From Frack to Fork: How Fossil Fuels Poison our Food Systems – Center for International Environmental Law

Printed October 2, 2025

By Taylor Hodge, US Agrochemicals and Fossil Fuels Campaigner, Lisa Tostado, Agrochemicals and Fossil Gas Campaigner, and Lindsey Jurca Durland, Senior Communications Marketing campaign Specialist on the Heart for Worldwide Environmental Regulation 

Fossil fuels permeate our meals techniques — from transportation and vitality to plastic packaging. Estimates present that meals techniques eat roughly 15% of worldwide fossil fuels every year. One main driver of this fossil gasoline dependence typically flies beneath the radar: fertilizers. Specifically, artificial nitrogen fertilizers play a task in fueling the local weather disaster and harming human well being — addressing them is essential to constructing a simply, fossil-free meals future. 

Fertilizers Are Typically Fossil Fuels in One other Kind

Greater than half of artificial fertilizers used worldwide are nitrogen-based and derived from fossil gasoline or coal. For this reason we name them fossil fertilizers. 

Crops want vitamins like nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (Ok) to develop. Just about all artificial nitrogen fertilizer is made out of fossil fuels — about 70% fossil gasoline and almost all the remaining from coal. Whereas phosphorus and potassium are produced from mined ores, producing any artificial fertilizer is energy-intensive, and the mining trade is closely depending on fossil fuels. Like different fossil gasoline merchandise, fossil fertilizers trigger in depth hurt to the setting, local weather, and human well being all through their whole provide chain.

Extraction: The Hidden Value

The fossil fertilizer provide depends on the extraction of fossil gasoline and coal. Whereas all extraction is dangerous, methods like fracking, frequent within the US, have been linked to leukemia, preterm births, bronchial asthma, and early dying in older individuals.

Manufacturing: Poisonous Factories Are Horrible Neighbors

Fossil fertilizer crops pollute the land, water, and air of surrounding communities, harming ecosystems and human well being. In 2021, thirty US nitrogen fertilizer services discharged 7.7 million kilos of nitrogen air pollution, together with 3.9 million kilos of ammonia, the important thing intermediate product for all artificial nitrogen fertilizers, into waterways.  One of many largest ammonia crops, CF Industries’ Donaldsonville Complicated in Louisiana, emits hundreds of thousands of kilos of poisonous chemical substances every year, together with ammonia itself and formaldehyde, a possible carcinogen. 

Within the US, petrochemical manufacturing — together with fertilizer services — is among the many sectors that impose disproportionate poisonous burdens on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities. Proximity to petrochemical infrastructure can result in elevated charges of most cancers, reproductive well being issues, and respiratory sickness.

Software

Fossil fertilizer use releases potent greenhouse gases, together with nitrous oxide (N2O), which has the potential to heat the planet 273 occasions greater than CO2, and can also be crucial stratospheric ozone-depleting emission. 

As a lot as 80% of reactive nitrogen utilized as fertilizer doesn’t feed meals manufacturing however as a substitute pollutes soil, waterways, and the environment. Nutrient air pollution can contaminate groundwater, create dangerous algal blooms, and trigger useless zones in oceans, equivalent to within the Gulf of Mexico, the place the useless zone stretches over 4,000 sq. miles. 

Using artificial fertilizers might contribute to nitrate contamination in consuming water. Nitrate contamination in consuming water is a well-known danger issue for ‘blue child’ syndrome or toddler methemoglobinemia, which,  in extreme circumstances, may cause coma and dying.  Nitrate ingestion also can kind N-nitroso compounds (NOCs), that are possible carcinogens in accordance with the Worldwide Company for Analysis on Most cancers (IARC). Whereas extra analysis needs to be performed, a rising physique of proof has begun to hyperlink nitrate ingestion to colorectal most cancers, thyroid illness, and neural tube defects. 

Fertilizers Chain Meals Programs to the Fossil Gas Trade

Meals techniques account for roughly 15% of worldwide fossil gasoline consumption every year, driving as many emissions as all EU nations and Russia mixed.  In 2020, 4% of the world’s gasoline provide was used to make ammonia, the precursor to all artificial nitrogen fertilizers.  About 70% of the ammonia globally is destined for fertilizers, with demand anticipated to rise. 

Company ties additional hyperlink the fossil gasoline and fertilizer industries with overlapping board members, in addition to a number of oil and gasoline corporations proudly owning stakes in fertilizer manufacturing or with chemical divisions concerned in agrochemical manufacturing.

Meals Programs Should Be Reimagined

In response to a report by the Meals System Economics Fee, the hidden prices of fossil-dependent meals techniques tally as much as trillions of {dollars} yearly, intensifying “persistent starvation, undernutrition, the weight problems epidemic, lack of biodiversity, environmental harm, and local weather change.” Current estimates registered the hidden value of our fossil-bound, industrial meals system at 15 –20  trillion USD per 12 months– roughly equal to the 2025 GDP of China or of all EU nations mixed 

Industrialized agriculture, sparked by the Inexperienced Revolution of the Nineteen Fifties, has tied our meals techniques to fossil fuels by way of fertilizers, pesticides and machines, displacing sustainable agricultural approaches like agroecology that preserve ecosystem integrity and diet. This was emphasised in 2021, by the UN Particular Rapporteur on the suitable to meals.

Options are Group-led and Fossil Free

The trail ahead is obvious: We should drastically scale back artificial fertilizer use and holistically remodel our meals techniques. This implies supporting practices that improve soil’s pure fertility, equivalent to planting legumes, crop rotation, including compost and manure, and shifting world diets away from fertilizer-intensive meals like meat and dairy. A current examine reveals that with such adjustments, the world can seemingly feed 10 billion individuals with out artificial nitrogen fertilizer or farmland enlargement. 

Agroecology, which mixes indigenous information and standard scientific strategies, may supply a blueprint for an agricultural transition with immense financial, social, and environmental advantages, together with higher resilience to a altering local weather. 

The Time to Act Is Now

A meals system reliant on fossil fuels is one which fuels local weather change, erodes our surroundings, and harms our well being. We want daring shifts towards agroecology and community-led, fossil-free agriculture.

Our capacity to feed the long run depends upon reimagining and rebuilding techniques that nourish individuals — not fossil gasoline income.

See our Frack to Fork reality sheet for extra info on Fossil Fertilizers. 

Fossil Fertilizer: How It’s Made 

Fossil fertilizer manufacturing depends on fossil fuels for each feedstock and vitality. Hydrogen is separated from the fossil feedstock and blended with nitrogen (from the air) by way of the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch course of to create ammonia (NH3), the bottom for all nitrogen fertilizers.  This course of emits 1.9 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) for each ton of ammonia.  Ammonia might then be  transformed into ammonium nitrate or urea (CO(NH2)2) — frequent types of fertilizers. Many manmade fertilizers mix fossil-based and mined inputs.