Fertiliser Price Tracker

Green oak

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Essex
Your probably find that’s your 1 tonne of barley seed will come in 4 half tonne bags. 😩 and they haven’t got enough bags because there all made in China.
 

Sprog

Member
Location
South Shropshire
Important isn't what matters though. What matters is whether a profit can be made at the price offered by the market.

Assuming a therm of gas costs £1000 and you can make 1.9t of fert and 3 tonnes of CO2.

If the fertiliser is worth £500/t that's £950, and perhaps CO2 is worth £5/t that makes a total output of £965. Making a loss not a profit, therefore may as well shut the plant down.

Even if the price of CO2 tripled, that would only add an extra £30 to the equation.

I think that's the issue - the CO2 is the by-product as it's not worth processing the gas for alone without being able to sell the fertiliser because it's such low value, even if it is an important commodity in certainy sectors.
You may be right as I’m certainly no expert and I don’t know how much of the CO2 produced is sold and how much, if any, is dumped but a quick google tells me that if I wanted to exchange an empty CO2 cylinder for a refill I would be paying considerably more than £5/t.
Initially the rise in price of fertiliser may well have been a supply and demand issue. Then as gas prices rose fertiliser manufacturers increased prices to try to recoup the extra costs. But it could be that if they marketed their CO2 better then they could charge less for their fertiliser. I really don’t know.
I’m known for talking a load of bollox so feel free to correct my flawed thinking.
 
Radio4 just reporting that the deal with CF is that HMG will 'cover the operating costs' for 3 weeks production for the Billingham factory- At peak /optimal production the factory can produce around 1200t of Nitram a day but it may take a few days to reach this so a rough calculation is it will possibly make 15kt of fertiliser and a similar amount of CO2 - This is negligible in the scale of things and there is no indication that the current gas price will be low enough to alter the original commercial rationale why CF shut down production. Unless an alternative source of CO2 can be secured in a very short time we will be back at the same crisis point in 3 weeks time.

Any chance the deal included a requirement to sell the fertiliser to UK farmers at a reduced price given the cost of production has been covered by the UK tax payer or is the profit the sweetner being gifted to CF who have the UK by the short & curlies?......
 
Something interesting here to mention may be irrelevant.
A fair few farms gone off using fertiliser all together round here. They are on digestate and some have signed up now with tanks in too. A few more I’ve spoken to say they aren’t going to be buying any more fert and going onto digestate. There’s 2 massive tankers turned up with dribble bars on a couple of different farms both do contracting, one has his own artics and tankers to lead it. Results are brilliant too.
I wonder how this will effect the fert production and co2? In time
 

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