Alaska's best shot at a new federal fertilizer grant is an idle Nikiski plant — if it can get the gas

Alaska farmers pay some of the highest fertilizer prices in the country, because nearly all of it is shipped in from thousands of miles away. So a new federal program aimed squarely at fertilizer costs ought to be good news here — but whether it reaches Alaska comes down to one shuttered plant and one stubborn shortage.

The program, called FIELDS, opened July 1 through USDA, with applications due August 15. It offers grants of $15 million to $150 million to build or expand American plants that make nitrogen, phosphate, potash, and other crop nutrients — part of a federal push to cut the country's reliance on foreign fertilizer. It favors projects that are financed and ready to break ground.

Alaska has one obvious fit. The Kenai Nitrogen Operations plant in Nikiski was once the second-largest producer of ammonia and urea in the United States, turning Cook Inlet natural gas into fertilizer until it closed in 2007, as that gas grew scarce and costly. Its current owner, Nutrien, has kept the plant's permits alive and repeatedly weighed reopening part of it.

Here's the catch. What idled the Nikiski plant — and still blocks it — isn't the cost of construction, which is what this grant covers. It's the feedstock: Cook Inlet natural gas, the same shortage now squeezing Southcentral utilities. Federal money can rebuild a plant; it can't conjure cheap gas. And when Nikiski did run, most of its fertilizer went overseas to Asia, not onto Alaska fields — so even a restart wouldn't necessarily lower a local farmer's bill.

The pressure the program targets is real here all the same. Testifying before a House committee this spring, Rep. Rebecca Himschoot captured the strange math of Alaska food costs: "as the cost of goods goes up around us weekly, locally grown food could very well become cheaper than food shipped to Alaska."