How the War on Fossil Fuels Will Kill People… Urea Edition

Guest “insert p!$$ joke here” by David Middleton

Hat tip to Kip Hansen…

Urea Shortage Is Felt Around the World
Raymond Zhong

This Chemical Is in Short Supply, and the Whole World Feels It
Farmers in India are desperate. Trucks in South Korea had to be idled. Food prices, already high, could rise even further.

Dec. 6, 2021

This is a story about one of those unsung forces that quietly keep the world running. It is a story about the clockwork interconnectedness of modern civilization, about how disturbances in one part of the planet can kick up storms in another.

This is a story, naturally, about urea.

Prices for the humble chemical — yes, the stuff in urine — are soaring to levels not seen in over a decade. In this time of everything shortages and inflation worries, that alone might not sound too surprising. But urea links up several disparate-looking strands of global economic disruption, showing how easily extreme weather and shipping turmoil can cause supply shortfalls to radiate.

People and industries of all kinds are feeling the shocks. In India, a lack of urea has made farmers fear for their livelihoods. In South Korea, it meant truck drivers couldn’t start their engines.

Urea is an important type of agricultural fertilizer, so rising prices could ultimately mean higher costs at dinner tables around the world. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s index of food prices is already at its highest level since 2011. The coronavirus pandemic has caused huge numbers of people to face hunger, and increased food prices could cause even more to have trouble meeting basic dietary needs. Prices of two other widely used plant foods are skyrocketing as well.

One big reason for surging fertilizer prices is surging prices of coal and natural gas. The urea in your urine is produced in the liver. The industrial kind is made through a century-old process that turns natural gas or gas derived from coal into ammonia, which is then used to synthesize urea.

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The New York Times

Industrial urea is produced from ammonia, generated with the Haber-Bosch process.

Ammonia
The manufacture of ammonia is crucial for the world’s agricultural industry for from it all fertilizers that contain nitrogen are produced.

Uses of ammonia
The manufacture of fertilizers is by far the most important use of ammonia. These include urea, ammonium salts (ammonium phosphates, ammonium nitrate, calcium ammonium nitrate) and solutions of ammonia.

An increasing amount of ammonia, although still small compared with other uses, is used as a concentrated solution in combating the discharge of nitrogen oxides from power stations.

Annual production of ammonia
Ammonia ranks second, to sulfuric acid, as the chemical with the largest tonnage. It is being increasingly made in countries which have low cost sources of natural gas and coal (China and Russia account for ca 40%).

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Manufacture of ammonia
The manufacture of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen takes place in two main stages:

a) the manufacture of hydrogen

b) the synthesis of ammonia (the Haber Process)

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(a) The manufacture of hydrogen

Hydrogen is produced from a variety of feedstocks, mostly from natural gas, coal or naphtha. The ways in which hydrogen is obtained from these feedstocks are dealt with separately.

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(b) The manufacture of ammonia (The Haber Process)

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Postscript

The Haber Process is of such importance to our lives that it has figured in three Nobel Prizes in chemistry, all to German scientists, over a period of nearly 90 years, a remarkable record.

The first was given in 1918, to Fritz Haber, the chemist who developed the process in the laboratory. The second was to Carl Bosch, whose brilliant engineering skills made the process viable on a massive scale, but who waited until 1931 for his award.

In 2007, Gerhard Ertl was awarded the Prize for his work on catalysis of gaseous reactions on solids. Among the wide range of reactions he studied, he gained evidence for the adsorption of nitrogen molecules and hydrogen molecules on the surface iron and that these adsorbed molecules dissociate into atoms. These atoms then join up in stages to form the ammonia molecule. It must be remembered that the conditions used in these studies (at less than 10^-10 atm) are very different from the conditions used in industry, ca 150 atm.

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The Essential Chemical Industry

The Haber Bosch process feeds half of humanity

About 25% of bulk chemical natural gas consumption is used as a feedstock for fertilizer production, fossil fuels contribute to the value added to our economy by farming.  The Haber-Bosch process, which manufactures synthetic fertilizer from natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen, feeds nearly half of the world population.

How Has the War on Fossil Fuels Driven the Urea Shortage?

The War on Fossil Fuels has largely been fought by attempting to deprive fossil fuel producers of capital and force the replacement of fossil fuels with unreliable renewable resources (wind & solar). This strategy was best summed up by Saule Omarova, whose nomination as Comptroller of the Currency was scuttled by at least five Senate Democrats.

