There is a great quote I heard once that many people don't realize: "Modern agriculture is the conversion of the energy in fossil fuels to energy in food we can eat".
I used to believe this, but it is a lie wrapped around a small kernel of truth. It is true that "the vast majority of nitrogen-fixation for fertilizers is done using" fossil fuels (mostly natural gas, which is not a petroleum product), but plants do not get their energy from those fertilizers. Moreover, the total energy obtained from agriculture is about five times greater than the energy input used to make fertilizers, as shown in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935130/figure/... (thanks Enginerrd).
I agree, but I think you and others are missing the primary point of the quote, or interpreting it too literally (which is fair, that is what the quote says after all).
The primary point is that agriculture, as it is currently practiced on a large scale, is extremely dependent on non-renewable resources and the energy in those resources. It's not just natural gas used for nitrogen, it's also things like phosphate mining.
Yes, the amount of calories in the final product largely comes from the sun, but it is the energy in those (currently) petroleum products that unlocks a plant's ability to photosynthesize in the first place.
This is so disingenuous. The total energy input from fossil fuels is several fold less than the energy output since most of it is derived from the sun. [1](See figure 3)
Around 50% of the input is indeed from nitrogen, but it need not be derived from fossil fuels since you could source energy elsewhere and use water electrolysis derived hydrogen in the nitrogen production process. That it is currently more economical to use fossil fuels is a separate issue.
> That it is currently more economical to use fossil fuels is a separate issue.
That's not a separate issue. That's the WHOLE issue. The first 2 words in the quote were "Modern agriculture". The point is not that there are many types of farming that can be done without using fossil fuels as an input, nor that in the future we couldn't transition away from fossil fuels for fertilizer. The point is that the output of modern agriculture would, at present, completely collapse if the energy input from fossil fuels wasn't available.
Fixed nitrogen, ie ammonia (for instance), is made from gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen. 3kg of hydrogen makes 17kg of ammonia. 200 pounds of ammonia (16kg of hydrogen) will make about 250 bushels of corn. 1 bushel of corn is about 370MJ. 1kg of hydrogen is 142MJ. So 2.3GJ of hydrogen makes 92GJ of corn. That’s about 3%, not 50%.
BTW, the US produces about 17 megatonnes of ammonia per year, or 3 Megatonnes of hydrogen per year. At 60% efficiency, that would require about 22 Gigawatts of average electricity, or less than 5% of average US electricity usage. The US grid is about 40% clean, so that’s still only about 10% of US’a clean electricity usage.
If you are saying that 50% of the energy input is from nitrogen, and if the most economical means of supplying nitrogen is from fossil fuel sources, such that the vast majority of it originates from fossil fuels, then wouldn't it be the case that nearly 50% of the energy input of the system is from fossil fuels?
How would this input be "several fold less" than the energy output of the system?
In the same way that bunker fuel powered ships are just "more economical" than transporting goods by sail powered ships.
People throw this term around like making it "less economical" to produce food is some minor detail.
Things being their current level of "economical" is what drives our global economy at the current scale it runs at. We could not have our current lifestyle using sail powered ships to transport goods from China any more than we could maintain anything like our current lifestyle if we had to produce all of our nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis.
Making food "less economical" means mass starvation.
Extrapolating from your comment (neither disagreeing or agreeing, primarily trying to provide additional resources for people to learn about and to help explore the option space):
And finally - I've no connection with the University of Michigan but I did find this recent article about a research grant for solar-powered, energy-decentralized fertilizer production; I'm not clear on the details of the research yet but it does again re-iterate the nature of the problem and illustrates that there is effort directed towards overcoming fossil fuel dependence in this area: https://news.umich.edu/2m-to-replace-fossil-fuels-with-solar...
I'm surprised by how little people understand the relationship between fossil fuels (not just energy) and global food production.
The primary reason that Malthus was wrong in his predictions about population growth and food supply isn't because of "science" it's because of fossil fuels.
This wouldn't be an issue if fossil fuels were unlimited in supply and didn't have very severe externalities in their unrestricted usage.
