[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," we look at the industry that provides our food, fertilizer.

- Fertilizer industry is like the food you have on your plate.

Is it always done properly?

No.

Is it not done properly on purpose?

No.

- Right.

- For me, it's a lot about distribution of knowledge and really ramping up, especially the countries that are not the most efficient to the other side of the scale so that the food sector in its totality becomes much more efficient.

- You know, I think in the case of the fertilizer industry, there is a stigma with fertilizer use and in the discussion of alternative approaches like organic or regenerative agriculture or sustainability, it's important to realize that supplying crops with nutrients is very important to ensure the productivity and the consistency of the food supply globally, but also ultimately to provide the nutrients that we need as humans to- - Right, right.

- Thrive.

[Scott] Coming up the incredible benefits and enormous challenges of fertilizers.

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Shaping global leaders, driving innovation, and transforming the future.

Arizona State, The New American University.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Fertilizer makes modern agriculture possible, which feeds the world.

It turns natural gas, nitrogen from the atmosphere, and mined minerals into plant nutrients, which ultimately end up on our plates to nourish our bodies.

But to do that, fertilizer production and use have large energy and greenhouse gas footprints.

We'll talk about all this and potential ways to make fertilizer more efficient with two industry experts.

Chrystel Monthean has 35 years' experience in fertilizer, working for Yara International in Europe and Latin America, and is now their Executive Vice President for the Americas.

Jason Haegele is the North American Marketing and Innovation Manager for ICL Group, a former Agronomy Manager at WinField United and Research Scientist at DuPont Pioneer.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," we'll dig into fertilizers.

Thanks for joining us to talk about fertilizers today.

A subject I don't think too many people know much about.

Let's just start off with why would a viewer care?

- Two things.

I think it's one of the greatest invention of humankind.

And second, it's contributing more than 50% of what you have in your plate.

- I don't wanna oversimplify, but from the soils to the plants to our bodies or the animals that eat them, and then out the manure and back to the soils.

- Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

- And the circle is complete.

- So human beings, us we need nutrients, that's why we eat what we eat.

Those nutrients that are in the crop are the ones that we need as human being to live basically.

So, there's yes, a link between fertilizer and the food on your plate.

I'm not saying with this that we should eat directly fertilizer.

[Scott laughs] That would be a shortcut.

But- - We need that plant middleman.

- But yes.

Also, what is very important to understand for your viewers is regardless if it's organic manure or synthetic, or mineral fertilizers, all of them are bringing those same nutrients.

[Scott] Right.

- There's different vehicles and different package to bring them.

- Right.

Gotcha.

How's it changed agriculture?

- In crop-based production, nutrients like nitrogen are generally very limiting in natural systems.

You know, farmers in antiquity would focus on using animal manure or human waste or other components to help you bring that nutrition back to their soil.

But ultimately, that was still a limitation to the productivity of those crops.

So, with the modern fertilizer industry, and particularly the modern industrial production of nitrogen, farmers now have a consistent and very concentrated form of fertilizer.

Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other nutrients that can really help enable food production for our growing world population.

- Yeah.

What are the main types of fertilizers and how do we make each one of those high level for us?

- Certainly.

Well, the big three that we talk about are nitrogen, phosphorus, and then potash or potassium, as it's also referred to.

Nitrogen is produced through a process called the Haber-Bosch process, which takes atmospheric nitrogen.

There's around 78% nitrogen in the atmosphere and converts that to a plant available form by combining it with hydrogen.

Phosphate and potassium are both mineral-based fertilizers, so they're mined from the ground.

Or in the case of potassium, sometimes extracted from a brine solution.

Phosphorus, phosphorus rock, also known as calcium phosphate is removed from the ground through a mining process.

It's reacted with acid to make it more available to plants and also to enrich the phosphorus content of the resulting fertilizer.

And then potash or potassium fertilizer is also mined from the ground either in deep underground mines, or in some cases, that brine extraction process from places like the Dead Sea in Israel.

