Aug 13, 2026 · 25 min · 13 segments
Your grocery bill begins at an oil refinery and a natural-gas well. Kevin Freeman exposes the fragile chain connecting energy, fertilizer, farming, shipping, and food — and explains how foreign choke…
Kevin FreemanHost
But that elemental sulfur becomes sulfuric acid, and sulfuric acid dissolves phosphate rock into phosphoric acid.
and that becomes your phosphate fertilizer, the DAP and MAP that grow corn, soybeans, and wheat.
Now branch two, natural gas becomes ammonia, and gas is not a side ingredient here.
The World Bank puts natural gas at 80 to 90% of the cost of making ammonia, and ammonia becomes urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer on Earth.
Then all of it gets processed, refrigerated, and hauled by diesel, by rail, by barge.
At the far end of that chain is a mother in Fort Worth staring at a grocery receipt.
You see gasoline come down and you wonder, why don't my groceries come down? It's because the food chain touches energy in six or seven places and every one of them lags.
So an energy shock enters your grocery bill the same way that water enters a basement.
Slowly, through several cracks, long after everyone stopped talking about the storm.
But that elemental sulfur becomes sulfuric acid, and sulfuric acid dissolves phosphate rock into phosphoric acid.
and that becomes your phosphate fertilizer, the DAP and MAP that grow corn, soybeans, and wheat.
Now branch two, natural gas becomes ammonia, and gas is not a side ingredient here.
The World Bank puts natural gas at 80 to 90% of the cost of making ammonia, and ammonia becomes urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer on Earth.
Then all of it gets processed, refrigerated, and hauled by diesel, by rail, by barge.
At the far end of that chain is a mother in Fort Worth staring at a grocery receipt.
You see gasoline come down and you wonder, why don't my groceries come down? It's because the food chain touches energy in six or seven places and every one of them lags.
So an energy shock enters your grocery bill the same way that water enters a basement.
Slowly, through several cracks, long after everyone stopped talking about the storm.
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