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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

Ships and their crews can‘t be cheap. Who paid to put the ammonium nirate on the ruby? Who paid for the ship to go somewhere? What was the original deal involving the ammonium nitrate? Did someone in another country originally plan to buy it but the deal was later cancelled?

The ammonium nitrate cargo alone is worth several million us dollar.

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Its a maltese ship headed to Malta. https://archive.ph/jFtD7#selection-1429.111-1429.116

> It is then expected to continue through the Channel with its destination listed as Marsaxlokk in Malta. The authorities in Malta said that they would only accept the vessel if it got rid of its cargo beforehand.

Ships are registered in Malta as a matter of convenience. See: they don't want the cargo either.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience

There’s a book capitalism and the sea that goes into more detail on this. It’s mostly a means for shipping companies to skirt regulations.

Perhaps it was someone trying to get around sanctions on Russian imports, was found out and refused entry/ abandoned?

There are no sanctions on Russian fertilizers. Europe's fertilizer production is down due to high natural gas prices (I wonder what happened) and import from Russia is up.

Do you want to provide sources for these claims? I see Germany's fertilizer exports are down by 10%, while its fertilizer imports from Russia fell by 80%. Fertilizer production seems to be up, but this metric is tracked by value only.

"For some types of fertiliser, such as urea, imports have even increased since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The cheap fertiliser has helped European farmers, but the region’s own fertiliser producers have been struggling to compete. “We are right now being flooded by fertilisers from Russia, which are significantly cheaper than our fertilisers, for the simple reason that they pay peanuts for natural gas in comparison to us European producers,” said Petr Cingr, chief executive of SKW Stickstoffwerke Piesteritz, Germany’s largest producer of ammonia. “If politicians will not act,” he warned, Europe’s production capacity “will disappear”.

...

A third of EU imports of urea, the cheapest form of nitrogen-based fertiliser, come from Russia, with the amount imported in 2023 close to record levels, Eurostat data shows. Poland’s imports of Russian urea climbed to almost $120mn in 2023, up from just over $84mn in 2021, for example, according to customs data.

...

Other big players are leaving the market. BASF, the world’s largest chemicals group, has shrunk its operations in Europe over the past few years, including its fertiliser business, and instead focused new investments in the US and China, where costs are lower." [0]

[0] https://archive.is/20240630042149/https://www.ft.com/content...

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