- Okay.

Thoughts to add to that, Chrystel?

- Fertilizer is called as one industry, but in fact, behind this it's very different.

Phosphorus and potash is mostly mining, whereas nitrogen fertilizer is more synthetic.

Energy consumption is high because part of the feedstock is gas, natural gas.

- And so, the nitrogen comes from where?

- So, natural gas is needed both for feedstock and for providing the hydrogen.

So, you get your hydrogen, then you capture through an energy-intensive process, the Haber-Bosch, the nitrogen from the air.

- Okay.

- And then, you get your NH3.

- Okay.

- Which is ammonia.

- Ammonia.

Okay.

- And ammonia is really the root and the origin of any type of nitrogen fertilizer.

- Interesting.

You mentioned natural gas as a source of the hydrogen to go with nitrogen to make ammonia.

Does the industry use a lot of gas, natural gas every year?

- Typically, I see around three percent of the world's natural gas consumption is dedicated to ammonia production.

- That's a lot.

And now, is that three percent mostly going into the methane to get the hydrogen, or is it for the energy that's needed to do the conversion or is it both?

- It's both.

But you know, the majority of it is the feedstock to produce or to provide the hydrogen-- - Okay.

- Atoms for that ammonia molecule.

And then, there are certainly other downstream processes that require energy and natural gas.

- Yeah, I don't have the number right at the top of my head, but I think we consume about 100 trillion cubic feet of gas a year globally.

It's a little more than that.

So, three trillion cubic feet, three percent for this process.

That's real.

- Yeah.

- And that is non-trivial.

So, with the nitrogen fertilizer supply then, that price is affected by the natural gas market then?

- Yep.

If the market is long of nitrogen fertilizer, well, the prices will go down, and then fertilizer producers that have a high production cost will curtail.

So, will stop their production.

- Okay.

- The other reason why some nitrogen fertilizers start curtailing the production is when gas cost is too high also versus the price they can sell fertilizers.

And this is again, when the market tend to be long.

When the market is tighter, there's less correlation between the gas and the fertilizer price.

- Okay.

- But roughly, a finished nitrogen fertilizer accounts for 70% of the cost of production is linked to natural gas.

- And gas, natural gas, unlike oil isn't just fungible.

It's priced regionally more.

It's pretty cheap here in the U.S.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause we have shale.

- Yeah.

- It's a lot more expensive in other places in the world.

- And the war between Russia and Ukraine has had a lot of impact on the flow of products in the fertilizer sector.

One because, for example, sanctioned countries or sanctioned players from Russia who are big supplier of all nitrogen, phosphorous, and potash could not reach certain market, and the opposite come to other region where they were not coming before.

So, it's really a reshuffling.

The map is under reshuffle.

I think it's landing now.

- Right.

I don't think we think always about food and fertilizers when we're thinking about that global security dynamic.

So, who are the big producers?

Which countries are the big producers of fertilizers?

- There are around seven countries that make up around two thirds of total global fertilizer production.

And those countries are the United States and Canada, Belarus and Russia, India and China, and then Morocco.

- And who are the biggest users who uses it?

- We got the same with slight differences.

You still find China, you still find Russia, you have U.S.

And the newcomer that is not a producer is Brazil.

- Interesting.

So, they're exporting a lot of food products, but they have to bring in their fertilizers.

- Exactly.

- And so, when we think about fertilizer production, particularly those fertilizers that are derived from mining activities.

The centers of production don't always overlap with the centers of consumption.

And so, we think about Morocco as an example.

That's a major world producer of phosphate fertilizers.

Canada's a major world producer of potash fertilizers due to the geological formations that are found in those various countries.

- How do you move fertilizers around?

Give me, is it on, is it on?

- Yeah, so, so jokingly, fertilizers are moved by planes, trains and automobiles.

And that's not entirely correct, but it's not far off.

If you take a phosphate fertilizer as an example, produced in Morocco or some other part of the world and it's going to a market like Western Canada, it's gonna travel on an ocean-going vessel to a port like New Orleans.

