Nutrien’s Trinidad Nitrogen Shutdown Adds to Rising Global Fertilizer Prices
19 October 2026, Trinidad: Nutrien, the world’s largest fertilizer producer, has indefinitely shut down its nitrogen complex in Trinidad and Tobago, citing ongoing natural gas supply constraints, adding a fresh supply shock to a fertilizer market where prices for several major nutrients have already been climbing into the Northern Hemisphere’s winter buying season.
The closure affects Nutrien’s Point Lisas nitrogen operations, which had already been idled once before, in October 2025, over port access restrictions and what the company described as unreliable and uneconomical natural gas supply. Dean Perkins, Nutrien’s senior vice president of upstream, nitrogen and proprietary product operations, confirmed the latest shutdown is open-ended rather than temporary. Trinidad has long been a major Caribbean source of ammonia and urea feeding into North American and Latin American markets, so an indefinite closure there removes a meaningful slice of regional nitrogen capacity just as buyers are positioning for the next application season.
US retail prices already moving higher
The shutdown lands alongside a broader upward drift in US retail fertilizer prices. According to DTN’s weekly Retail Fertilizer Trends survey, which polled agricultural retailers between October 5 and 9, UAN32 liquid nitrogen rose to an average of $485 a ton, up 6% from a month earlier and the only nutrient that crossed DTN’s threshold for a “significant” month-on-month move. Urea climbed to $672 a ton, up from $658 the previous month and now 12% higher than a year ago. DAP edged up to $934 a ton from $923, a 2% year-on-year increase, while potash rose to $502 a ton from $494, pushing it back above the $500 mark for the first time since the second week of August 2024 and leaving it 4% higher than a year earlier.
Potash crossing a two-year threshold
The potash move is the one worth watching most closely. Potash prices have spent roughly two years below the $500-a-ton line in DTN’s US retail survey, and the fact that they have now crossed back over it, even on a relatively modest monthly gain, suggests buyers are no longer counting on the nutrient staying cheap through the coming planting cycle. DTN’s reporting did not tie the potash move directly to any single supply event, but it comes at the same time as the Trinidad nitrogen news and against a backdrop of persistently higher year-on-year costs across nearly all major nutrients, DTN noted that all eight of the major fertilizer nutrients it tracks are now costing more than they did at this point last harvest season.
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Taken together, the picture is one of a fertilizer market with less slack than it had even a few months ago. A large Caribbean nitrogen plant going offline indefinitely, combined with urea and UAN prices already trending upward and potash breaking back above a two-year threshold, points to tighter conditions heading into the next big application window in the Americas, even before accounting for how the wider Black Sea shipping disruption and China’s steady fertilizer import quota might further constrain the nutrients that move through global trade.
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