5 ms·

Urea prices

113 points by burnt-resistor 8mo ago

burnt-resistor 8mo ago
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.
- carbocation 8mo ago
  Haber-Bosch process, for the curious.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- gravypod 8mo ago
  I thought the US primarily got it's LNG supply from fracking. Is this incorrect?
  - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
    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-global-gas-prices-go-haywire-2026-03-09/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/tracking-lng-flows-key-globa... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-natural-gas-prices-rise-130900002.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-natural-gas-prices-rise-130...
    - gravypod 8mo ago
      Doh! That makes a lot of sense. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks for the links, they are great reads.
      - pbmonster 8mo ago
        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.
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  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 https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_move_impc_s1_a.htm [1] - https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/decarbonizing-urea-production-in-india-via-renewable-ammonia/ https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/decarbonizing-urea-produc...
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- belorn 8mo ago
  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?
  - adrianN 8mo ago
    It's debatable whether biofuels reduce CO2. I think it's better to understand them as subsidies for agriculture.
    - portly 8mo ago
      Could you elaborate?
      - pbmonster 8mo ago
        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.
      - adrianN 8mo ago
        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.
  - alephnerd 8mo ago
    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.
Trasmatta 8mo ago
Incredible how Trump ran on a "no wars" and "lower prices" platform. And that people actually believed it.
- actionfromafar 8mo ago
  But at least we have the second coming of Christ soon, so none of that will matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology xkcd://2345
- hsuduebc2 8mo ago
  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"
  - rwmj 8mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
- bediger4000 8mo ago
  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.
  - Trasmatta 8mo ago
    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).
  - tdeck 8mo ago
    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".
avalys 8mo ago
Up 30% is not “nearly doubles”.
- throwaway27448 8mo ago
  Where are you pulling this number from? I see a clear change from 350 to 585
  - flaminHotSpeedo 8mo ago
    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
malshe 8mo ago
Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast did an episode on this today. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096?i=1000754620452 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096?...
jmyeet 8mo ago
[flagged]
adrianN 8mo ago
Sooner rather than later we need to decarbonize fertilizer production. Maybe this will speed the process up a bit.
- Johnny_Bonk 8mo ago
  Indeed, I did some work on that with regards to renewable ammonia production, interesting field to look into if you're curious
  - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
    Resources on the topic you would recommend?
- 3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
  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.
- AngryData 8mo ago
  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.
WaitWaitWha 8mo ago
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.
- pavel_lishin 8mo ago
  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.
  - D_Alex 8mo ago
    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.
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  > 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/files/Japan%27s%20hydrogen%20and%20ammonia%20policy%20-%20overview%20and%20key%20developments%20%28final%29_1.pdf https://grjapan.com/sites/default/files/content/articles/fil... [1] - https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2022/09/china_green_hydrogen_new_era_renewable_hydrogen_roadmap.pdf https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2022/09/china... [2] - https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/1033081/adbi-wp1491.pdf https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/1033081/...
SigmundA 8mo ago
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.
- throwaway85825 8mo ago
  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.
  - SigmundA 8mo ago
    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.
    - throwaway85825 8mo ago
      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.
mikelitoris 8mo ago
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
- bluGill 8mo ago
  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
- adrianN 8mo ago
  There is historic precedent: https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/lecontesalt/leconte.html https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/lecontesalt/leconte.html, but we probably want to collect cattle pee, since that is available in greater quantities.
- thetallgeek 8mo ago
  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
- smscott 8mo ago
  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-farmers-using-urine-to-grow-their-crops https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250227-the-vermont-farm...
aaron695 8mo ago
[dead]
yellowapple 8mo ago
My first thought from this is that (if my napkin math is right) I'm apparently pissing away a penny a day.
- PlunderBunny 8mo ago
  There was a time when leather tanners used to collect the urine from bars - I guess the tanners paid for it.
  - avadodin 8mo ago
    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.
  - codelikeawolf 8mo ago
    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.
    - zamadatix 8mo ago
      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://grammarphobia.com/blog/2019/07/a-pot-to-piss-in.html https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/piss-poor-pot-to-piss-in https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/piss-poor-pot-t...
      - codelikeawolf 8mo ago
        Serves me right for collecting facts from Instagram memes.
snthpy 8mo ago
Someone's taking the piss
zahlman 8mo ago
> 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?
- phire 8mo ago
  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.
  - zahlman 8mo ago
    So, better to power the ammonia plant with clean electricity, and source methane from methane capture projects?
    - AngryData 8mo ago
      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.
Scoundreller 8mo ago
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/publications/113324/ERR-354.pdf?v=83545 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/ammonia-price-index/ 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-conversion-ratios-help-explain-meats-outsized-climate-impact/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2022/03/feed-conv...
- AngryData 8mo ago
  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.
  - pjc50 8mo ago
    I wondered about the prevalence of this in Europe: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cultivation-area-of-alfalfa-in-some-EU-countries-in-2021-from-EUROSTAT-2022-120_fig2_367346844 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.
ramesh31 8mo ago
Fortunes being made on piss futures. What a time to be alive.
zelias 8mo ago
One of the most interesting recurring themes in Neal Stephenson's _Baroque Cycle_ novels are the innovative uses of this stuff
i4i 8mo ago
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-into-solid-fertiliser-it-could-make-farming-more-sustainable-148877 https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-way-to-turn-urine-int...
kylehotchkiss 8mo ago
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.