People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
edit: This comment getting quickly downvoted is objective evidence for my argument that "People don't like to talk about..." There's nothing controversial in this comment. In a world without fossil fuels we very likely would have seen Malthus's predictions come to be, fossil fuels are obviously a limited resource and their usage has extreme externalities.
I get that people are scared, but it's still sad to see a community of otherwise curious people start to break down when they see facts that make them uncomfortable.
> People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
I, for one, love to talk about zero emission food production.
It's not scary, and in fact it will be somewhat straightforward to replace our nitrogen sources with zero emission production methods.
Electricity can be used to produce ammonia in many ways. The most obvious is electrolysis of water to hydrogen, and then through the Haber process. Large scale production is already being planned, for example by Fertiberia in Spain, who will deploy many MW of electrolyzers soon. Spain's target for electrolyzers is 4GW by 2030! We couldn't even build 4GW of nuclear by 2030, but we will be able to do elecrolyzers and the solar to power them.
There is also a startup (blanking on the name) that creates ammonia on site, off grid, using high voltage in a box. This eliminates the transport cost of nitrogen, which is not insignificant. By focusing on small scale production on site a small startup can break in to a huge commodity market.
I didn't downvote your comment, but your unnecessary pessimism does not accurately reflect the future that we can see already!
>People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
I'd have to run the numbers... but offhand I'd guess it just means nitrogen gets 2.5x more expensive. (Call it 2-10x if you want some padding) That doesn't even mean food gets 2.5x more expensive, only that the percentage of costs due to nitrogen go up that much. I think this is such a non-issue.
I don't know if we could get all the required nitrogen to sustain our current agricultural methods, but there are definitely people working towards normalizing the capture and reuse of the nutrients in urine. Our current practice of polluting waterways with our urine is a travesty though, and it behooves us to process our 'waste' in a more regenerative way.
You can say the same thing about all economics after the 1600s - wood, coal, whale oil, petroleum.
There is a direct causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. End the former and you end the latter. And you also kill off a ton of people because the system that enables their lives will falter and starve them to death.
And a whole lot of time, temperature, and pressure driven through geological processes.
Energy from gravity and radiation are contributing factors to fossil fuel production, even if the hydrocarbons broken down for use are largely photosynthetic in nature/origin, they owe their energy density that makes them a viable fuel source to factors beyond solar. Breaking that down has side effects beyond pure photosynthetic processes.
Forget diesel trucks and piss, ya’ll are overlooking that urea is a major component of fertilizer.
Higher urea prices->higher fertilizer prices->Less fertilizer demand->less food supply->more suffering via sick and hungry people->more potential for confrontation and war.
This is probably a question easily solved by querying Wikipedia, but I'll ask it here so the answer benefits others as well, where does the urea used in fertilizer come from?
Related article from yesterday that specifically calls out urea: "Global farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut use, raising food security risks"
"I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest. I'm afraid we're going to have a food crisis." — Svein Tore Holsether, CEO and president Yara International. https://fortune.com/2021/11/04/energy-crisis-food-shortage-s...
"In the fall, soaring electricity demand led the southwestern province of Yunnan, a key phosphate producer, to order drastic production cuts by energy-hungry industries, including fertilizer." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"High fertilizer prices could exert inflationary pressures on food prices, compounding food security concerns at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are making access to food more difficult." https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/soaring-fertilizer-pric...
"Higher farm input costs, expensive shipping and good demand provide for a grim combination... We are under La Niña conditions, the second such event in as many years, and the weather cannot be expected to be normal until Q2 2022 at the earliest." — Rabobank Outlook 2022: Hell in the Handbasket. https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/documents/842941_Raboba...
This is why I don’t buy the Bitcoin “mined with free energy” narrative. Put a fertilizer plant near that hydro dam instead of doing proof of work calculations.
Ethereum 2.0 (uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining) can’t come soon enough for me.
No it’s a supply side problem, urea is synthesized from ammonia which is synthesized from methane and atmospheric nitrogen. Methane and in general fossil fuel prices spiked and brought fertilizer prices with it. There is probably also a covid labor component as well.
