The way the world works:
1. The development of the need for fertiliser for food production
The Torah lays down the agricultural regulations applying in the land of Israel ensuring that the fields retain their potency to produce food - one year in seven the fields and vineyards should not be tended by the farmers but allowed to grow wild - a period of rest for the land.
As agriculture developed around the world a system of field rotation ensued -each year one out of three fields was left fallow. This was followed by a crop rotation system where one of the three fields was used to grow leguminous crops that in growing returned nitrogen to the soil, thus ensuring that every three years each field received additional nutrients. As time passed this system was surpassed by the addition of manure to the fields that increased the crop yield.
Around the late 1880’s, besides adding manure, the fields were enriched with Chilean nitrate extracted from the Atacama Desert and this lasted till around the 1920’s when the the production of synthetic ammonia through fixation of air by the Haber Bosch Process commenced.
2. Current fertiliser production
In this Haber Bosch process, atmospheric nitrogen was combined with hydrogen over an iron catalyst. The hydrogen together with carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide was derived from the steam reforming of hydrocarbons (liquid or gaseous) over a nickel catalyst at high temperatures and pressures, followed by a Water Gas Shift reaction over an iron or copper catalyst where the carbon monoxide produced was reacted with steam to produce additional carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
This is the basic process employed today. The nitrogen nowadays is derived from Cryogenic Air Separation plants operating at pressure. Additionally, by combining ammonia with carbon dioxide under high pressure and moderate temperatures, a higher grade nitrogen containing fertiliser, urea, is produced.
As such, many ammonia and urea plants were established worldwide based on this Western technology. The processes involved required significant energy both for compression and thermal heating. With the availability of natural gas in the mid to late 1980’s over naphtha or even coal as a feedstock, the cost of the products decreased and consumption increased, bringing with it greater yields to the agricultural sector and a more reliable source of fertilisation over natural methods. Nearly every country had its own production facilities that ranged from 150 tonnes per day in the third world to 1000 tonnes per day in the developed world.
3. Fertiliser production in Gulf States
In the 1980’s the rich Gulf oil producing companies slowly embarked on a course of action that would change both world plastic and fertiliser production. It was decided that instead of just exporting crude oil, as had been the case since the 1920’s where the overseas purchasing countries would refine, and the subsequent downstream petrochemical processes produced raw materials for plastics production, the Gulf would instead engage in large scale refining, enlarge their petrochemical industries to enable them to produce added value products like the building blocks for plastics as well as plastics, organic carbon based compounds and solvents.
With very large scale modern production units that were more efficient, this enabled them to undercut the overseas prices production, increasing their added value as the crude oil raw material was available cheaply at their doorstep. They also forced an increase in crude prices as OPEC restricted crude production to maintain higher market prices. Slowly but surely, they then extended this to the production of ammonia and urea fertilisers in mega-sized modern efficient plants, but as the local market demand was small due to arid conditions, they exported at a lower price than countries could produce in their own old inefficient plants. This allowed them to dictate the price on the world market, thereby becoming major international export players and leaders.
4. Impact of natural gas exploration and production in the Gulf.
Large scale exploration and production of natural gas took hold in the Gulf, but much of which was sour (containing hydrogen sulphide and organic sulphur compounds known as mercaptans), and these compounds had to be removed before liquifaction, since these impurities could result in corrosion. Odorous and poisonous gases also had to be removed because they were polluting during combustion. This resulted in the production of vast quantities of solid sulphur and soon the Gulf states became major exporters - some for use in the production of the main economic indicator, sulphuric acid, and some for sulphur products, some also used in agriculture.
5. Major exporters of fertilisers
Export of fertilisers is confined to a few major players on the tonnage level.
The primary exporters are China, Russia, the Gulf and Turkey. In 2024 the Gulf exported 34 percent of the world’s traded urea and 23 percent of ammonia in terms of nitrogen fertilisers, as well as 50 percent of the world’s sulphur and 17 percent of phosphates. In the 2024 tonnage of supply from the Gulf, sulphur accounted for 20 million, urea 17.5 million, phosphates 5 million and ammonia 3.4 million.
6. Knock on effects of the closure by Iran
To compound the problem of inability to export from the Gulf due to closure by Iran of the Straits of Hormuz, China, Russia and Turkey have exacerbated the problem by imposing restrictions on their exports. Furthermore, like the car industry, the fertiliser Industry operates on a just in time basis, as storage is costly. The only country that maintains any storage is China, which holds 50 percent of the world’s inventory in case of local famine.
7. The crunch
The spring planting season in the Northern hemisphere reaches its peak time in April and May, while in the Southern hemisphere it is the start of the winter planting season. As the industry operates on a just in time supply, it is doubtful if these farmers will have sufficient quantities of fertilisers to ensure maintaining crop yields, resulting ultimately in famine throughout the world.
The shortage has resulted in excessive world prices and this is exacerbated by the shortage created in crude oil exports from the Gulf, that has also seen wild rises in prices of refined products such as diesel. Unless solved asap, this double whammy problem will ultimately result in much higher food prices as well as a shortage causing near famine conditions in the world’s poorer countries producing food insecurity not seen for many generations.