The Sulfur Crisis Threatening the World's Food Supply
Qatar Offers Lebanon 2 Gas Plants and 20 Years of LNG Piped Through Syria Colombia’s largely untapped critical mineral… Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment.
His work has also appeared in The Christian Science… Sulfur has become an indispensable element for the modern industrial system, including agriculture.
Before the outbreak of the Iran war,24 percent of the world's supply of sulfur passed through the Strait of Hormuz.
I can find no reliable information on whether sulfur is being shipped through the strait now after the Iranian government claimed control.
Thesulfur price at the start of the Iran conflict was approximately $500 per metric tonfor sulfur originating from the Middle East.
Some customers paid more than $1,000 in June for Canadian-origin sulfur, a record.
These high prices are threatening worldwide phosphate fertilizer supplies, which depend on sulfuric acid for their production.
To understand why this is happening, it's important to have some background.
In the densely interconnected web of global production, sulfur sits in the middle as the basis for sulfuric acid, a chemical thatfinds wide application in industryincluding for improving octane in gasoline; as raw material for detergents, resins, dyes, and explosives; for the "pickling" of metals, that is, the removal of oxidation from the surface; as an electrolyte in lead-acid batteries; as a laboratory reagent, that is, a chemical used for analysis and synthesis of chemicals; and for the production ofphosphate fertilizer, an essential plant nutrient critical to obtaining high yields in today's industrial agricultural system.
In fact,50 percent of all sulfuric acid is used to make fertilizers, 42.5 percent to make phosphate fertilizer and 7.5 percent to make ammonium sulfate (a source of nitrogen) and sulfur fertilizer products.
(Sulfur is an important soil nutrient by itself.) I mention all these competing uses because they are implicated in the emerging world food crisis that is in large part the result of a dramatic reduction in the availability of sulfur, nitrogen fertilizer, and natural gas (from which most nitrogen fertilizer is derived) from Persian Gulf countries—which are, of course, currently embroiled in the Iran war.
When Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz—the only waterway exiting the Persian Gulf to the ocean—not only were shipments of oil seriously curtailed, but also other key materials, including helium, aluminum, and those just mentioned To understand the nexus between the Iran war and sulfur, it is important to know that sulfur used to be mined directly from underground and surface deposits, first from surface deposits in Sicily and later from underground salt domes in Texas and Louisiana and near volcanoes in Indonesia, Chile and Japan.
| Product | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Brent Crude | $102.14/bbl | +0.34% |
| WTI Crude | $96.90/bbl | +0.21% |
| EN590 Diesel | $846/MT | +0.18% |
| Jet Fuel A-1 | $1090/MT | +0.55% |
| Mazut M100 | $450/MT | -0.15% |
| Bitumen 60/70 | $470/MT | +0.08% |
| Sulphur Gran 99.5% | $470/MT | -0.44% |
| Urea 46% Gran | $650/MT | +1.12% |
| NPK 16-16-16 | $460/MT | -0.28% |
| Nat Gas TTF | $15.42/MMBtu | +0.92% |
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