Fertilizer scarcity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) perpetuates the region’s widespread food insecurity. 240 million people in SSA suffer from malnourishment, and 1.3 million more are expected to experience hunger each year. Insufficient local food production pushes many in SSA to depend on food imports at sometimes exorbitant prices. Low local agricultural yields persist largely due to inefficient farming practices and farmers’ inability to provide crops with enough nutrients.

A dearth of local fertilizer supply similarly drives SSA farmers to import almost 90% of their fertilizer, often at prohibitively high prices. The added costs of logistics and transport have driven fertilizer prices in SSA as much as 4 timeshigher than those in Europe. Moreover, the close linkage between fertilizer prices and volatile natural gas prices makes it difficult for farmers to plan effectively around the small quantity of fertilizer they can afford. Recent years have brought SSA’s fertilizer scarcity to a head with prices more than tripling in 2021-22 due to low global natural gas supplies induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme temperatures across the world, and further supply disruptions from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But while many development finance institutions (DFIs) recognize that investing in local fertilizer production will increase SSA farmers’ productivity through improved fertilizer access, these groups unnecessarily limit their support to “green” fertilizer projects that use exclusively zero-emissions technologies. Such an approach locks in African producers to high-cost agricultural inputs and only exacerbates the problem.

Sub-Saharan Africa needs a solution that can produce fertilizer on timescales that reflect the urgency of feeding hundreds of millions of people. Any proposition must also lower the cost of fertilizer below the current price of imports. Green fertilizer can achieve neither the speed nor the prices required. And while advocacy groups and DFIs continue to spend time and capital on an obsessive pursuit of dubiously achievable green fertilizer cost declines, farmers in SSA will still face high price barriers to fertilizers, and families will still struggle to feed themselves.

To achieve food security and enable broader economic development, SSA countries need access to locally produced fertilizer made from domestically extracted natural gas.

Green fertilizer is—and will continue to be—far too expensive

Today, the production of most fertilizers begins with a process known as steam methane reforming (SMR). SMR uses the methane (CH4) in natural gas to make “grey” hydrogen which gets reacted with atmospheric nitrogen to make grey ammonia (NH3). The entire process of synthesizing grey ammonia from natural gas is called the Haber-Bosch process.

Each year, emissions from the Haber-Bosch process account for about 1.8% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions on account of its high energy requirements and SMR’s generation of high-purity CO2 as a chemical byproduct. In contrast, “green” hydrogen—produced by splitting water (H2O) with renewable electricity—directly emits no CO2 but regularly costs over twice as much as grey.

Most green hydrogen supporters rationalize the green premium as a necessary cost to avoid CO2 emissions from the Haber-Bosch process. They point to green hydrogen cost reduction goals from governments around the world, the United Nations, and myriad market forecasts to assert that enough investment will inevitably decrease green hydrogen prices to equal or fall below grey prices. And upon achieving competitive green hydrogen prices, they extrapolate that industries that heavily utilize hydrogen will also become cost-competitive with the current grey processes. Estimates of the price needed to catalyze widespread market uptake of green hydrogen typically fall between 2 USD/kg and 1 USD/kg.

But even when accounting for such dramatic decreases in green hydrogen prices, green fertilizer will remain more expensive than imported fossil-based fertilizer in SSA. An important reason for this is that pure ammonia is not used as a fertilizer in Africa; rather, ammonia is only a chemical precursor to some of Africa’s most commonly used fertilizers, such as urea (CH4N2O) and ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3). The costs of additional processing and chemical feedstocks other than hydrogen or ammonia also heavily influence fertilizer prices. In other words, cost parity between green and grey hydrogen or ammonia does not signify that green fertilizer prices will resemble grey fertilizer prices.

Urea, for instance, is produced by reacting ammonia with carbon dioxide. A traditional urea plant supplies carbon dioxide to this reaction by capturing CO2 from waste flue gas. Without access to carbon in petrochemicals, however, a green urea plant must extract carbon dioxide directly from ambient air via direct air capture (DAC).

Techno-economic modeling using the current costs of green technologies (e.g., electrolyzers, DAC, heat pumps) shows that a single ton of green urea produced in SSA would cost about 1,900 USD—about 3 times more expensive than average recorded urea prices in SSA since January 2024 (Figure 2) and almost 500 USD/t more than peak SSA urea prices during 2021-22 (Figure 1).

Even the most optimistic decarbonization scenarios often cited by green hydrogen proponents do not demonstrate enough decline in green hydrogen costs to make green urea cost-competitive with grey urea in the foreseeable future. The International Energy Agency (IEA), for instance, predicts that a path to global net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 could lead to green hydrogen prices of 2 USD/kg by 2030. Taking the accuracy of such predictions at full face value, green urea made from 2 USD/kg hydrogen would still cost an exorbitant 1530 USD/t.

