Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | Fertilizer nitrogen is produced from atmospheric nitrogen using natural gas. Since air is 85% nitrogen gas it is essentially free, the major cost is the natural gas. It takes 3/4 lb of natural gas to make a lb of N as ammonia, 0.95 lbs of natural gas to make a lb of N as urea. Once you build the plant, natural gas is the only cost as you can make electricity using the waste heat. At the moment, natural gas is very inexpensive.
Rock phosphate, on the other hand, is a mined mineral, the good deposits of which are few in number, all known and closely held. There's no incentive for the owners to mine & sell something cheap which they know they have control over and nobody will ever underbid them. It doesn't help that you're bidding against every other agricultural and some industrial users in the world.
Maybe the best strategy you can employ is to go to in-furrow applications for row crops. Depending on the soil and other factors a good deal of applied phosphorus is made unavailable or leached away as water pollution. Supposedly, with in-furrow applications you can reduce the phosphorus applications to something like 2/3ths and still get optimum yield. |
Why is Phosphorous so Expensive?
