Yes, it is nothing like 2022 yet. But the concerning thing is that this may be just a beginning of a protracted event, plus the world, and especially Western Europe, is less resilient today to the disruptions in gas supply.
One of those is an absolute value (urea $) and one is a rate of change (food price inflation). Maybe I’m being dumb, but why are they tracking almost 1:1, both with linear Y axis?
I can compare Urea $ to Crude Oil $ and get an even closer 5 year correlation. Are we actually indexing against something else here?
Edit: that is, perhaps urea prices are driven mostly by energy costs, which in turn drives inflation rates.
Yes. Nat gas -> ammonia -> urea. Theres some efficiencies that vary by site but its a hundred year old process of a true commodity. The price per therm _is_ the input.
Was listening to a fertilizer analyst the other day. She thought corn:urea was the better comparison. Nitrogen is the cost of marginal yields. And corn:urea shows the farmer being squeezed between their commodity output price and the required input cost. At some point its just not cost effective to grow corn, so you go soy, and reduced supply should pish up future prices. Oh look! More commodity price inflation pressure!
And that was specifically due to the (ongoing) Russian Invasion of Ukraine. After the 2022 spike, most large countries began building alternative supply chains to reduce impacts from these kinds of hits.
For example, the US and Europe largely doesn't use urea unlike Brazil, India, and China.
This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.
Edit: can't reply
> Is it really hydrogen energy if your plan for the hydrogen gas is turning it into ammonia? Would give you another use for it, I suppose
The whole point of building a hydrogen energy market is becuase hydrogen electrolyzers are dual use, and the methodology to leverage and produce "green" ammonia is similar to "green" hydrogen.
A non-LNG method to mass produce ammonia has always been called out in most countries Hydrogen energy roadmaps such as Japan [0], China [1], and India [2].
A lot of the hate for hydrogen is for a vehicle fuel where it's strictly inferior to batteries, partly because it's such a pain to handle, and partly because it's a "submarine" for natural gas derived H2.
Evolving hydrogen from electrolysis and then immediately turning it into ammonia is a much better idea; ammonia is easier to handle than H2 gas and already has a market.
The Economist was recently citing hydrogen as "deep tech" [1] (meaning long R&D cycles, sometimes unproven techniology no short term profitability, heavy investment, industry-wide transformative power).
Most of your sources have plans focused on hydrogen production, but I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers. There are some in the Hydrogen Roadmap Europe, but it seems focused on transportation [2].
> I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers
It's primarily in Asia and North Africa. For example, India has begun building a 7GW green hydrogen project specifically for urea production [0] and as a technical demonstration. An Egypt-Germany-Norway JV is also expected to be completed by 2027 explicitly for this usecase [1]
There were plans to build a hydrogen plant near Whyalla in South Australia, a famous steel-making site; see e.g. [1]. The tl;dr uses were export (I expected ammonia but the whole thing was vague enough to include hydrogen) on boats, reduction of iron ore ("decarbonisation", apparently requires magnetite) and while all the financial engineering that didn't happen was going to happen, energy storage for the grid, soaking up S.A.'s over-abundant solar.
Someone observed that this was the entirety of the presently-outgoing (but sure to be re-elected) state regime's story about reducing electricity bills in the state.
2022 was abnormally high, caused largely by the disruption of gas supplies to Western Europe after sanctions on Russian gas and the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipeline.
Really interesting. It made me curious to dig in and learn that urea production starts with natural gas. And if you add natural gas to the chart as well urea and natural gas prices generally track together without a lag either way, except natural gas doesn't have the recent uptick seen in urea.
I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply?
> I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply
One of India's SOEs recently paused Urea production at some plants due to NatGas issues from the ongoing conflict [0].
Additonally, India began reducing purchasing of Russian LNG in late 2025.
India also launched a tender to purchase urea on the global market in February [1].
This led to a double whammy for urea in the short term given how Indian agriculture is heavily Urea dependent (around 70-80% of all fertilizers used in India are Urea).
But the same SOE recently announced it's restarted operations earlier today [2] and India has restarted spot purchases of what appears to be Russian LNG [3][4] that was originally destined for Europe (especially Hungary and Slovakia).
