larry johnson speaks of the items gone missing due to the embargo in hormuz. those things matter as much as the oil; 

 

The global economic damage caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is generally not understood by most policymakers. Public and policy discussion of the Strait of Hormuz closure has fixated on crude oil: tanker counts, Brent prices, strategic petroleum reserves. That focus is understandable, but it misses much of the damage. The Persian Gulf is also a dominant global supplier of liquefied natural gas, urea, sulfur and helium. Each feeds a different part of the world economy (power and industrial gas, food production, phosphate fertilizer and metals refining, and semiconductors and medical imaging), and none can be replaced by drawing down an emergency stockpile the way oil can. The loss of these flows has received a fraction of the attention given to oil, even though for several import-dependent countries it is the more consequential shock.

This paper addresses two of these neglected commodities, sulfur and urea. It explains why they matter to the global economy, sets out how much the Gulf states produce, and identifies the countries most adversely affected by the cutoff. LNG enters the analysis only where it bears on fertilizer production; helium is outside the scope of this paper.

Urea and sulfur are low-value bulk commodities that sit underneath two of the world’s most important production systems: food and metals. Urea is the world’s main nitrogen fertilizer. Sulfur, converted to sulfuric acid, is the indispensable input for phosphate fertilizer and for leaching copper, nickel and cobalt. The Persian Gulf is the single largest export source of both, and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz since 28 February 2026 has removed most of that supply from world markets..........more............