President Biden’s controversial, Soviet-born pick to lead a key branch of the Treasury Department admitted in a newly unearthed video that she “wants” traditional fuel industries “to go bankrupt.”

Saule Omarova, Biden’s pick to be the comptroller of the currency, was filmed calling coal, oil and gas “troubled industries” in which “a lot of the small players … are going to probably go bankrupt.”

“At least, we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change, right?” she said in the now-viral clip.

The Cornell University law professor made the remarks in February during a “Social Wealth Seminar” event hosted by the Jain Family Institute, a nonprofit research organization, Fox News said.

NY Post

The investment community has also been fighting a War on Fossil Fuels…

Why energy prices are high and rising.

The true origin of today’s energy crisis isn’t the 2020 COVID crash, but rather, the 2014 oil-price collapse. 

In the first years of the last decade, China’s strong growth propelled a global commodities boom, and kept the price of oil hovering around $100 a barrel. This was a boon to energy investors in the short run. But the rally sowed the seeds of its own undoing. Forms of energy extraction that had been prohibitively expensive when oil was trading at $60 a barrel suddenly became eminently profitable. Capital poured into America’s shale industry. Thus, the supply of fossil fuel on global markets rapidly increased. At the same time, slowing global growth combined with advances in energy efficiency lowered global energy demand.

Traditionally, OPEC would have responded to such conditions by trying to stabilize global prices by pumping less oil. But Saudi Arabia saw opportunity in a sustained energy glut.

As a conventional oil producer, Saudi Aramco had a much lower break-even price than America’s shale drillers. And as a sovereign government with a foreign-currency reserve worth $750 billion, the Saudis could afford to sell energy at a loss for a lot longer than private firms in the Permian basin. Thus, by keeping the taps on and allowing global energy prices to crash, the House of Saud could reclaim the global market share that frackers had so rudely wrestled from it.

As a result, the price of oil plunged by 70 percent between mid-2014 and early 2016.

All this had two lasting consequences for global energy markets that are integral to today’s crisis. First, investors’ appetite for new oil and gas production collapsed. Global capital craves steady returns, not 70 percent price swings.

Long-term shareholders in fossil-fuel firms pressured managers to cut back investment in favor of dividends. Many such shareholders had sustained heavy losses during the crash, and therefore refused to sanction risky new projects until they recouped their initial investments.

Second, the combination of advances in fracking technology and a glutted energy market made natural gas unprecedentedly abundant and cost-competitive with coal. Utilities therefore started replacing coal-fired power plants with gas-fired ones, and the global electricity system became newly reliant on natural gas.

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NY Magazine

The sustained efforts of activists to defund fossil fuel companies, coupled with the investment community’s demands to “to cut back investment in favor of dividends” have caused the inability to ramp up production fast enough to keep up with surging demand. And this is why we suddenly have a synthetic fertilizer crisis…

Nitrogen fertilizer shortage threatens to cut global crop yields -CF Industries
By Rod Nickel

November 4, 2021

Nov 4 (Reuters) – A shortage of nitrogen fertilizer due to soaring natural gas prices is threatening to reduce global crop yields next year, CF Industries, a major producer of the crop nutrient, said on Thursday.

European gas prices have jumped amid high demand, as economies recover from the pandemic and with below-average gas storage levels at the start of the winter heating season. Natural gas is a key input in the production of nitrogen-based fertilizers and higher costs have caused some producers to cut production.

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Reuterss

“European gas prices have jumped”… In Three Easy Charts

The wholesale destruction of our coal-fired power plant infrastructure and an unjustified fear of nuclear power, coupled with the low capacity factors of wind and solar power has made the world increasingly reliant on natural gas for power generations. Efforts to defund the oil & gas industry and the investment community’s demands that we focus on investor returns rather than growth, while also reducing the carbon intensity of our operations have driven natural gas prices through the roof in areas of the world dependent on imported LNG. This has left us in a situation where many nations will have to choose between freezing in the dark this winter or facing food shortages come spring.

Norman Borlaug is probably rolling over in his grave right now.

Any questions?

Reference

Erisman, J. W., Sutton, M. A., Galloway, J., Klimont, Z. & Winiwarter, W. How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nat. Geosci.1,636–639 (2008)