They Killed American Coal. China Kept Theirs. Now American Farmers Are Paying the Price — and Frontieras Is the Answer.
The Strait of Hormuz crisis has exposed a deliberate strategic vulnerability. American farmers cannot fertilize their fields because we were talked out of our own resources — by a natural gas CEO, by foundations with ties to Beijing, and by a political class that mistook dependency for virtue.
By Matthew McKean, CEO & Co-Founder, Frontieras North America
Right now, American farmers are staring down a crisis that most of Washington is pretending is an act of God.
The conflict in the Strait of Hormuz has effectively bottled up close to half the world’s urea exports. Urea — the nitrogen fertilizer that feeds corn, wheat, and the majority of row crops across this country — has spiked roughly 70% in price since February. An American Farm Bureau survey of nearly 5,700 farmers found that approximately 70% could not afford all the fertilizer they needed for the 2026 growing season. Farmers from Kansas to Indiana are switching from corn to soybeans — not because the market told them to, but because corn requires too much nitrogen and they simply cannot afford to put it in the ground.
Even after the Strait of Hormuz reopens, experts say it will likely take months to straighten out the fertilizer supply chain. Analysts project that under the most likely scenario, urea prices stay above $700 per short ton through November 2026. Some analysts believe elevated prices will linger into the spring of 2027.
This is not a supply chain problem. This is what strategic dependency looks like when the bill finally comes due.
China Is Sitting Pretty — and Here’s Why
While American farmers are making impossible choices at the planting line, China’s farmers are fine. Fully stocked. Undisturbed.
The reason is a decision China made decades ago that the United States — the most coal-rich nation on earth — refused to make for itself.
Whereas other big exporters of urea, including Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, use natural gas to produce it, approximately 78% of China’s urea output is produced with coal, a relatively cheap resource it has in abundance. China gasifies coal into synthesis gas — a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide — processes it through ammonia synthesis, and converts it into urea at domestic prices so low they are effectively insulated from global market shocks. China’s industrial route for urea is completely different from that of other countries, and it is naturally immune to the oil crisis.
China made a strategic decision: use your most abundant domestic resource to feed your people, and never let a foreign chokepoint hold your agriculture hostage.
Now consider the irony. China shipped more than $13 billion in fertilizer last year and has been a major supplier to global markets. A meaningful share of the fertilizer that has flowed into American agriculture over recent years was not made from natural gas. It was made from Chinese coal. The country that spent years telling the world it was moving beyond fossil fuels was quietly feeding American farms with the product of coal gasification — and the United States, holding the largest recoverable coal reserves on the planet, paid for the privilege.
China has now placed strict quota management and export controls on urea, effective 2026. The drawbridge is up. And American farmers are finding out what it means to have outsourced your food security to a geopolitical competitor.
We Had the Resource. We Abandoned It.
The United States holds approximately 249.8 billion short tons of recoverable coal reserves — the largest in the world, enough to sustain production for 250 years at current rates. We are, by any measure, the Saudi Arabia of coal. We have always been.
So how did the most coal-rich nation on earth arrive at a moment where our farmers cannot fertilize their fields because a conflict half a world away disrupted a shipping lane?
The answer is not geological. It is not economic. It is political — and the politics were manufactured.
Starting in the mid-2000s, a coordinated campaign to eliminate coal from the American energy mix accelerated dramatically. The Beyond Coal campaign, run by the Sierra Club, became one of the most effective industrial demolition projects in American history — claiming credit for blocking more than 160 new coal plants and accelerating the closure of dozens of operating ones.
What the Sierra Club did not tell its members — at least not voluntarily — was where a significant portion of the funding for that campaign came from.
Between 2007 and 2012, Aubrey McClendon — CEO of Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest natural gas companies in the United States — and his associates contributed around $26 million to the Sierra Club to oppose the building of new coal-fired power plants. McClendon’s motivations were hardly pure. He knew that preventing new coal plants meant more demand for his company’s product, natural gas.
The Sierra Club accepted the money secretly, under former executive director Carl Pope, and did not disclose the arrangement. The Club ultimately turned down an additional $30 million in promised donations only after the new executive director learned of the arrangement in 2010 and the story became public in 2012.
Let that settle for a moment. A natural gas company paid tens of millions of dollars to an environmental organization to destroy its primary competitor. The environmental organization took the money. And American coal policy was shaped — in part — by that transaction.
That is greed wearing the costume of idealism. It is also, as we now know, a model that was being replicated with far more strategic intent from a very different direction.
Follow the Money — Beijing’s Hand in American Energy Policy
The Chesapeake-Sierra Club arrangement was driven by corporate self-interest. What came next involved a foreign government’s strategic objectives — and the documented evidence deserves a clear-eyed reading.
