Notebook
The market spent this week reading the Strait of Hormuz like a barometer, and the needle is not steady. The interim peace collapsed and tanker traffic through the strait thinned out, which is the sort of sentence that moves urea, sulphur and ammonia before it moves oil. Anyone lifting nitrogen out of the Gulf, from Saudi, Qatar, the Emirates or Oman, is now paying attention to war-risk premiums on hulls as much as to FOB quotes. Freight and insurance are doing the pricing that the plants are not.
Phosphate money picks a safer address
While the Gulf twitches, the phosphate business quietly voted with its feet toward Morocco. Koch Ag & Energy has agreed to buy into Jorf Fertilizers Company I, a 50/50 operating joint venture with OCP built around a 1.2 million tonne per year plant at Jorf Lasfar. Add the existing Kofert venture and the two partners now run about 2.5 million tonnes a year of phosphate capacity aimed at global buyers, North America explicitly among them. The timing is not an accident: Washington temporarily suspended countervailing duties on Moroccan phosphate, so OCP tonnes can reach US farmers without the penalty that has dogged them.
The same protective instinct runs through Canada. New US tariffs on Canadian goods landed this week and carved out fertilizers, potash included, because American agriculture cannot function without them. And India, the buyer that sets the tone for global urea, has gone the other way entirely, unveiling a new urea policy built around self-sufficiency. If India buys fewer cargoes over the next few seasons, Gulf and Iranian urea has to find a new home, and that home is Africa and Latin America. In Germany, meanwhile, CAN eased to €340 to €360 per tonne CIF, so the European nitrogen floor is soft.
Copper blinks, then earns
Copper pulled back from record territory as the same US-Iran nerves overrode a run of strong numbers, hopes of a Cobre Panama restart and visibly shrinking exchange stocks. The fundamentals underneath were good news for producers: Freeport beat profit forecasts as higher prices more than covered weaker output from a stumbling Grasberg. High prices are papering over real supply trouble, which is the condition that keeps the metal bid.
Africa keeps building the feedstock
The longer supply story is being poured in concrete across the continent. Zimbabwe lined up Chinese partners for a $300 million lithium project, cementing its role as feedstock to Beijing's battery chain. And in Zambia's Copperbelt, KoBold Metals has broken ground at the Mingomba mine near Chililabombwe, one of the higher-grade undeveloped copper deposits anywhere. These are 2027-and-beyond tonnes, but they are the corridors that will need trucking, reagents and diesel long before first metal.