Bert A. Frost
Analyst · Bank of America.
So in the aggregate, I'm uncomfortable giving a specific number, but we do follow these facilities individually, as well as in terms of regions, what is being exported, being produced and what is online and offline. And what you're seeing today, for different reasons, different plants are running or not. Today, right now in Egypt, we've gone through a gas shortage where they're having to bring in LNG. That is impacting the urea, UAN and ammonia supply. With the unrest in Russia and the Ukraine, focused on the Ukraine, you're seeing a significant amount of capacity offline. And today, that represents 7% to 8% of the ammonia traded supply, so a pretty big impact that wasn't expected probably 6 months ago. And the Eastern European locations is more gas-related, gas cost-related, so those plants flex on and off when it's attractive for them to produce and above their cash costs. After an exhaustive study of -- an internal study we did of China, segmenting the different levels of cost of production for anthracite thermal or gas producer, and then laying on the logistical costs, port costs, labor costs, it was interesting to us and how that actually functioned in real time with several of the outlying plants with a higher cost, low -- smaller capacity facilities shutting down this year in May and June when we hit the levels of around $260, $255 for prilled product coming out of China. That market has since improved. We've seen some pricing improvement out of China for both granular and prilled. But you can go around the world, whether it's Pakistan, Argentina, Trinidad, you got gas issues. And so the capacity is out there, yes, but our opinion on the market and how people choose to produce or not have been proven correct that these high-cost facilities do shut down, and we seem to find the floor and then march back up until we hit the marginal producer and they come up. And as we mentioned, Q4 urea could be in the range of $3.10 to $3.30 at the U.S. Gulf, which is an attractive range for us.