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burnt-resistortoday at 2:03 AM5 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

belorntoday at 2:29 AM

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?

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alephnerdtoday at 2:24 AM

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...

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gravypodtoday at 2:23 AM

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

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carbocationtoday at 2:19 AM

Haber-Bosch process, for the curious.