in reality, that's not the case for any large US gas fields. They are all connected to the national pipeline "grid", and their gas can go wherever it is most expensive right now.
But it's the case for e.g. many Russian gas fields. They are much more segmented, and they have nowhere close to the liquefaction infrastructure necessary to export a significant fraction of their total output on LNG carriers.
Haber-Bosch process, for the curious.
Fortunes being made on piss futures. What a time to be alive.
> For use in industry, urea is produced from synthetic ammonia and carbon dioxide. As large quantities of carbon dioxide are produced during the ammonia manufacturing process as a byproduct of burning hydrocarbons to generate heat (predominantly natural gas, and less often petroleum derivatives or coal), urea production plants are almost always located adjacent to the site where the ammonia is manufactured.
To be clear, the CO2 is captured from the fuel burned in producing the ammonia?
... how much of it?
No, capturing CO2 from combustion is hard. Ammonia plants might burn methane for heat, but they don't capture its output.
The actual Haber–Bosch process for reaction directly spits methane into Hydrogen (which is combined with Nitrogen from the air) leaving CO2 as a byproduct.
The resulting CO2 is relatively pure, and it's already captured. You can feed it into anther process (such as Urea) or sell it for carbonisation of drinks.
> The resulting CO2 is relatively pure, and it's already captured. You can feed it into anther process (such as Urea) or sell it for carbonisation of drinks.
Makes for a pretty good refrigerant as well (R-744):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Refrigerant
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Comparative_perfor...
So, better to power the ammonia plant with clean electricity, and source methane from methane capture projects?
If possible that would seem ideal, however we don't exactly have tons of excess fossil fuel free methane just sitting around waiting to be used, atleast compared to the absolutely massive amount of fertilizer we need to produce to feed farmland. And if you are eliminating the fossil fuel from production, you might as well eliminate the methane component too and produce hydrogen on-site from water.
The main problem is just the energy cost because ammonia and urea both contain an ass ton of energy, 90% of which is coming from the the fossil fuel sourced methane. 1% of total world electrical production already goes into fertilizer production, and eliminating the fossil fuel component increases energy requirements near 10x over.
I had understood that e.g. landfill methane capture was this promising new (and cheap) idea that people just aren't executing because of a lack of political will. Is it not so straightforward?
Incredible how Trump ran on a "no wars" and "lower prices" platform. And that people actually believed it.
The Israeli lobby paid more than the voters.
To be honest, the Fell for it again award goes to a lot of voters across the world. It has become a routine part of politics. What is fascinating is how confidently repeating almost any claim, over and over, is often enough to make people eventually believe it. "He wouldn’t have lied to us"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
The value of the Trump presidency for his voters was never really about those issues, so much as who he was promising to hurt.
For the core of his base certainly, but he can't win with just them, it's not enough. He won because of the median voter that was mad at the incumbent party for inflation.
You know what else will blow your mind? Mass media excusing Trump from blame, followed by a good Republican showing in the midterms. Trump will be the only president to escape punishment for inflation. Mark my words.
The administration didn't even bother manufacturing consent this time and yet the media is acting like they did during the Iraq war. Democratic leaders are weakly pretending like they opposed the war but they really stalled the war powers resolution so it would happen before they forced the vote. Now they get to spend the first half of their statements condemning Iran and the second half weakly protesting about procedural issues and lack of an "exit strategy".
> administration didn't even bother manufacturing consent this time and yet the media is acting like they did
Which might suggest holes in Chomsky’s hypotheses.
> they really stalled the war powers resolution so it would happen before they forced the vote
The war’s timeline was moved back so materiel could be relocated and moved up because of Khamenei’s meeting. Democrats don’t control the Supreme Leader’s calendar.
This was an opportunistic war of choice pursued by one man. Partisan politics mean anything he does will be popular with Republicans and hated by Democrats, with all the electoral action happening at their margins while all the rhetoric is dominated by their cores. (The polling on this war isn’t black and white, either.)
It’s tempting to try and shoehorn this into one of the old narratives about there being a master plan. But sometimes nobody has a plan, they just sort of have a vibe.
This was an opportunistic war of choice pursued by one man
Completely agree. My problem is with his use of the entire nation's war fighting system and materials. We should at least have our elected representatives vote, after the Senate deliberates. None of that happened as you note. One guy, one vibe, one nation.
I expect a very bad showing for Republicans in the midterms. They will almost certainly lose the House, and it's actually becoming possible that they will lose the Senate (which seemed laughable to even consider a year ago).
It's really not about them "believing" it. They tend to "believe" any new reality they are presented with if given by the "right" person. And they will just as quickly discard those "beliefs" if they are told something different by the "right" person. Trump is that person for them right now. Ultimately there is no value that "conservatives" aren't willing to abandon other than maintaining the hierarchy. Everything else seems to be in service to that end. They fight hardest when new groups are receiving rights they didn't previously enjoy. It's never been about "fiscal responsibility". It's never been about "small government" or "states rights". They are quite happy to abandon all of those if a trans person might be be able to use a bathroom in peace.
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." ~ Maya Angelou
But at least we have the second coming of Christ soon, so none of that will matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology
xkcd://2345
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What if we collectively pee in buckets (to not dilute it with water and other human by-products) and give them to refineries for purification? /s
I tried an experiment a few years back. I peed into a small bucket and watered my curry leaf plant with it, not realizing that it need to be diluted. The plant "died" within a few weeks. I just left the pot and plant be. A few weeks later it started sprotuing again and that was the healthiest curry leaf plant I had ever seen. It had leaves double the size and it grew so fast that we had to give away curry leaves to neighbours
There is historic precedent: https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/lecontesalt/leconte.html, but we probably want to collect cattle pee, since that is available in greater quantities.
On a simpler scale, some communities do this. I've read a few articles about efforts in Virginia, as reported here by the BBC https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250227-the-vermont-farm...
Possible but there is a lot of water to remove. And even after that a lot of other impurities. You could do it, but it isn't worth it at scale
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