It's gonna be transferred to a barge and go up the Mississippi River.

At some point it'll be transferred to a train, which will take it to Canada, and then it'll go the final mile in a truck.

So, there's a lot of handling, there's a lot of transportation associated with fertilizers that move through these global supply chains.

And then, you think about some other global markets where the other common forms of transportation may be motorbikes or some other type of vehicle.

Those can be used to move fertilizer that final mile, especially if they're in markets where a farmer might be buying a single bag of fertilizer as opposed to a, you know, a large truck of fertilizer.

- Yeah, yeah.

How does it work?

I take one of these fertilizers and put it on crops.

What happens?

What's the magic here?

- Depends which one you're talking about.

- So, if you take fertilizer like potash or calcium, you apply it into the soil and it's getting absorbed by the soil and is in stock, and ready for future use or immediate use.

If you take nitrogen fertilizer, there's processes that has to happen in the soil by the microorganism so that it's ready for use by the roots of the crop.

- Okay.

- So, a very common nitrogen fertilizer is urea.

- Yeah.

- You apply urea to the soil.

You need a sort of microbe to transform this urea into an ammonia form, and then another sort of microbe to transform it into nitrates, which is the preferred form of nitrogen.

- Okay.

- For crops.

- So, microbes are everywhere.

They do a lot of work.

We're essentially feeding the microbes in, is what you're saying?

- Exactly.

They are fed and then they have emissions as part of their process.

Like, they have their own digestion.

- It's literally their digestion.

- That's their digestion.

And part of their digestion is emitting what we call greenhouse gas.

- Which gases?

- N20, nitrous oxide.

- Oh, nitrous oxide.

- Yeah.

- I mean, is it a lot?

- Well, we calculate that for one ton of urea applied is roughly 1.66 ton equivalent CO2.

- So, one ton of urea is 1.6 tons of?

- Equivalent CO2 - Of equivalent CO2.

As a nitrous oxide.

- Yes.

- This sounds like a big number.

- It's a big number.

- It is.

I think in the case of nitrogen, you know, it's over a hundred million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizers consumed each year.

Phosphates and potash are significant numbers as well, but less.

Phosphates are around 50 million metric tons and potash is around 40 million metric tons of consumption globally each year.

- A hundred million metric tons would be close to 200 equivalent tons, million equivalent tons of CO2, just for the-- - Equivalent.

- Nitrous.

- Yeah.

- All right, so we're not to a billion, but it's hundreds of millions of it in terms of... And that's just releasing from the microbes?

- Yeah.

[Scott chuckles] - But that's-- - Can we give 'em something that doesn't make them emit?

[chuckles] - There are absolutely.

And that's one of the ways in which the fertilizer industry is innovating but also promoting best management practices for nitrogen fertilizers.

The industry refers to these as nitrogen stabilizers or nitrogen additives.

And these chemistries or these molecules when applied to nitrogen fertilizer help to modulate this microbial process that Chrystel was was talking about.

- So, here I am joking, but it's actually happening.

And in the spectrum.

- Or the alternative route is to bring a form of nitrogen that is mostly based on nitrate that is, doesn't need that process in the soil.

- Oh, so it goes directly to the root system?

- Yes.

- It doesn't need the microbial- - Exactly.

- Intervention?

- It has its pros and cons, but that's the alternative route.

- Okay.

- When feasible.

When they're able.

- When feasible?

- Yeah.

- What makes it not feasible?

- Well, those type of fertilizer are not available everywhere.

- Okay.

- It can be explosive.

- Okay.

- The nitrate form.

So, there's some regulation around them.

- And do some countries or regions use fertilizers more efficiently than others?

- Yes, regions and countries do vary in their fertilizer use efficiency, and we can make that very specific to nitrogen use efficiency.

I think globally the average is somewhere around 50%.

So, of the nitrogen applied, 50% is used by the crop and the other 50% is potentially subject to loss in the environment.

