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by colechristensen 33 days ago
Nitrogen is pulled out of the air which is free but the process requires hydrogen which is acquired from disassembled methane, the price of which is a significant contributor.
1 comments

US shale oil notably has a lot of natural gas - methane.

the methane isnt the issue, building and operating the processing plants is

Hard to find exact data but 60-80% of the cost to manufacture ammonia comes from the cost of natural gas. Feel free to look a price charts for both to see the correlation.
Long term yes, however the building in such a plant is very expensive in the short term. As such, no one is going to build a plant unless they actually think it will have reasonably high utilization.