As discussed above, some strategies aim to achieve green hydrogen costs as low as 1 USD/kg. And the IEA’s net-zero scenario also models green ammonia prices dropping to 560 USD/t to be competitive with grey ammonia by 2030. But accomplishing even these ambitious objectives would still not come close to realizing price reductions for green urea that are realistic for mass application across SSA (Figure 2), yielding prices at 1350 USD/t with 1 USD/kg hydrogen and 1200 USD/t with 560 USD/t ammonia.

Investment sustained past 2030 and robust government subsidization for clean chemical manufacturing could, in theory, decrease green urea prices even further. But the world’s green hydrogen aspirations are far lower-priority than the core intent of building SSA’s fertilizer production capacity: to meet SSA’s current and future food demands by helping local agriculture to flourish.

SSA’s population is expected to double to 2 billion people by 2050–an average of 40 million new lives each year in addition to the billion people living there now. To meet the associated increase in food demand and harvested land, SSA’s agricultural sector in 2050 may need 10x more fertilizer (~56 Mtpy) than it uses today. Meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals while faced with this challenge won’t be unlocked simply because green hydrogen/ammonia prices fall below a certain threshold.

Only more local natural gas extraction will make fertilizer affordable

Green fertilizer faces an inevitable dead end in SSA. The only viable options that remain require natural gas feedstock. These are grey urea (made from natural gas) and blue urea, which adds carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS) to the grey process.

Potential for grey or blue urea in SSA depends heavily on natural gas prices. While some SSA countries could use imported natural gas to make cheaper urea than today’s, dependence on imported feedstock keeps SSA’s fertilizer exposed to external supply disruptions, the likes of which largely precipitated SSA’s fertilizer price spikes in 2021-22.

Even more importantly, SSA can only make urea at affordable prices using natural gas feedstock extracted locally; modeling shows that the prices for urea made from imported natural gas would remain higher than current prices in many SSA nations.

Only by making grey urea using local natural gas can SSA confidently improve fertilizer access for its entire population. Green urea remains squarely outside the realm of reason, and blue urea, though prices approach affordability, would still prove too expensive for some farmers. No farmer should lose a harvest because a company tacks on a blue urea premium to amortize its CCUS installation. SSA can only universally eliminate hunger with universally affordable fertilizer. And the only way to make universally affordable fertilizer is with more local natural gas.

Immediate actions to increase fertilizer production should undoubtedly center around expanding natural gas extraction and building grey urea plants. SSA needs to exploit the fastest and least expensive option at its disposal. But effective policy design could confine unabated emissions from grey urea plants to the near term by incentivizing CCUS retrofits. In the time needed to survey natural gas deposits, develop infrastructure, and build chemical plants, DFIs and regional/local governments could realistically refine financial mechanisms that lower or even offset the ~110 USD/t blue premium (in contrast to the outlandish notion that the same strategy could cover the 1000 USD/t green premium).

Nevertheless, grey fertilizer production remains the best option to reduce fertilizer prices and increase agricultural productivity in SSA. Even a long-term plan to implement blue retrofits requires more immediate investment in upstream fossil fuel extraction and construction of the base grey process that CCUS gets added onto.

Sub-Saharan Africa can’t develop while it starves

SSA’s fertilizer shortage is not an opportunity to decarbonize the Haber-Bosch process; it’s an emergency that will continue to fuel famine while DFIs as influential as the World Bank, European Investment Bank, and the United Nations’ International Finance Corporation fail to recognize that green hydrogen alone cannot replace fossil hydrocarbons.

Even the premise of decarbonizing fertilizer production by promoting green fertilizer in SSA means vanishingly little in the context of SSA’s historically minimal contribution to climate change and the negligible increase required to meet SSA’s fertilizer needs. Excluding South Africa, the remaining 48 countries in SSA have only contributed to 0.6% of cumulative CO2 emissions but are home to 14% of the world’s population. Making enough urea to bring SSA fertilizer use equal to the global average would result in just 0.01% of global emissions from 2024.

Farmers in SSA need solutions that can be deployed rapidly and that immediately produce fertilizer at affordable prices. Single-minded pursuit of carbon-free strategies that disregard both their real-world economical and engineering feasibility and their near-term suitability for addressing urgent development challenges does more harm than good.

If DFIs and the development community at large are serious about combating hunger by funding fertilizer chemical plants local to SSA, they cannot continue to dogmatically discard petrochemical solutions without giving them serious consideration.

Sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t need electrolyzers and direct air capture. It needs food, fertilizer, and more local natural gas to make them both.

For more information, please access our methodology and supplementary calculations.