There's a big focus on best management practices or what the industry calls the 4R Nutrient Management Standards, applying nutrients at the right place at the right time, in the right form and the right amount.

And so, for a country like the United States that has high levels of productivity, by combining that high level of productivity with the right nitrogen management practices, we can achieve a high nutrient use efficiency or fertilizer use efficiency.

In other markets around the world that are still developing, they're applying high amounts of nitrogen fertilizer relative to the amount of productivity that they achieve and maybe not achieving or promoting those best management practices yet.

But they're quickly catching up in terms of their nutrient use efficiency.

- I guess the upside to that to me if I'm listening right, is there's still a lot of headroom.

We could grow a lot more crops from the soils that we have and feed more people?

This seems like knowledge that we could easily export to all the growers in the world.

- Yeah, for me, it's never a bad intention from the farmers.

It's either not knowing those principles, the 4R that Jason mentioned.

It's not having access to knowledge or not having the economic capacity to buy the right product or the right technology.

- Yeah.

- Even in some countries you have government that are thinking, that are subsidizing fertilizer.

And with the best intention of the world to make it available so that the yields are increasing, but it has the opposite effect because it's not well managed.

- Yeah.

- That's the challenge the industry is facing or the world is facing.

- Right.

So, greenhouse gases in global agriculture, what are the sources?

What are the big sources of greenhouse gases?

- One specific example from the United States, and this is data from 2021 estimated by the US Environmental Protection Agency attributed about 11% of total U.S.

greenhouse gas emissions to agriculture in the United States.

- Oh really?

- The United States is one of the largest agricultural producers in the world.

Significant number of acres of many different crops across the United States, as well as significant producer of various livestock.

Pigs, cows, chickens, et cetera, so.

- Right.

- It is a very big industry with the potential to contribute a lot to- - Right.

- Overall greenhouse gas emissions.

- So, Chrystel, things to add in terms of sources of greenhouse gases from ag and?

- If we look at the totality of greenhouse gas at world scale, a big contributor is land use change.

It's also the reason why we say it's important again to have efficient use of the land, - Right.

- To produce food rather than opening new fields.

[Scott] Right.

- Because opening new fields by itself is also emission.

So, once the land is already agricultural land?

- Yeah.

- Let's make the best use of it.

- Yeah.

- That's when fertilizer have a role to play.

- Yes.

Okay.

Whether they're proportional emissions levels or?

- So, agriculture roughly 20%, 10% land use change, seven percent livestock.

[Scott] Okay.

- One percent rice, paddy rice.

One percent production of fertilizer.

One percent fertilizer application.

- Okay.

That's important to know then.

So, in that plus or minus 20%, land use is a big chunk of it and livestock is a big chunk of it.

- Yeah.

- And then, we start getting down into the... So, if we zoom into the fertilizer part only, manufacture, transport and use, what kind of greenhouse gases are we seeing from those different things?

- N20, nitrous oxide is the biggest one.

So, application is at least 50% and the rest is roughly 25% linked to the production process.

So, linked to fossil energy.

- How does that compare to CO2 in terms of its warming impact?

They're not as much volumetrically, but are they intense like CO2 or?

- That's correct.

You know, nitrous oxide isn't as abundant in the atmosphere compared to CO2, but it is much more potent.

You know, somewhere around 300 times more potent in its warming potential- - Oh?

- Compared to CO2.

- 300 times?

- Correct.

And with nitrous oxide, N20, it also has a relatively long half-life in the atmosphere of, I believe, 100 to 120 years.

So, a little bit can have a significant impact over a long period of time.

- What's the future of the fertilizer industry?

How do you, how do you see it?

Is the industry working to reduce these things with and how so?

- You know, I think it comes back to the form of nitrogen and how we can precisely control that release of nitrogen to the crop when it needs it so that there's never an overabundance of nitrogen in the system relative to what the crop can take up and utilize.