113 points by burnt-resistor 8mo ago

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.

carbocation 8mo ago
Haber-Bosch process, for the curious.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
gravypod 8mo ago
I thought the US primarily got it's LNG supply from fracking. Is this incorrect?
- toomuchtodo 8mo ago
  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-global-gas-prices-go-haywire-2026-03-09/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/tracking-lng-flows-key-globa... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-natural-gas-prices-rise-130900002.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-natural-gas-prices-rise-130...
  - gravypod 8mo ago
    Doh! That makes a lot of sense. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks for the links, they are great reads.
    - pbmonster 8mo ago
      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.
alephnerd 8mo ago
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 https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_move_impc_s1_a.htm [1] - https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/decarbonizing-urea-production-in-india-via-renewable-ammonia/ https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/decarbonizing-urea-produc...
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
belorn 8mo ago
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?
- adrianN 8mo ago
  It's debatable whether biofuels reduce CO2. I think it's better to understand them as subsidies for agriculture.
  - portly 8mo ago
    Could you elaborate?
    - pbmonster 8mo ago
      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.
    - adrianN 8mo ago
      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.
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  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.

Trasmatta 8mo ago

Incredible how Trump ran on a "no wars" and "lower prices" platform. And that people actually believed it.

actionfromafar 8mo ago
But at least we have the second coming of Christ soon, so none of that will matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology xkcd://2345
hsuduebc2 8mo ago
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"
- rwmj 8mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
bediger4000 8mo ago
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.
- Trasmatta 8mo ago
  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).
- tdeck 8mo ago
  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".

avalys 8mo ago

Up 30% is not “nearly doubles”.

throwaway27448 8mo ago
Where are you pulling this number from? I see a clear change from 350 to 585
- flaminHotSpeedo 8mo ago
  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

malshe 8mo ago

Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast did an episode on this today. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096?i=1000754620452 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096?...

jmyeet 8mo ago

[flagged]

adrianN 8mo ago

Sooner rather than later we need to decarbonize fertilizer production. Maybe this will speed the process up a bit.

Johnny_Bonk 8mo ago
Indeed, I did some work on that with regards to renewable ammonia production, interesting field to look into if you're curious
- toomuchtodo 8mo ago
  Resources on the topic you would recommend?
3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
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.
AngryData 8mo ago
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.

WaitWaitWha 8mo ago

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.

pavel_lishin 8mo ago
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.
- D_Alex 8mo ago
  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.
alephnerd 8mo ago
> 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/files/Japan%27s%20hydrogen%20and%20ammonia%20policy%20-%20overview%20and%20key%20developments%20%28final%29_1.pdf https://grjapan.com/sites/default/files/content/articles/fil... [1] - https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2022/09/china_green_hydrogen_new_era_renewable_hydrogen_roadmap.pdf https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2022/09/china... [2] - https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/1033081/adbi-wp1491.pdf https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/1033081/...

SigmundA 8mo ago

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.

throwaway85825 8mo ago
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.
- SigmundA 8mo ago
  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.
  - throwaway85825 8mo ago
    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.

mikelitoris 8mo ago

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

bluGill 8mo ago
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
adrianN 8mo ago
There is historic precedent: https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/lecontesalt/leconte.html https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/lecontesalt/leconte.html, but we probably want to collect cattle pee, since that is available in greater quantities.
thetallgeek 8mo ago
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
smscott 8mo ago
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-farmers-using-urine-to-grow-their-crops https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250227-the-vermont-farm...

aaron695 8mo ago

[dead]

yellowapple 8mo ago

My first thought from this is that (if my napkin math is right) I'm apparently pissing away a penny a day.

PlunderBunny 8mo ago
There was a time when leather tanners used to collect the urine from bars - I guess the tanners paid for it.
- avadodin 8mo ago
  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.
- codelikeawolf 8mo ago
  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.
  - zamadatix 8mo ago
    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://grammarphobia.com/blog/2019/07/a-pot-to-piss-in.html https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/piss-poor-pot-to-piss-in https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/piss-poor-pot-t...
    - codelikeawolf 8mo ago
      Serves me right for collecting facts from Instagram memes.

snthpy 8mo ago

Someone's taking the piss

zahlman 8mo ago

> 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?

phire 8mo ago
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.
- zahlman 8mo ago
  So, better to power the ammonia plant with clean electricity, and source methane from methane capture projects?
  - AngryData 8mo ago
    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.

Scoundreller 8mo ago

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/publications/113324/ERR-354.pdf?v=83545 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/ammonia-price-index/ 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-conversion-ratios-help-explain-meats-outsized-climate-impact/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2022/03/feed-conv...

AngryData 8mo ago
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.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  I wondered about the prevalence of this in Europe: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cultivation-area-of-alfalfa-in-some-EU-countries-in-2021-from-EUROSTAT-2022-120_fig2_367346844 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.

ramesh31 8mo ago

Fortunes being made on piss futures. What a time to be alive.

zelias 8mo ago

One of the most interesting recurring themes in Neal Stephenson's _Baroque Cycle_ novels are the innovative uses of this stuff

i4i 8mo ago

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-into-solid-fertiliser-it-could-make-farming-more-sustainable-148877 https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-way-to-turn-urine-int...

kylehotchkiss 8mo ago

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.