What is the price of a bag of urea made of?

In 2026, the World Bank projects urea at around $700 per tonne — sixty percent more than a year earlier. In the field, that means dearer bags, reduced doses, lost yields. As with the litre of fuel, this price is not arbitrary: it decomposes, layer by layer — and each layer explains why the gas → fertiliser chain of the petrochemical complex is the structural answer.

Layer 1: gas — 80–90 % of ammonia’s cost

Urea is natural gas made solid, or almost. Steam reforming of methane yields ammonia, ammonia yields urea: in a nitrogen fertiliser plant, gas accounts for 80 to 90 % of production cost. When world gas flares up — the engine of the 2026 shock — urea follows, mechanically. This is the layer nobody administers: it is set on gas markets thousands of kilometres from the Chadian field. Unless the gas is local — we will come back to that.

Layer 2: the plant — transformation

Between gas and granule stand ammonia and granulation units, their depreciation, energy and maintenance. This layer is steadier — a few tens of dollars per tonne in a world-class plant — and it obeys a law of scale: the continent’s giants (Nigeria is heading towards eight million tonnes a year) compress it better than anyone. This is the layer where one should not pretend to beat the giants: the aim is a plant sized for regional demand, not a record.

Layer 3: the journey — the landlocked layer

This is the layer Chad knows by heart, for the bag of fertiliser as for the litre of diesel. A tonne of urea landed in Douala or Lagos must still travel more than 1,700 kilometres: port handling, road freight, storage, losses, financing of stock en route. The cheapest urea in the world at the plant gate is no longer cheap at all delivered in Moundou. This is the heart of the thesis: proximity is a premium — the argument behind our fuels model also underpins the fertiliser model.

Layer 4: the calendar — arriving in the right month

Fertiliser that arrives after sowing is worth almost nothing. The Sahelian farming season is short and the import chain long: ordering early ties up cooperatives’ cash, ordering late misses the window. Producing in the country also means producing at the country’s rhythm: stocks built near the farming basins, timed to the crop calendar rather than to shipping rotations.

What Sédigui gas changes

Reread the four layers. The fourth is won through national logistics, the third nearly disappears when the plant is in Chad, the second is sized sensibly — and the first, the heaviest, changes in nature: Sédigui gas (~7 bn m³ documented) is today untapped, and partly flared elsewhere in the basin. Gas with no other outlet has no world price: using it for ammonia decouples the Chadian bag from the global gas shock. That is the complex’s “gas → ammonia → urea/NPK” chain: every layer of the bag’s price is a trade, and every trade brought home is yield that stays in the field. Chadian urea will not be magically cheap — the plant must still be financed, the road maintained — but it will stop depending on a gas market nobody here controls.