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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

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.

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.