The family farm is planting a lot less corn as a result.
Goods whose supply has a natural upper limit in what's easily obtainable (given current methods and infra) and no easy substitutes in their use up the supply chain often have price spikes when (non-spiking) marginal demand suddenly bumps into that limit ... or else when there's a sudden limitation in the ability to deliver the usual supply of the good. Neither of these is a demand spike, per se.
Or a price increase in inputs, or a reduction in supply.
Most nitrogen fertiliser is supplied via natural gas formation (Haber-Bosch process). I'm not sure if urea is HB-formulated nitrogen or comes from other sources, but this wouldn't much matter as HB-formulated ammonia is near-exact substitute for urea and would follow similar pricing patterns.
Reading at Wikipedia iforms me that:
- Urea is CO2(NH2)2.
- Production is from ammonia + carbon dioxide.
Given that natural gas prices are presently spiking, my presumption would be that urea prices are following natural gas.
People eat shrimp and crab and lobster. Bugs are arthropods as well. They seem to perform similar functions in different contexts, eg, they feed on the waste of other animals.
The difference is historical and cultural inertia. Buttered cockroach could be the next big thing in Brooklyn.
These are the guys that want us all to rent our stuff instead of buying it. "You will own nothing and you will be happy". Uh no.
I'm not going to buy bug burgers nor rent my stuff.
What we should do is more population control. As a first step stop incentives for having children (Inn the Netherlands you get more child benefit per child the more you have!). It's tough for the people that want big families but we can't continue growing humanity like this.
If the prices are denominated in USD, and the consumers are in countries with stronger (less elastic) currencies, it's likely caused by inflation pressure from obvious sources like QE-infinity policy, debt monetization, and de-facto negative interest rates. What we are watching is the controlled demolition of western economies. It's not a conspiracy, it's an ideology that has prevailed and this is all downstream of it. I hope you like eating bugs.
> If the prices are denominated in USD, and the consumers are in countries with stronger (less elastic) currencies
Well, that's not what's going on in the market.
This crisis is caused by a reduced supply of inputs, mostly natural gas and energy. One of the direct causes is Hurricane Ida, which had a massive impact on natural gas supplies. China has also experienced a coal shortage, and also a drought that reduced hydropower generation. Europe has done a lot to switch to renewables, but they've suffered low winds.
So no, the people who are going to hurt aren't rich Westerners, who are best positioned to ride this out. It's the poor people (mostly in the "global south") who already spend massive portions of their income on food, who will bear the brunt of this crisis.
Time for lazy/ignorant farmers to switch to cover cropping with rotational grazing, which is just a better system as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
I think that you shouldn't call other profession lazy/ignorant in general. People only tend to maximize their profits and minimize efforts, and this is natural. This, in no way, means that farmers are lazy and certainly not ignorant. A better rephrasing would be: "Time for farmers to switch ..."
I think there are real serious trade-offs here in income to the farmer. It's nothing about lazy or ignorance. Honestly to make a comment like that, add if you know more about their business than they do is both ignorant and arrogant - unless that really is your business and you know what you're talking about. But this feels like armchair commentary to me.
So while I'd agree that no-till/rotational farming is superior in many many ways, and while I would very much like to see its wide-scale implementation, I also note your final line:
>as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers, but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the current system.
Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto, or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of conditions (so all the fries look the same).
I've never met a single successful farmer that is either lazy or ignorant. Most people would never last a full week working on a farm. As far as rotational grazing, if you don't think modern farmers understand nutritional cycles you are sadly misinformed.
High input prices cause inflation, inflation causes central banks to tighten monetary policy, tight monetary policy causes financial crashes as the cash flows of assets are evaluated against higher discount rates.
Shale revolution saved US and indirectly rest of the world of many things. We had one heck of decade with cheap Natural Gas prices in the US and the market adjusted to that. The days of Cheap NG are over given that it is now the preferred input for electricity generation including the peaker plants. The next step is US banning NG and Oil exports which can happen before next presidential election.
