30일간의 폭격으로 세계 유황의 절반이 차단됨

Key Takeaways

• The Iran war’s most important casualty isn’t oil: The Middle East supplies 47% of global seaborne sulfur. The Strait of Hormuz closure removed 45,000–50,000 metric tons per day from the market. Spot prices hit $695–700/mt, up $200 from pre-war levels.
• Three supply chains are breaking simultaneously: Sulfuric acid feeds fertilizer production (30% of global fertilizer exports transit Hormuz), copper mining (16% of global production depends on acid-based leaching), and semiconductor fabrication.
• Food inflation is arriving now: Urea prices surged 44.9% to $710/mt. Ammonia production costs in Europe jumped 65% since January. The UN Food Price Index is rising. One-third of global fertilizer trade could be affected.
• The Jones Act waiver won’t save you: Suspending cabotage law saves $3–4 per barrel on shipping. It does not replace the missing sulfur, the missing fertilizer, or the missing refined products that California and New England import from Asia.

The Chemical Nobody Watches

Thirty days into Operation Epic Fury, every news desk on the planet is tracking oil prices. Brent crude above $115. Gasoline heading toward $4 a gallon. Tanker insurance premiums through the roof.

Nobody is tracking sulfur.

That is a mistake. Sulfuric acid is the most-produced industrial chemical on Earth. More tonnage of it moves through global supply chains annually than any other manufactured chemical compound. It is the unglamorous workhorse behind three supply chains that touch every human being alive: the food you eat, the copper wiring in your walls, and the chips in your phone.

The Middle East supplies approximately 47% of global seaborne sulfur. Every day the Strait of Hormuz stays functionally closed, between 45,000 and 50,000 metric tons of sulfur disappear from the global market. As of March 19, spot sulfur prices hit $695–700 per metric ton, a $200 increase from pre-war levels. Analysts project that if the Strait remains blocked through late April, prices will surge above $800/mt, rendering sulfur uneconomical for low-cost phosphate producers and high-pressure leaching nickel operations.

Among the world’s ten largest sulfur importers, seven source over 40% from the Middle East. Five exceed 50%. Pre-war stockpiles, the inventories sitting at ports and processing plants worldwide, were expected to reach their destinations by late March. That cushion is gone. Even if the Strait reopens tomorrow, rebuilding supply lines takes four to six weeks. Infrastructure damage from the bombing campaign will take years.

The bombs stopped falling on bridges and refineries weeks ago. The sulfuric acid shortage is just starting.

Kill Chain 1: Your Grocery Bill

Sulfur’s first kill chain runs straight to your plate.

Sulfuric acid is the primary input for phosphate fertilizer production. Phosphoric acid, the backbone of DAP (Diammonium Phosphate) and MAP (Monoammonium Phosphate) fertilizers, requires massive volumes of sulfuric acid to process phosphate rock into something crops can absorb. No acid, no phosphate fertilizer. No fertilizer, no yields.

The numbers are already moving. Middle East urea prices closed above $590/mt on March 5, a 19% increase from the previous week. US Gulf DAP hit $655/mt, up 5% week-over-week. European ammonia production costs climbed 65% between January 5 and March 12, rising from $396/mt to $652/mt on elevated natural gas costs.

The transmission mechanism is straightforward. The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly 30% of global fertilizer exports, 27% of global oil exports, and 20% of LNG trade. Shipping activity through the Strait has dropped 75%. As much as one-third of global fertilizer trade could be affected by the ongoing disruptions.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index rose for the first time in five months in February, averaging 125.3 points. That is the leading indicator. The lagging indicator is what you pay for bread, poultry, and pork.

Import-dependent nations are already feeling it. The Philippines faces immediate price transmission as higher bunker fuel costs spike shipping rates and the landed cost of imported wheat and animal feed. India faces acute urea and ammonia shortages given its structural import dependence.

And the United States is not immune. This is a global commodity market. When fertilizer costs rise 20–40% worldwide, American farmers pay the same input cost increases. Those costs flow through to grocery prices within two to three quarters.

Kill Chain 2: The Green Transition’s Invisible Input

Sulfuric acid’s second kill chain runs through the copper supply chain.

Approximately 16% of global copper production uses a hydrometallurgical process called SX/EW (Solvent Extraction/Electrowinning). This technique dissolves copper from oxide ores using sulfuric acid, then extracts pure copper through electrochemical processing. It is the dominant method for lower-grade copper oxide deposits in Chile, Peru, and parts of Africa.

The chemistry is non-negotiable:

$\text{CuO} + \text{H}_2\text{SO}_4 \rightarrow \text{CuSO}_4 + \text{H}_2\text{O}$

No sulfuric acid, no copper dissolution. No dissolution, no extraction. Industry analysts warned that if sulfur disruptions persist beyond three weeks, copper oxide operations that rely on commercial acid would need to shut down entirely due to acid depletion.

The counterargument exists and deserves acknowledgment. Global copper inventories are currently at a 22-year high: exchange-monitored stockpiles surpassed 1 million metric tons for the first time since 2003, with global refined stocks rising 50% by early March to 1.25 million metric tons. Iran itself represents just 1.5% of global mined copper and 1.2% of refined copper. LME copper prices actually fell 9.4% from their January record of $13,524/mt to $12,081/mt by March 23, driven by demand fears rather than supply panic.