Edit: can't reply
I'm not a god damn LLM and I do not use AI to write my comments. If you can't engage with an argument, then fuck off.
Not sure which natural gas that’s referencing, but looks to be a US index (Henry Hub or so) - note the peak corresponds to a cold snap, not the Iran war. Natgas is tricky because it’s: difficult to store and difficult to transport (aside from well-established pipelines), so you have a massively disjointed market between various deliver markets (look at NY Henry Hub vs Dutch TTF), and also a massively disjointed market between delivery delivery dates (natgas calendar spread trades has been nicknamed “widowmakers”)
I guess it is users' accounts, so service accounts are exempt? I would hate to see a headless server rebooting and waiting for an age verification from a service account at a power or water sanitation plant...
Maybe all laws should have a "dev environment", starting with the politicians. All their systems will demand their age and proof of age for say 12 months? Toaster, washer, dryer, cell, dishwasher, car, calculators, etc. Then, if they still want to pass the law, 3 months of red teaming by the "general public" for all the systems that have their data. And, if they still want it, go for it.
> The DB48X project intends to rebuild and improve the user experience of the HP48 family of calculators
They just updated their license to exclude California residents. The law is so vague there is a possibility to apply it against the project, per project team.
i did not even think of that! As the current law reads, will smart devices with OSes require age verification? Many IoTs are just tiny Linux versions running on a small processor. This makes all smart GE washing machines, dryers and refrigerators illegal in California.
come to think of it, maybe there is something good about this law. :D
I have played this game on the road so many times, just by myself. Airports, hotel lobbies, waiting for taxi, and more. I never played it online though. It is my "TV" to disconnect my brain from the day to day work troubles and hustles. It is not as boring as sitting front of a TV and just consume; it forces me to strategize a bit, use at least a tiny bit of my left over brain cells.
I cannot tell if this is /s or real. there is an entire genre of art that specifically about functionality - functional art. Chairs, tables, buildings, vases, textile, and so on can be beautiful art yet functional.
> Why does i2p (per the article) expect state sponsored attacks every February?
Because The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) allows government dissidents to communicate without the government oversight. Censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication
> Where are those forming from, what does the regularity achieve?
At least PR China, Iran, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait. censor communication between dissidents.
> How come the operators of giant (I’m assuming illegal) botnets are available to voice their train of thought in discord?
How would you identify someone as 'operators of giant botnets' before they identified themselves as 'operators of giant botnets'?
Likely it's just a coincidence — there were other Sybil attacks that are not in February too, so the chance that you'd get 3 in Feb isn't all that low.
That’s a great question… Currently we’re in the main Chinese holiday period with the Lunar New Year/Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, so perhaps people traveling back home from foreign lands might use the service more during this time?
I know no one using this in China. And people who can afford to travel (and have visa and passport) will have foreign sim/phone. The timing is just a coincidence
In the context of the paper, the entire book seems to go downhill from the definition of ontology for me.
There is no benefit of using Gruber's ivory tower definition. A simpler explanation (e.g., it describes a structured framework that defines and categorizes the entities within a specific domain and the relationships among those entities) would have sufficed, and easier to digest.
Palantir is doing nothing revolutionary or "paradigm shift" when it comes to data and information organization. Their secret weapon is not introducing ontology to information.
Ching (1000BC?) classified reality into binary ontological primitives, created trigrams and hexagrams a combinatorial ontology. Aristotle introduced categories, substance, properties, relations, etc. Thomas Aquinas systemized Aristotelian categories into theological knowledge systems, and used structured classifications.
I am becoming curmudgeony as I see more and more of these reverse-research papers. Write the paper, then find references that fit the statement and use weasel words ...
unbelievable scene unfolds, deep-rooted disease of silos, paradigm shift, fatal flaws, forged in these extreme environments, eliminated to the absolute limit...
look at the chart in the article, then click 5Y on the bottom of the chart.
Click the + sign between the calendar and wrench icon
Type in "US Food inflation". It will overlay the "urea" price with the "US food inflation".
Yes, urea seems to be a leading indicator. It is nothing like in 2022, yet.
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