There are many reasons but the second and third order effects of 'plague' have to run through the system and it would take a decade for all these things to wash through.
It is not a coincidence famine follows plague and war follows famine. The bush fires have already started if you are paying attention.
We've been here before isn't the same thing as 'this is fine'. The earth has had several extinction-level events in it's history - it wouldn't be 'fine' to have one again.
It was already clear in September that this was going to happen, when fertilizer plants started to shut down because of the high gas prices[1]. (context: Natural gas is used to produce ammonia via the Haber process, and the ammonia is in turn used to produce ammonium nitrate and urea, which are used as fertilizer.) I already commented on it back then[2].
I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea price?
>I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea price?
Probably because big urea producers have longer-term contracts for gas and the price hike would only occur after a set period. Chemical plants buy very little spot.
For anyone curious why this was the case, it's due to a step in wool textile production called "fulling" [0]. Stale human urine was used for the ammonium, which cleaned away dirt and oil from the cloth and made it thicker (fuller).
One of the more entertaining episodes in Don Quijote is when he and Sancho are confused by the persistent loud noise made by the hammers in a fulling mill.
This a huge venerability in our supply chain. If we run out of DEF urea, trucking will grind to a halt. I hope engine makers like Cummins and Detroit have contingency plans where they could release a software patch for their engines that would temporarily bypass the DEF requirement. However, I doubt they have any contingency plan and this is actually a huge venerability that I guarantee our enemies know of.
As long as price controls aren't imposed, there's no danger of a DEF shortage. The price has gone from US$250/tonne (25¢/kg) to US$1000/tonne (US$1/kg). Trucks consume perhaps 1 kg of urea per 100 km. Even at US$10/kg it wouldn't grind trucking to a halt, just raise the price a little.
Adding $0.10/KM (side note, why are we doing math with USD and metric distances?) isn't raising the price 'a little' - it's over a 5% increase in trucking costs.
Do you think most trucking operations have much more than a 5% margin in their businesses right now, or that if they did, they'd just eat such a huge increase?
It's an open secret you can code out DEF on some diesel VWs. The older TDI Touaregs that were fixed during Dieselgate are nearing the end of their 120k mile warranty and owners are recoding the ECU to ignore DEF warnings rather than maintain or repair them. I'm sure the same could be done for Cummins and Detroit.
Natural gas prices were a lot higher multiple times in the past, with no corresponding peaks in Urea prices. Just wondering if Natrual gas is the sole reason or if something else also is at play.
Readit News
That is, the vast majority of nitrogen-fixation for fertilizers is done using natural gas or other petroleum product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production
The primary point is that agriculture, as it is currently practiced on a large scale, is extremely dependent on non-renewable resources and the energy in those resources. It's not just natural gas used for nitrogen, it's also things like phosphate mining.
Yes, the amount of calories in the final product largely comes from the sun, but it is the energy in those (currently) petroleum products that unlocks a plant's ability to photosynthesize in the first place.
Around 50% of the input is indeed from nitrogen, but it need not be derived from fossil fuels since you could source energy elsewhere and use water electrolysis derived hydrogen in the nitrogen production process. That it is currently more economical to use fossil fuels is a separate issue.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935130/
That's not a separate issue. That's the WHOLE issue. The first 2 words in the quote were "Modern agriculture". The point is not that there are many types of farming that can be done without using fossil fuels as an input, nor that in the future we couldn't transition away from fossil fuels for fertilizer. The point is that the output of modern agriculture would, at present, completely collapse if the energy input from fossil fuels wasn't available.
Fixed nitrogen, ie ammonia (for instance), is made from gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen. 3kg of hydrogen makes 17kg of ammonia. 200 pounds of ammonia (16kg of hydrogen) will make about 250 bushels of corn. 1 bushel of corn is about 370MJ. 1kg of hydrogen is 142MJ. So 2.3GJ of hydrogen makes 92GJ of corn. That’s about 3%, not 50%.
