Nutrien, the world's largest fertiliser producer, has shut its nitrogen complex in Trinidad and Tobago indefinitely, citing continuing natural gas supply constraints, adding a supply shock just as Northern Hemisphere buyers enter the winter buying season, Global Agriculture reported.
The Point Lisas operations had already been idled once, in October 2025, over port access restrictions and what the company called unreliable and uneconomic gas supply. Dean Perkins, Nutrien's senior vice president for upstream, nitrogen and proprietary product operations, confirmed that this shutdown is open-ended. Trinidad has long been a major Caribbean source of ammonia and urea for North and Latin American markets.
US retail prices were already rising. In DTN's Retail Fertilizer Trends survey of retailers between 5 and 9 October, UAN32 averaged $485 a ton, up 6% from a month earlier and the only nutrient to cross DTN's threshold for a significant monthly move. Urea rose to $672 a ton from $658, 12% above a year ago. DAP edged up to $934 from $923, 2% higher than a year earlier.
Potash rose to $502 a ton from $494, back above $500 for the first time since the second week of August 2024 and 4% higher than a year earlier. DTN did not tie that move to any single supply event, but it noted that all eight major fertiliser nutrients it tracks now cost more than at this point of last year's harvest season.
With a large Caribbean nitrogen plant offline, urea and UAN trending up and potash above a two-year threshold, Global Agriculture says the market has less slack heading into the next big application window in the Americas, before any further effect from Black Sea shipping disruption or China's flat fertiliser import quota.
Photo: Kalamazadkhan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Global Agriculture
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