But then also, focusing on other best management practices like nitrogen stabilizers that help to keep nitrogen in a form that is less susceptible to nitrous oxide emissions.

I see a greater dependence or more innovation around recycled nutrients.

So, how we can capture nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from the environment or waste streams like animal waste or human waste, and take those back to the field.

I also see greater focus on other, new sources of nutrients that potentially have a lower carbon footprint compared to what we're currently manufacturing and selling in the marketplace.

And then, I also think with the advent of artificial intelligence and the greater adoption of autonomous vehicles on farm, that will help enable the 4R Nutrient Strategy at an even higher level so that we can precisely, you know when and where crops need those nutrients, and then precisely apply them with autonomous equipment.

- Yeah.

Nice.

How do you see the future of the industry?

- I see it bright, but also under the condition that the industry is also capable of adjusting to the new reality.

I think if you look back after the post second World War, there was a clear need to improve and increase food production.

So, that has been achieved, at least in Europe, and most of the part of the world.

But this also has a cost.

- Right.

- As we said.

The nutrient and nitrogen use efficiency is only 50%, so.

- Yeah.

- So, I think the industry has to collaborate much more with other players in the food system and we need to be more efficient.

So, to use less gas per ton of nitrogen, that's one element.

The second element is using based on available technology at the moment.

We are talking a lot about urea or ammonium form of nitrogen, but if you look at nitrate form of nitrogen, you need to go through the nitric acid route, which is also where N20 emission can happen.

But there is catalyst technology available to reduce those emission by, to zero almost.

- Okay.

- Then, as an industry in the production process, you have the carbon capture and storage so that, to mitigate the emission.

And the last path is renewable energy.

- Final thoughts?

If you wanted to leave our listeners with a point or two, what would you like them to remember?

- What I would like to get across is that fertilizers have led us to where we're at in the development of civilization, at an enabled population.

You know, there are fewer people involved in farming now because of the advances in agriculture that have occurred, including fertilizer use.

Fertilizers will continue to be with us into the future.

And I believe that innovation, continued innovation in the fertilizer industry.

You know, looking at different ways of production, different ways of use, and promoting best management practices all across the world to ensure that all countries and all production systems are achieving high nutrient use efficiency is what the fertilizer industry will focus on in the 21st century.

- How about you, Chrystel?

What thoughts would you like to leave with our listeners?

- That fertilizer is nutrition for the crops and it's very important for feeding, filling up our plates.

That's one.

Also all our respect to the farmers and how we can help them rather than punish them.

And the third point is really, food is so precious that we need to be careful the way we use it.

I'm referring to food loss and food waste.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- It's so difficult to produce a crop, a kilo of wheat or a kilo of potato, or a kilo of coffee.

When it's leaving the farm, what do we do afterward?

This whole food system has a lot of space for improvement in terms of efficiency.

- Yeah.

- For the sake of better environment, for the sake of economy, for the sake of many elements.

- Yeah, well, look, thank you for all you've-- - Thank you.

- Shared with us today.

Merci beaucoup.

- Thank you.

Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

Modern agriculture and the global food supply would not be possible without fertilizer.

It is simply essential to our lives.

It's made mostly in about six countries and transported all over the world.

Potassium and phosphorus fertilizers are mined.

Nitrogen fertilizer, the most abundant type is made with natural gas by splitting off its hydrogen and using that to trap nitrogen from the atmosphere, which combine to make ammonia.

The main fertilizer feedstock.

When applied to the soil, microbes break down nitrogen fertilizer into nitrates that plants can absorb, but half of that nitrogen is released from the soil as nitrous oxides.

As a greenhouse gas, these are 300 times more potent than CO2, which means that global fertilizer use has six percent in the warming impact of the CO2 from fossil fuel and industrial sources.

The industry is aware of this and working to make uptake more effective and encourage a more efficient use of fertilizers.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Major funding provided by Arizona State University.

Home to the Thunderbird School of Global Management, redefining management education to empower transdisciplinary leaders.

Arizona State, The New American University.