BTW, the US produces about 17 megatonnes of ammonia per year, or 3 Megatonnes of hydrogen per year. At 60% efficiency, that would require about 22 Gigawatts of average electricity, or less than 5% of average US electricity usage. The US grid is about 40% clean, so that’s still only about 10% of US’a clean electricity usage.
How would this input be "several fold less" than the energy output of the system?
In the same way that bunker fuel powered ships are just "more economical" than transporting goods by sail powered ships.
People throw this term around like making it "less economical" to produce food is some minor detail.
Things being their current level of "economical" is what drives our global economy at the current scale it runs at. We could not have our current lifestyle using sail powered ships to transport goods from China any more than we could maintain anything like our current lifestyle if we had to produce all of our nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis.
Making food "less economical" means mass starvation.
The history of ammonia production has led to a fossil fuel dependency chain. This article at resilience.org seems to include some good history: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-06-11/implications-f...
One of the primary processes involved in the creation of ammonia is the Haber-Bosch process, as outlined on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
The International Energy Agency provides a good summary of a technology roadmap for migration of ammonia production processes to lower-emission methods: https://www.iea.org/reports/ammonia-technology-roadmap/execu...
And finally - I've no connection with the University of Michigan but I did find this recent article about a research grant for solar-powered, energy-decentralized fertilizer production; I'm not clear on the details of the research yet but it does again re-iterate the nature of the problem and illustrates that there is effort directed towards overcoming fossil fuel dependence in this area: https://news.umich.edu/2m-to-replace-fossil-fuels-with-solar...
The primary reason that Malthus was wrong in his predictions about population growth and food supply isn't because of "science" it's because of fossil fuels.
This wouldn't be an issue if fossil fuels were unlimited in supply and didn't have very severe externalities in their unrestricted usage.
People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
edit: This comment getting quickly downvoted is objective evidence for my argument that "People don't like to talk about..." There's nothing controversial in this comment. In a world without fossil fuels we very likely would have seen Malthus's predictions come to be, fossil fuels are obviously a limited resource and their usage has extreme externalities.
I get that people are scared, but it's still sad to see a community of otherwise curious people start to break down when they see facts that make them uncomfortable.
I, for one, love to talk about zero emission food production.
It's not scary, and in fact it will be somewhat straightforward to replace our nitrogen sources with zero emission production methods.
Electricity can be used to produce ammonia in many ways. The most obvious is electrolysis of water to hydrogen, and then through the Haber process. Large scale production is already being planned, for example by Fertiberia in Spain, who will deploy many MW of electrolyzers soon. Spain's target for electrolyzers is 4GW by 2030! We couldn't even build 4GW of nuclear by 2030, but we will be able to do elecrolyzers and the solar to power them.
There is also a startup (blanking on the name) that creates ammonia on site, off grid, using high voltage in a box. This eliminates the transport cost of nitrogen, which is not insignificant. By focusing on small scale production on site a small startup can break in to a huge commodity market.
I didn't downvote your comment, but your unnecessary pessimism does not accurately reflect the future that we can see already!
I'd have to run the numbers... but offhand I'd guess it just means nitrogen gets 2.5x more expensive. (Call it 2-10x if you want some padding) That doesn't even mean food gets 2.5x more expensive, only that the percentage of costs due to nitrogen go up that much. I think this is such a non-issue.
See https://richearthinstitute.org for more.
There is a direct causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. End the former and you end the latter. And you also kill off a ton of people because the system that enables their lives will falter and starve them to death.
Deleted Comment
Energy from gravity and radiation are contributing factors to fossil fuel production, even if the hydrocarbons broken down for use are largely photosynthetic in nature/origin, they owe their energy density that makes them a viable fuel source to factors beyond solar. Breaking that down has side effects beyond pure photosynthetic processes.
Higher urea prices->higher fertilizer prices->Less fertilizer demand->less food supply->more suffering via sick and hungry people->more potential for confrontation and war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-farmers-f...
Oh yes. And alarm bells are ringing.
"I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest. I'm afraid we're going to have a food crisis." — Svein Tore Holsether, CEO and president Yara International. https://fortune.com/2021/11/04/energy-crisis-food-shortage-s...
