Fertilizer Production in the United States: How Big Ag is Fossil Fueled

Products derived from oil and gas are ubiquitous in our lives—and so are their impacts. As society becomes increasingly aware of the risks associated with petrochemicals, one common concern centers around the production and disposal of single-use plastic products. However, there are many other issues related to the petrochemical industry. A prime example: the connection between agriculture and petrochemicals.

But how interdependent are industrial-scale agriculture and the oil and gas industry? And what are the concerns? In this article, we explore the linkages between the two industries, including the history of agricultural development in America and its connection to industrial chemical manufacturing.

Fertilizer and Fossil Fuels

There are many examples of connections between large-scale commercial agriculture and the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries. One example of this is commodities such as corn and soybeans being coated in plastics to allow for the controlled release of fungicides and insecticides. However, the most time-tested example of how reliant these two behemoths are connected: industrial agriculture’s historic reliance on nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers.

As farming practices have eroded topsoil and depleted once-fertile grasslands of the greater Midwest, often referred to as the “breadbasket” for its role in producing high volumes of wheat and other staple food crops, reliance on fertilizer has only continued to grow in the last hundred years—which in turns drives the fossil fuel industry.

The History of Fertilizer Production

The connection between fossil fuels and fertilizer begins with production. Producing nitrogen fertilizer for US cropland depends on cheap and unfettered access to natural gas to fuel the Haber-Bosch process, an industrial chemical manufacturing process developed to synthesize ammonia.

Discovered by Nobel Prize-winning chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch in the early 1900s, this process converts N2 into Ammonia (NH3) by reacting it with hydrogen (H) at extremely high temperatures (>900F) and pressures (2,200-2,900 psi). Producing the hydrogen feedstock needed for the Haber-Bosch process requires using natural gas for steam reformation to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

By middle of the twentieth century, aided and abetted by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations’ scientists like Norman Borlaug, technological advances in nitrogen production helped spur what came to be known as the “Green Revolution”, the precursor to modern industrial agriculture characterized by massive alterations of plant genetics, modern irrigation, rampant deployment of all manner of herbicides and pesticides, and the full-throated advocacy for the utility of synthetic nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers.

Though the Green Revolution is credited for having increased yields significantly where it was implemented, even earning its architect Norman Borlaug a Nobel Prize in 1970, many others were sounding alarms about the potential ecological and socioeconomic impacts of such intensive agriculture, including Anne and Paul Ehrlich in their classic book Population Bomb (1968), and, even more famously, the venerable Rachel Carson in her classic call to arms Silent Spring (1962).

In the US, large agricultural interests didn’t need much coaxing to embrace the fertilizer revolution that was catalyzed by Haber and Bosch, and later implemented on a large scale by Borlaug, the “father of the Green Revolution”, and his fellow proselytizers.

Modern Impacts

Today, not only is using the Haber-Bosch process for fertilizer production responsible for approximately 1.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions, no matter where it’s used—whether used in the Great Plains of the US, or the rice fields of Southeast Asia—nitrogen and phosphorus applications exact a price from the environment and people that apply them.

Numerous studies to date have demonstrated the deleterious impacts of Input Intensive Agriculture (IIA) on biodiversity, water quality and quantity, small farmers, food quality, and human health.

Furthermore, whether producing a percentage of the 11.9 million tons of nitrogen used by industrial agriculture in a plant in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, or a fraction of the 3.7 million tons of phosphorus used and derived from mining phosphate rock east of Tampa, Florida, we are relying on natural gas to keep the price of both processes affordable, and therein is the longest running link between “big ag” and “big oil and gas”.