Re:Ask HN: Could the fertilizer shortage be caused by weapon...
by PaulHoule on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @10:22AM
(#31248649)
A 1 ton bomb is pretty good sized, a million of those would be 1% of the mass of a year's fertilizer production.
A B-52 can carry about 30 tons, so that is 33,000 sorties of a B-52. The US has 76 of those, that would be 434 sorties per aircraft. I can picture the B-52 fleet dropping that many bombs in a year.
So, a +/- of $3B is a 16% shock to the fertilizer market. That is plus one year of explosives, but if you are going to war, you might need several years, all at once (pow). We are talking about future prices in the grand scheme.
That is in gross, too, we don't know specific chemical or supply bottlenecks: one kink in ammonia might not mean much except for fertilizer production; if ammonia is produced via hydrocarbon extraction, then fertilizer is not only dependent on energy prices, but competing directly with wartime energy supply.