The gasoline costs are unmissable.
Because the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, Brent crude oil has surged previous $100 a barrel for the primary time in 4 years, briefly topping $119 on March 19. California drivers are paying over $5 a gallon, whereas gasoline costs in Japan hit a file excessive. The Worldwide Vitality Company (IEA) coordinated a launch of 400 million barrels from strategic petroleum reserves — the most important in historical past. Gasoline station worth boards have changed frightened inventory merchants because the picture du jour of financial disaster.
So that’s the disaster you already know about.
Right here’s one it’s possible you’ll not: the Strait of Hormuz, now successfully closed to Western-allied industrial transport for the third consecutive week, is a key route for extra than simply oil. It additionally carries roughly a 3rd of the world’s seaborne fertilizer commerce — together with almost half of all international urea exports and 30 p.c of ammonia, based on farm sector analysts. These are the chemical constructing blocks that make our present agricultural system potential. When Iran shut the strait, it didn’t simply curtail gasoline. It curtailed entry to one of many primary elements of recent meals.
“We’re up for a meals catastrophe and all we speak about is gasoline costs,” Michael Werz, a senior fellow on the Council on International Relations who makes a speciality of meals safety, informed the Atlantic this week.
He’s proper. And the explanation most individuals don’t see this disaster coming is that most individuals don’t perceive what fossil fuels really are — and precisely what we actually want them for.
The chain that retains us alive
After we take into consideration fossil fuels, we take into consideration burning them — in our vehicles, in energy crops, in furnaces. That’s the model of fossil gasoline dependence that dominates the general public dialog, and it’s the model that the clear power transition is, progressively, addressing. Renewables now generate greater than half of Germany’s electrical energy, led by photo voltaic and wind. Electrical automobiles are rising quick.
This represents actual progress, and it’s one purpose why many international locations are higher outfitted to deal with this oil disaster than earlier ones. However fossil fuels aren’t simply gasoline. They’re, in a fairly literal sense, the molecular basis of recent civilization.
When you don’t imagine me, ask somebody who is aware of much more about this (and about most issues, actually): the Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil.
Smil, who we named to our Future Excellent 50 record in 2024, has spent a long time cataloguing the world’s unexpectedly deep dependence on fossil fuels in books that must be required studying for anybody who needs to know fashionable life. In his 2022 How the World Actually Works, he identifies 4 “materials pillars” of civilization: cement, metal, plastics, and ammonia. All 4 require fossil fuels not merely as an power supply however as a primary chemical enter with out which the manufacturing course of can not occur.
Ammonia is the one which issues most proper now. By means of the century-old Haber-Bosch course of, pure gasoline is mixed with atmospheric nitrogen at excessive temperatures and pressures to supply ammonia, which is then transformed into the nitrogen fertilizers that maintain international agriculture. Smil estimates that roughly half the nitrogen in our our bodies comes from this course of. In its absence, international agriculture might assist maybe 3 to 4 billion folks, far lower than the greater than 8 billion alive at the moment. The distinction at the moment — these 4-plus billion folks — is fed, in a really actual chemical sense, by fossil fuels.
The Persian Gulf is a fertilizer powerhouse — the identical plentiful pure gasoline that powers economies around the globe additionally serves because the feedstock for ammonia manufacturing. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are main fertilizer exporters, and the broader Gulf area is a important provider of urea, ammonia, sulfur, and phosphates. Iranian drones struck QatarEnergy’s services early within the warfare, denting LNG manufacturing. Yesterday, its CEO revealed to Reuters that the cumulative harm is much worse than initially understood: 17 p.c of Qatar’s LNG export capability could have been knocked offline for maybe three to 5 years. As a result of that very same pure gasoline is the feedstock for ammonia and fertilizer manufacturing, this implies the disruption to the worldwide meals provide chain will outlast any ceasefire.
What has occurred is Econ 101. Urea costs have surged because the disaster started, hitting farmers simply as spring planting ramps up. That timing issues: fertilizer is without doubt one of the greatest variable prices in crop manufacturing, and better costs now might ripple into decrease yields and better meals costs later this yr.
Whereas the world has an structure of response for an oil disaster like this one — strategic petroleum reserves, bypass pipelines from Saudi Arabia to the Crimson Sea, naval escort discussions, IEA coordination — virtually none of that exists for fertilizer. G7 international locations don’t keep strategic fertilizer reserves. The Saudi bypass pipeline carries crude, not ammonia. A ship captain daring sufficient to courageous the strait beneath drone hearth would select to hold oil over fertilizer — it’s price extra per ton. Every bit of disaster infrastructure is constructed to guard the commodity that markets perceive and worth extra. Fertilizer, the commodity that really feeds folks, is an afterthought.
Worse, the international locations that depend upon imported fertilizer most are those least outfitted to compete for scarce provide. India, which imports greater than half its LNG from the Gulf and whose monsoon planting season begins in June, had already seen home fertilizer producers minimize urea output. Brazil, the world’s largest fertilizer importer, makes use of sources uncovered to disruptions within the Center East. Sub-Saharan African international locations — those whose fertilizer use dropped most in the course of the 2022 Ukraine-driven worth spike — might as soon as depend on overseas support to fill gaps. With USAID dissolved and most of its features absorbed elsewhere, that backstop could also be gone.
This burgeoning disaster demonstrates why diversifying away from fossil fuels and the chokepoints they stream by means of is so pressing. Most of the international locations which have been weathering the scenario finest — like Spain with its plentiful photo voltaic buildout — are those that invested in options.
However the power transition that’s underway has been, overwhelmingly, an electrical energy story — and electrical energy is just a few fifth of worldwide closing power consumption. The issues that feed folks, transfer freight, warmth buildings, and make supplies — the deep bodily infrastructure of a globalized planet — stay virtually completely depending on fossil hydrocarbons. (Whereas international locations just like the US which have plentiful fossil gasoline reserves are in a greater place, sources like oil and ammonia are priced on a world market, so there’s a restrict to how impartial anybody may be.) Although in principle you may make ammonia with out fossil fuels — use renewable electrical energy to supply hydrogen, then feed it into the identical course of — such “inexperienced ammonia” remains to be a rounding error in international manufacturing. It’s nowhere close to the size that would feed a nation, not to mention a planet.
The Hormuz disaster has achieved one thing uncommon: It’s making the invisible seen. It has proven us, in actual time, that fashionable civilization rests on a molecular basis most individuals have by no means thought of — methane turned to ammonia turned to nitrogen turned to meals. That basis is extraordinary. It has enabled essentially the most affluent period in human historical past, the feeding of billions who wouldn’t in any other case exist. It’s one thing we should always have a good time.
It’s also, as we’re studying proper now, terribly fragile. The best response to that fragility is to shore up these chains, to diversify by means of backups and options. As an alternative, the Trump administration, in its huge carelessness, has chosen to smash all of it up, because it has achieved with so many different treasured issues.
A model of this story initially appeared within the Future Excellent publication. Join right here!
