Published October 2, 2025
By Taylor Hodge, United States Agrochemicals and Fossil Fuels Advocate, Lisa Tostado, Agrochemicals and Fossil Fuel Advocate, and Lindsey Jurca Durland, Senior Citizen Communications Project Expert at the Center for International Environmental Regulation
Fossil fuels permeate our food systems– from transportation and power to plastic packaging. Price quotes show that food systems consume about 15 % of international fossil fuels each year. One major vehicle driver of this nonrenewable fuel source dependancy typically flies under the radar: fertilizers. Namely, artificial nitrogen fertilizers contribute in fueling the climate dilemma and hurting human health and wellness– addressing them is crucial to developing a just, fossil-free food future.
Plant Foods Are Usually Nonrenewable Fuel Sources in Another Kind
More than half of synthetic plant foods used around the world are nitrogen-based and stemmed from fossil gas or coal. This is why we call them fossil fertilizers
Plants need nutrients like nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) to expand. Essentially all synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is made from nonrenewable fuel sources– concerning 70 % fossil gas and nearly all the remainder from coal. While phosphorus and potassium are produced from extracted ores , creating any kind of artificial fertilizer is energy-intensive, and the mining market is heavily depending on fossil fuels Like various other fossil fuel products, fossil plant foods create considerable damage to the environment, climate, and human wellness throughout their entire supply chain.
Removal: The Surprise Expense
The fossil plant food supply depends on the extraction of fossil gas and coal. While all extraction is unsafe, methods like fracking, usual in the United States, have been connected to leukemia, preterm births, bronchial asthma, and sudden death in older individuals.
Manufacturing: Poisonous Factories Are Horrible Next-door Neighbors
Fossil plant food plants contaminate the land, water, and air of bordering areas, damaging communities and human wellness. In 2021, thirty US nitrogen plant food facilities released 7 7 million pounds of nitrogen contamination, consisting of 3 9 million pounds of ammonia, the vital intermediate product for all synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, into waterways. Among the largest ammonia plants, CF Industries’ Donaldsonville Facility in Louisiana, discharges countless pounds of toxic chemicals yearly, consisting of ammonia itself and formaldehyde, a potential carcinogen.
In the US, petrochemical manufacturing– consisting of fertilizer centers– is among the markets that impose out of proportion hazardous problems on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and bad communities. Proximity to petrochemical facilities can bring about raised prices of cancer cells, reproductive health problems, and respiratory illness.
Application
Fossil fertilizer usage launches powerful greenhouse gases, consisting of nitrous oxide (N 2 O), which has the prospective to warm up the planet 273 times greater than carbon monoxide 2, and is additionally one of the most essential dizzying ozone-depleting exhaust.
As much as 80 % of responsive nitrogen applied as plant food does not feed food production however rather pollutes dirt, rivers, and the environment. Nutrient contamination can infect groundwater, produce dangerous algal blooms, and create dead areas in oceans, such as in the Gulf of Mexico, where the dead zone stretches over 4, 000 square miles
Using artificial fertilizers might contribute to nitrate contamination in drinking water. Nitrate contamination in alcohol consumption water is a widely known risk variable for ‘blue baby’ disorder or infant methemoglobinemia, which, in serious situations, can create coma and death. Nitrate intake can likewise form N-nitroso substances (NOCs), which are probable carcinogens according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer Cells (IARC) While more research study must be done, a growing body of proof has begun to link nitrate consumption to intestines cancer, thyroid disease, and neural tube issues
Plant Foods Chain Food Systems to the Fossil Fuel Market
Food systems make up about 15 % of worldwide nonrenewable fuel source usage every year, driving as numerous discharges as all EU countries and Russia combined. In 2020, 4 % of the world’s gas supply was made use of to make ammonia, the precursor to all synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Concerning 70 % of the ammonia internationally is predestined for fertilizers , with demand anticipated to increase.
Corporate ties even more connect the fossil fuel and fertilizer industries with overlapping board participants, along with several oil and gas business owning risks in fertilizer production or with chemical divisions involved in agrochemical manufacturing.
Food Systems Have To Be Reimagined
According to a report by the Food System Economics Commission, the concealed prices of fossil-dependent food systems tally up to trillions of dollars annually, escalating “consistent hunger, undernutrition, the weight problems epidemic, loss of biodiversity, ecological damages, and climate change.” Recent estimates signed up the surprise cost of our fossil-bound, commercial food system at 15 — 20 trillion USD per year– about comparable to the 2025 GDP of China or of all EU nations combined
Industrializ ed agriculture, triggered by the Green Revolution of the 1950 s, has actually tied our food systems to nonrenewable fuel sources with plant foods, chemicals and makers, displacing lasting agricultural methods like agroecology that maintain environment honesty and nourishment. This was stressed in 2021, by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food.
Solutions are Community-led and Fossil Free
The course forward is clear: We should substantially minimize artificial fertilizer usage and holistically change our food systems. This implies supporting methods that improve soil’s natural fertility, such as planting vegetables, crop rotation, including garden compost and manure, and changing international diets far from fertilizer-intensive foods like meat and dairy products. A recent research programs that with such changes, the world can likely feed 10 billion individuals without synthetic nitrogen plant food or farmland expansion.
Agroecology , which integrates native expertise and traditional clinical techniques, might provide a plan for a farming change with tremendous financial, social, and ecological advantages, consisting of greater resilience to a changing environment.
The Moment to Act Is Now
A food system reliant on nonrenewable fuel sources is one that gas climate adjustment, erodes our setting, and harms our health. We require strong shifts toward agroecology and community-led, fossil-free farming.
Our capacity to feed the future depends on reimagining and rebuilding systems that nourish individuals– not nonrenewable fuel source revenues.
See our Frack to Fork truth sheet for more details on Fossil Fertilizers.
Fossil Fertilizer: Just How It’s Made
Fossil plant food manufacturing relies on fossil fuels for both feedstock and power. Hydrogen is divided from the fossil feedstock and blended with nitrogen (from the air) through the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process to develop ammonia (NH 3, the base for all nitrogen fertilizers This process emits 1 9 lots of co2 (CO 2 for every single ton of ammonia. Ammonia might then be converted into ammonium nitrate or urea (CARBON MONOXIDE(NH 2 2– typical kinds of fertilizers. Lots of synthetic fertilizers integrate fossil-based and extracted inputs.
