“High fertiliser prices could exert inflationary pressures on food prices, compounding food security concerns at a time when the Covid pandemic and climate change are making access to food more difficult,” the bank said in a post. What’s the problem?ĭemand and supply shifts have contrived to push up fertiliser prices by about threefold in a year, according to the World Bank. Instead, it will rely on its international supply chains to replace the manufactured product, at least until it can determine the viability of making so-called green ammonia using hydrogen at scale as the substitute feedstock for fossil gas. The facility had been unable to secure “an economically viable long-term gas supply”. That company told the stock exchange last month it plans to close its main urea plant in Brisbane’s Gibson Island by the end of next year. According to Volker Hessel, a professor at the University of Adelaide, Australia’s largest producer, Incitec Pivot, has a capacity of about 290,000 tonnes a year, or one-800th of the total. Global urea production is about 220m tonnes a year. The main feedstock for the world’s urea production is gas, which is first converted to ammonia under high temperatures and pressure, and then into liquid urea. These include as an agricultural fertiliser, but also to reduce nitrous oxides produced in combustion engines. Since 1828, when the German chemist Friedrich Wohler developed a process to synthesise the compound, urea has also been produced in bulk for human uses. Urea is a handy, naturally occurring chemical compound – CO(NH 2) 2, also known as carbamide – that is found in mammalian urine, among other places.
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