The Fertilizer Institute's USDA request-for-information comments, documented in the 2022 process, cited sulfur prices up 198 percent from March 2021 to March 2022 alongside energy, labor, and freight inflation. The association framed fertilizer as a globally traded, geopolitically exposed commodity chain. The PDF is at https://www.tfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/the_fertilizer_institute_comments_final_usda_rfi.pdf.
March 2021 Tampa had been in the climb from the $69-ish early-2021 USGS neighbourhood toward mid-year about $192 in BC Insight's telling. March 2022 Tampa was heading to $481 in early April. A 198 percent input-cost increase in twelve months is that path in a trade-association sentence. It is not a licensed weekly grid. It is TFI's submitted figure.
Alberta recovered sulfur still leaves mainly through Vancouver. Canadian molten rail into US phosphate plants is the import book TFI members buy. USGS Canada at 77 percent of US elemental imports for 2019-22 is that book in a table. A 198 percent sulfur cost is a Conda, Tampa, and Gulf acid-plant cost. It is also a Vancouver FOB netback for Alberta forming plants.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, six days before this March 1 slug, is the geopolitical exposure TFI named. Black Sea fertilizer logistics, nitrogen gas costs, and phosphate trade risk all moved. Sulfur moved with them. USGS later noted 2022 world sulfur supplies were hampered by the conflict even as global output was roughly unchanged.
Chinese phosphate inspections from October 2021 are the other geopolitical-policy leg. Constrained Chinese DAP availability supported sulfur as phosphate producers outside China competed for feedstock. TFI's 198 percent captures both the China-policy firming of late 2021 and the war-risk firming of early 2022.
Mosaic's later utilization cuts are the demand response to this cost shock plus the July Chinese quota. Affordability, not molecule shortage, cut runs. Higher Gulf refining kept adding recovered tonnes. The mismatch is the second-half crash.
2023 TFI surveys still named geopolitics and regulation as leading challenges. The 198 percent figure is why. Licensed weekly grids are not restated.
Figures follow TFI. Sulfur plus 198 percent March 2021 to March 2022 is the US phosphate-input chapter of the spike.