But that inventory buffer is finite. The 16% of global copper production dependent on commercial sulfuric acid represents roughly 3.5 million metric tons annually. If SX/EW operations begin shutting down over the coming weeks, no existing stockpile lasts forever. Every data center, every EV charging station, every kilometer of grid expansion requires copper wire. The AI infrastructure buildout alone was already competing with the green transition for copper supply before the war started.

Kill Chain 3: The Chip-Grade Problem

Sulfuric acid is also a critical process chemical in semiconductor fabrication. Ultra-high-purity sulfuric acid is used in wafer cleaning steps during chip manufacturing, removing organic contaminants and metal ions from silicon surfaces between lithography passes.

The disruption here is more nuanced. Korea Zinc, a major producer of semiconductor-grade sulfuric acid, derives its product from an integrated smelting process rather than from Middle East sulfur. The company is expanding capacity to 320,000 metric tons per year by the second half of 2026, with plans to scale to 500,000 metric tons. That specific supply line is insulated from the Hormuz closure.

But the broader semiconductor supply chain is not. The Middle East conflict has disrupted helium supplies that flow through the same shipping corridors. Taiwan’s potential loss of Middle Eastern helium could cripple electronics production equivalent to 25.2% of national output. Helium is used in semiconductor fabs for cooling during the lithography process and as a carrier gas in chemical vapor deposition. It has no substitute.

The chip supply chain was already under stress from the HBM memory shortage. Adding a helium disruption on top of an acid supply squeeze is not a single-point failure. It is a cascade.

The American Gasoline Problem

The standard Washington response to energy price shocks is to pull the Jones Act lever. On March 18, the Trump administration suspended the Jones Act for 60 days, allowing foreign-flagged vessels to transport refined products from the US Gulf Coast (USGC) to the West Coast and Atlantic Coast.

The waiver saves $3–4 per barrel on shipping costs compared to Jones Act-compliant vessels. That is not nothing. But it addresses the wrong bottleneck.

New England has zero operating refineries. The region is 100% dependent on imports for its gasoline, delivered by marine tanker and barge to coastal ports, plus rail and truck from New York and Canada. Foreign imports account for approximately 16% of East Coast gasoline supply. When global refined product flows are disrupted, New England pays first.

California’s problem is different but equally structural. The state uses CARBOB, a boutique reformulated gasoline blend mandated by the California Air Resources Board. Gulf Coast refineries do not produce CARBOB. California historically supplemented domestic production with Asian refined imports. Those Asian flows now transit through disrupted shipping corridors, or they do not transit at all. The Jones Act waiver makes it easier to move USGC product to California, but USGC product is not CARBOB without additional processing.

Meanwhile, replacement crude exports from alternative ports at Yanbu and Fujairah total 6.2 million barrels per day, offsetting roughly half of Hormuz closure losses. The other half is missing. You can waive a cabotage law. You cannot waive the laws of chemistry.

The Two-Front Squeeze

On April 2, 2026, a second front opens.

Liberation Day tariffs impose new duties across a range of imported goods. The precise structure is still being announced, but the direction is clear: importing alternatives to disrupted supply chains just became more expensive. The tariff changes already announced for auto parts alone represent one of the largest single-month forecast revisions in S&P Global’s history, comparable to the 2008-09 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID manufacturing pause.

The timing creates a pincer. The Iran war physically cut off sulfur, fertilizer precursors, and refined products. The tariffs economically cut off alternative import routes. Both hit the same industries. Both compress the same supply chains. Both raise costs for the same American consumers.

In 1930, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act raised average US import duties from 40% to 59% on 20,000 goods. Twenty-five countries retaliated. US imports from Europe fell from $1,334 million in 1929 to $390 million in 1932. Global trade declined by some 66% between 1929 and 1934. One thousand and twenty-eight economists signed a petition warning it would cause “widespread unemployment.” Congress passed it anyway.

The United States has never simultaneously fought a shooting war while imposing broad tariffs on its own trading partners. In World War II, the Roosevelt administration lowered trade barriers with allies to support the war effort. The War Production Board controlled sulfur allocation specifically because sulfuric acid was a strategic material, essential for TNT production and industrial chemistry.

In 2026, the administration that started the war is also starting a trade war. The sulfur supply chain being destroyed in the Persian Gulf is the same supply chain being taxed at the port.

The Bottom Line

The Iran war is not about oil. Oil is the first-order story, the one that fits in a headline and a futures chart. The second-order story is sulfuric acid, and it touches everything.

The sulfur shortage feeds a fertilizer crisis that will raise food prices on every continent. It threatens copper mining operations that supply the wire for grid expansion, EV charging, and data center construction. It disrupts semiconductor manufacturing through both acid supply and helium supply. And it hits American consumers directly through boutique gasoline blends that cannot be substituted with a Jones Act waiver.

The pre-war stockpiles are depleted. The replacement routes are running at half capacity. The tariffs are making alternatives more expensive. And the war shows no sign of ending.

You can blow up every bridge in Iran. You cannot bomb sulfuric acid into existence. The laws of chemistry do not negotiate.