"Major fertilizer producers Yara International ASA and CF Industries Holdings Inc. said soaring energy costs are forcing them to halt some output of nutrients crucial for growing crops." https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/europe-s-energy-woes...
"In the fall, soaring electricity demand led the southwestern province of Yunnan, a key phosphate producer, to order drastic production cuts by energy-hungry industries, including fertilizer." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Farmers in India are desperate. Trucks in South Korea had to be idled. Food prices, already high, could rise even further." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Among farmers and ranchers, very few topics are being discussed as much as the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer and increasing concerns regarding availability." https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...
"High fertilizer prices could exert inflationary pressures on food prices, compounding food security concerns at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are making access to food more difficult." https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/soaring-fertilizer-pric...
"Higher farm input costs, expensive shipping and good demand provide for a grim combination... We are under La Niña conditions, the second such event in as many years, and the weather cannot be expected to be normal until Q2 2022 at the earliest." — Rabobank Outlook 2022: Hell in the Handbasket. https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/documents/842941_Raboba...
Hell in the handbasket here we come!
Ethereum 2.0 (uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining) can’t come soon enough for me.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/22/why-is-the-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-58626935
We should increase the atmospheres CO2 and urea production. More food for all!
The family farm is planting a lot less corn as a result.
Most nitrogen fertiliser is supplied via natural gas formation (Haber-Bosch process). I'm not sure if urea is HB-formulated nitrogen or comes from other sources, but this wouldn't much matter as HB-formulated ammonia is near-exact substitute for urea and would follow similar pricing patterns.
Reading at Wikipedia iforms me that:
- Urea is CO2(NH2)2.
- Production is from ammonia + carbon dioxide.
Given that natural gas prices are presently spiking, my presumption would be that urea prices are following natural gas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea
Deleted Comment
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...
Thesis -> Antithesis -> Synthesis
The difference is historical and cultural inertia. Buttered cockroach could be the next big thing in Brooklyn.
I'm not going to buy bug burgers nor rent my stuff.
What we should do is more population control. As a first step stop incentives for having children (Inn the Netherlands you get more child benefit per child the more you have!). It's tough for the people that want big families but we can't continue growing humanity like this.
Well, that's not what's going on in the market.
This crisis is caused by a reduced supply of inputs, mostly natural gas and energy. One of the direct causes is Hurricane Ida, which had a massive impact on natural gas supplies. China has also experienced a coal shortage, and also a drought that reduced hydropower generation. Europe has done a lot to switch to renewables, but they've suffered low winds.
So no, the people who are going to hurt aren't rich Westerners, who are best positioned to ride this out. It's the poor people (mostly in the "global south") who already spend massive portions of their income on food, who will bear the brunt of this crisis.
>as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers, but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the current system.
Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto, or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of conditions (so all the fries look the same).
What's the befit if fertilizer helps?
That it looks more natural?
There are many reasons but the second and third order effects of 'plague' have to run through the system and it would take a decade for all these things to wash through.
It is not a coincidence famine follows plague and war follows famine. The bush fires have already started if you are paying attention.
I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea price?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/16/fears-for-u...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29113533#29116895
They didn't. The futures price started climbing in September.
https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/JC*1
Probably because big urea producers have longer-term contracts for gas and the price hike would only occur after a set period. Chemical plants buy very little spot.
One of the more entertaining episodes in Don Quijote is when he and Sancho are confused by the persistent loud noise made by the hammers in a fulling mill.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling
I wonder whether urea is recovered from waste water at water treatment plants.
Do you think most trucking operations have much more than a 5% margin in their businesses right now, or that if they did, they'd just eat such a huge increase?
[1] (warning - math required, source is in $/Mile) https://www.paragonrouting.com/en-us/blog/post/want-optimize...
Deleted Comment
Urea is made from ammonia which is made from natural gas.
The effect of this will mostly impact the agricultural sector, where it is the main component of many fertilisers.
Natural gas prices were a lot higher multiple times in the past, with no corresponding peaks in Urea prices. Just wondering if Natrual gas is the sole reason or if something else also is at play.