Energy Foundation China — a nonprofit with significant operations in Beijing — wired millions of dollars to fund climate initiatives and environmental groups in the United States, according to tax filings. Its CEO and President, Ji Zou, previously served as the deputy director general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy, an agency within the Chinese government’s National Development and Reform Commission. Other senior leaders at the organization include former officials of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau and the Chinese Academy of Sciences — a leading state-run research institution.
According to tax filings, Energy Foundation China contributed $3.8 million to initiatives in the U.S. specifically targeting the phase-out of coal and the electrification of transportation. Among the recipients: the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has filed dozens of legal challenges opposing domestic fossil fuel drilling, coal plants, the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and critical mineral mining projects.
The San Francisco-based Energy Foundation has disbursed over $330 million to U.S. registered organizations, with funding provided by major American foundations including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The Rocky Mountain Institute, another prominent recipient, co-authored a report with the Chinese government in 2013 arguing for a transition away from oil and gas toward an economy more dependent on energy sources where China holds dominant supply-chain positions.
China’s greenhouse gas emissions are double those of the United States, while Chinese institutions lead the world in financing new fossil fuel developments globally. China was building coal plants at home while funding organizations that were shutting them down here. That is not environmentalism. That is strategy.
Policy analysts have argued that China’s support of green energy — both domestically and abroad — is part of a broader strategy to transform its energy resource vulnerabilities into a net advantage. A transition to green energy in the U.S. benefits China directly: the communist nation is dominant in solar, wind, and electric vehicle supply chains, while America enjoys structural advantages in oil, gas, and coal.
I am not claiming that every environmental activist in America is a witting agent of Chinese strategic interests. Most are not. Most are sincere. But sincerity does not change the outcome. Whether the anti-coal movement was driven by ideology, greed, or foreign strategic calculation — or all three simultaneously — the result is the same: American coal policy was shaped by interests that were not American farmers’ interests. Not American energy workers’ interests. Not American national security interests.
And right now, at planting season 2026, American farmers are paying for it.
The Answer Is Already in the Ground
Here is what I know to be true, because we built it.
Coal does not have to be burned to be useful. It does not have to generate emissions to generate value. The FASForm™ Solid Carbon Fractionation process, developed by our co-founder and CTO Joe Witherspoon, does not combust coal. It disassembles it — thermally fractionating solid hydrocarbons into a portfolio of high-value outputs without combustion and without waste.
One of those outputs is ammonium sulfate fertilizer, produced through the Witherspoon Method™ — a patent-pending process that captures volatile byproducts from the fractionation process and converts them into agricultural-grade fertilizer at significantly lower production costs than conventional methods. At nameplate capacity, our first commercial facility will produce 135,000 tons of ammonium sulfate fertilizer annually. That is domestic fertilizer, made from domestic coal, on American soil, for American farmers. No Strait of Hormuz. No Chinese export quotas. No foreign government with a lever on our food supply.
That facility is now under construction in Mason County, West Virginia.
There is a detail about that site I want to share, because it captures something about this moment that I find clarifying.
The 183 acres in Mason County where we broke ground on April 2, 2026, were a working soybean farm until the day construction began. We held that property under contract for four growing cycles while completing our feasibility engineering and due diligence. We made a deliberate choice: let the land keep producing. Keep the farmer farming. Not one season was lost.
Some in the press still framed our arrival as a disruption to agriculture — as if we had paved over a family farm in the name of industry. They had it exactly backwards. We protected that farm while we built the thing that will feed more farms — a fertilizer plant powered by West Virginia coal, producing domestic ammonium sulfate for growers in West Virginia, neighboring states, across North America, and eventually around the world. The farm didn’t end at Mason County. It expands from it.
The Question That Demands an Answer
China has known for decades that coal is not just an energy source. It is a feedstock. A strategic asset. A sovereign resource that, if properly utilized, provides food security, energy security, and industrial independence simultaneously. They made that choice deliberately. They protected their farmers. They used their coal.
We had the same resource — more of it, in fact — and we chose to walk away from it. The campaign to make us do so was funded by a natural gas CEO who wanted to eliminate a competitor, by foundations with documented ties to Chinese government officials, and by a political class that confused virtue signaling with national strategy.
The result is 2026: American farmers who cannot fertilize. A food supply exposed to a chokepoint we do not control. And a nation slowly waking up to what it cost to be talked out of its own inheritance.
The good news — the only good news in this story — is that the resource is still here. The technology now exists to use it cleanly, efficiently, and profitably, without combustion, without waste, and without apology. We do not need to copy China’s model. We need to surpass it.
That is the work underway in Mason County.
ABUNDANT, AFFORDABLE, AVAILABLE ENERGY FOR ALL.