Gas prices are not missing.
Since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran on February 28. Brent crude oil has crossed $100 a barrel for the first time in four years, it briefly exceeded $119 on March 19. California drivers are paying more than $5 a gallon, while gasoline prices in Japan. hit a record high. The International Energy Agency (IEA) coordinated a the release of 400 million barrels from the strategic petroleum reserve – the largest in history. Gas station price boards have it changed worried stock traders as an image of the day of the economic crisis.
So that’s the crisis you know.
Here’s one you might miss: The Strait of Hormuz, now closed to commercial shipping of Western partners for the third week in a row, it is an important way for more fat. It also carries about a third of the world’s marine fertilizer trade – including almost half of all world sales of urea and 30 percent of ammonia; according to analysts of the agricultural sector. These are the chemical building blocks that make our current agricultural system possible. When Iran closed the strait, it didn’t just cut off oil. It limited access to one of the staples of the modern diet.
“We’re ready for a food disaster and what we’re talking about is gas prices,” Michael Werz, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who focuses on food security, said. he told The Atlantic this week.
He is fine. And the reason most people don’t see this problem coming is that most people don’t understand what fossil fuels really are – and why we really need them.
The chain that keeps us alive
When we think of fossil fuels, we think of burning them – in our cars, in power plants, in furnaces. That’s the version of fossil fuel dependence that dominates public discourse, and it’s the version that the transition to clean energy, slowly, is addressing. Renewables now produce more than half of Germany’s electricityguided by the sun and the wind. Electric cars are growing rapidly.
This represents real progress, and is one reason why many countries are better equipment to handle this oil problem than before. But fossil fuel is not just fuel. They are, in a real sense, the molecular basis of modern civilization.
If you don’t believe me, ask someone who knows a lot about this (and about a lot of things, really): Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil.
Smil, whom we named after ourselves Future Perfect 50 list in 2024has spent decades charting the world’s deep dependence on fossil fuels in books that should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand modern life. In its 2022 How the World Really Workshe identifies four “pillars” of civilization: concrete, steel, plastic, and ammonia. All four require fossil fuels not only as a source of energy but as a basic chemical input from which the production process cannot occur.
Ammonia is currently the most important. Through the old century The Haber-Bosch processnatural gas is combined with atmospheric nitrogen at high heat and pressure to produce ammonia, which is converted into the nitrogen fertilizer that sustains agriculture around the world. Smil estimates that about half of the nitrogen in our bodies comes from this process. In its absence, global agriculture it can help maybe 3 to 4 billion peoplemuch less than the more than 8 billion alive today. In contrast today – those 4 billion-plus people – are fed, in the real chemical sense, by fossil fuels.
The Persian Gulf is a fertilizer hub – the same abundant natural gas that powers economies around the world is also used as feedstock for ammonia production. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are major fertilizer exporters, and the wider Gulf region is an important exporter of urea, ammonia, sulfur and phosphate. Iranian drones hit QatarEnergy facilities earlier in the war, damaging them LNG production. Jana, its CEO disclosed to Reuters that the cumulative damage is worse than previously understood: 17 percent of Qatar’s LNG shipping capacity could be taken offline for three to five years. Because the same natural gas is the feedstock for ammonia and fertilizer production, this means disruption to the global food supply chain will outlast any ceasefire.
What happened is Econ 101. Urea prices have it increased since the crisis started, and hit the farmers as the spring planting starts. That time is important: Fertilizer is one of the biggest variable costs in crop production, and higher prices now could translate into lower yields and higher food prices later this year.
When the world has an architecture to deal with an oil crisis like this – a strategic reserve of petroleum, pipelines from Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea, discussions on naval escorts, coordination of the IEA – almost none of them exist for fertilizer. The G7 countries do not maintain strategic reserves of fertilizers. The Saudi bypass pipeline carries crude, not ammonia. A ship captain brave enough to brave the current under a drone would choose to carry fuel over fertilizer – it’s more valuable per ton. Every piece of crisis infrastructure is built to protect the product that markets understand and value most. Fertilizer, a product that feeds people, is an afterthought.
Worse, the countries that are most dependent on imported fertilizers are the ones that do not have the equipment to compete with the shortage of fertilizers. India, which imports more than half its LNG from the Gulf and whose monsoon planting season begins in June, domestic fertilizer manufacturers had already seen a reduction in urea output. Brazil, the country that imports the most fertilizers in the world, uses open sources of disruption in the Middle East. Sub-Saharan African countries – those that use fertilizers fell further during the Ukraine-driven 2022 price hike – immediately can rely on foreign aid to fill the gaps. With USAID dissolved and most of its functions absorbed elsewhere, that back station may be gone.
This ongoing crisis shows why differentiating away from fossil fuels and the bottlenecks they are experiencing is so important. Many countries that have been facing better conditions – like Spain and his most solar construction – they are the ones who invested in alternatives.
But the ongoing energy transition has been, to a large extent, an electricity story – and electricity is just around the corner. fifth of the final consumption of energy in the world. The things that feed people, move cargo, heat buildings, and manufacture materials — the deep infrastructure of the globalized planet — remain entirely dependent on hydrocarbons. (Although countries like the US that have large oil reserves are in a better place, resources like oil and ammonia are traded on the global market, so there’s a limit to how self-sustainable anyone can be.) Although in theory you can make ammonia without fossil fuels – use renewable electricity to produce hydrogen, then feed it in the same process – such “green ammonia” is still green. cyclical errors in global production. Nowhere near the scale that can feed a nation, let alone a planet.
The Hormuz crisis has done a rare thing: It has made the invisible visible. It has shown us, in real time, that modern civilization is based on a molecular basis that most people have never imagined – methane turned into ammonia which turned into nitrogen which turned into food. That foundation is amazing. It has enabled the most productive era in human history, feeding billions of people who otherwise would not have existed. It is something we should celebrate.
Also, as we are learning right now, it is very weak. The correct response to that vulnerability is to connect these chains, exchange through backups and alternatives. Instead, the Trump administration, in his great carelessnessit has chosen to destroy it all, as it has done with many other valuables.
A version of this story originally appeared on Future Perfect journal. Register here!
