My first thought from this is that (if my napkin math is right) I'm apparently pissing away a penny a day.
There was a time when leather tanners used to collect the urine from bars - I guess the tanners paid for it.
Urea prices
61–70 of 100 posts
Re: Urea prices
#62Yes urea is used in fertilizer. Yes, the price is going up relative to May 13, 2024 (lowest in 5 years). look at the chart in the article, then click 5Y on the bottom of the chart. Click the + sign between the calendar and wrench icon Type in "US Food inflation". It will overlay the "urea" price with the "US food inflation". Yes, urea seems to be a leading indicator. It is nothing like in 2022, yet .
Really interesting. It made me curious to dig in and learn that urea production starts with natural gas. And if you add natural gas to the chart as well urea and natural gas prices generally track together without a lag either way, except natural gas doesn't have the recent uptick seen in urea. I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or…
Not sure which natural gas that’s referencing, but looks to be a US index (Henry Hub or so) - note the peak corresponds to a cold snap, not the Iran war. Natgas is tricky because it’s: difficult to store and difficult to transport (aside from well-established pipelines), so you have a massively disjointed market between various deliver markets (look at NY Henry Hub vs Dutch TTF), and also a massively disjointed market between delivery delivery dates (natgas calendar spread trades has been nicknamed “widowmakers”)
Re: Urea prices
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's debatable whether biofuels reduce CO2. I think it's better to understand them as subsidies for agriculture.
Could you elaborate?
Re: Urea prices
#64What if we collectively pee in buckets (to not dilute it with water and other human by-products) and give them to refineries for purification? /s
I tried an experiment a few years back. I peed into a small bucket and watered my curry leaf plant with it, not realizing that it need to be diluted. The plant "died" within a few weeks. I just left the pot and plant be. A few weeks later it started sprotuing again and that was the healthiest curry leaf plant I had ever seen. It had leaves double the size and it grew so fast that we had to give away curry leaves to neighbours
Re: Urea prices
#65Yes urea is used in fertilizer. Yes, the price is going up relative to May 13, 2024 (lowest in 5 years). look at the chart in the article, then click 5Y on the bottom of the chart. Click the + sign between the calendar and wrench icon Type in "US Food inflation". It will overlay the "urea" price with the "US food inflation". Yes, urea seems to be a leading indicator. It is nothing like in 2022, yet .
One of those is an absolute value (urea $) and one is a rate of change (food price inflation). Maybe I’m being dumb, but why are they tracking almost 1:1, both with linear Y axis?
I can compare Urea $ to Crude Oil $ and get an even closer 5 year correlation. Are we actually indexing against something else here?
Edit: that is, perhaps urea prices are driven mostly by energy costs, which in turn drives inflation rates.
Re: Urea prices
#66> For use in industry, urea is produced from synthetic ammonia and carbon dioxide. As large quantities of carbon dioxide are produced during the ammonia manufacturing process as a byproduct of burning hydrocarbons to generate heat (predominantly natural gas, and less often petroleum derivatives or coal), urea production plants are almost always located adjacent to the site where the ammonia is manufactured. To be cle…
No, capturing CO2 from combustion is hard. Ammonia plants might burn methane for heat, but they don't capture its output.
The actual Haber–Bosch process for reaction directly spits methane into Hydrogen (which is combined with Nitrogen from the air) leaving CO2 as a byproduct.
The resulting CO2 is relatively pure, and it's already captured. You can feed it into anther process (such as Urea) or sell it for carbonisation of drinks.
Re: Urea prices
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's debatable whether biofuels reduce CO2. I think it's better to understand them as subsidies for agriculture.
Could you elaborate?
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.
Re: Urea prices
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2022 And that was specifically due to the (ongoing) Russian Invasion of Ukraine. After the 2022 spike, most large countries began building alternative supply chains to reduce impacts from these kinds of hits. For example, the US and Europe largely doesn't use urea unlike Brazil, India, and China. This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technolog…
Is it really hydrogen energy if your plan for the hydrogen gas is turning it into ammonia? Would give you another use for it, I suppose.
There were plans to build a hydrogen plant near Whyalla in South Australia, a famous steel-making site; see e.g. [1]. The tl;dr uses were export (I expected ammonia but the whole thing was vague enough to include hydrogen) on boats, reduction of iron ore ("decarbonisation", apparently requires magnetite) and while all the financial engineering that didn't happen was going to happen, energy storage for the grid, soaking up S.A.'s over-abundant solar.
Someone observed that this was the entirety of the presently-outgoing (but sure to be re-elected) state regime's story about reducing electricity bills in the state.
[1] https://research.csiro.au/hyresource/south-australian-govern...
Re: Urea prices
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-globa... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-natural-gas-prices-rise-130...
Doh! That makes a lot of sense. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks for the links, they are great reads.
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.
Re: Urea prices
#70> For use in industry, urea is produced from synthetic ammonia and carbon dioxide. As large quantities of carbon dioxide are produced during the ammonia manufacturing process as a byproduct of burning hydrocarbons to generate heat (predominantly natural gas, and less often petroleum derivatives or coal), urea production plants are almost always located adjacent to the site where the ammonia is manufactured. To be cle…
No, capturing CO2 from combustion is hard. Ammonia plants might burn methane for heat, but they don't capture its output. The actual Haber–Bosch process for reaction directly spits methane into Hydrogen (which is combined with Nitrogen from the air) leaving CO2 as a byproduct. The resulting CO2 is relatively pure, and it's already captured. You can feed it into anther process (such as Urea) or sell it for carbonisati…
So, better to power the ammonia plant with clean electricity, and source methane from methane capture projects?