Urea prices

> 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/...

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.

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)_/

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.

:( Food is already so expensive in Canada. It doesn’t seem like it ever recovered after 2022.

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.

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.

There was a time when leather tanners used to collect the urine from bars - I guess the tanners paid for it.

Yeah, unless you’re a growing person, that’s where it all goes (depending on the bioavailability of your protein).

Adding to PlunderBunny, the Romans also used urine collected from public toilets to make detergents to whiten clothes.

Indeed, I did some work on that with regards to renewable ammonia production, interesting field to look into if you're curious

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.

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.

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.

Wars open a lot of opportunities, especially for the worst people.

Here's a trucker explaining other costs of the unnecessary Iran war.

https://youtu.be/BtAZ1jAV57s

Where are you pulling this number from? I see a clear change from 350 to 585

Haber-Bosch process, for the curious.

I thought the US primarily got it's LNG supply from fracking. Is this incorrect?

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?

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.

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

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"

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 value of the Trump presidency for his voters was never really about those issues, so much as who he was promising to hurt.

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

The Israeli lobby paid more than the voters.

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

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.

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

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...