By Ed Ballard
To see how the fallout from the Iran war is spreading, check out how much Robert Friedland is charging for sulfuric acid these days.
His company, Ivanhoe Mines, recently opened Africa's biggest copper smelter in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It churns out sulfuric acid, the world's most widely used industrial chemical, as a byproduct.
Running the numbers for the project a half-decade ago, Friedland reckoned on getting $150 a ton for the acid. But prices are now rocketing. Ivanhoe recently sold at $500 a ton, and prices have reached around $800 a ton in the local spot market.
"In a month or two, it could be any price," Friedland said in an interview. "Soon everyone will know H2SO4," he added -- the chemical symbol for the colorless, corrosive liquid.
Ivanhoe is one node in a globe-spanning supply chain in which fossil fuels underpin the technologies pitched as their replacements. Sulfuric acid is crucial for -- among many uses -- processing the metals in electric-vehicle batteries. Yet it largely comes from sulfur that was removed from oil and gas in refineries.
This little-noticed supply chain is being tested to the limit by the throttling of exports through the Strait of Hormuz, with serious implications for everybody who depends on sulfuric acid, from fertilizer makers to semiconductor manufacturers, who use it to clean chips.
"I don't think we've ever seen a potential supply disruption of this scale in living memory," Friedland said.
There are two main ways to make copper. Ivanhoe does it by smelting copper-sulfide ore, and sells the acid byproduct to copper producers who do it the other way. They need acid to leach metal from copper-oxide ore.
Those producers use lots of acid -- the ratio of acid to finished copper can be anywhere from 2:1 to 20:1, depending on the ore, according to research firm CRU. Normally they use acid made by cooking imported sulfur in plants called burners. But half of the world's sulfur exports come through the Strait of Hormuz.
When the Strait closed, the already complex markets for sulfur and sulfuric acid became "ridiculously chaotic," said CRU analyst Peter Harrisson.
The big concern for governments is the impact of shortages on the food supply. Making phosphate fertilizer is the leading use of sulfuric acid.
Last week, Beijing suspended exports of the acid, starting in May, according to media reports. China has half the world's copper-refining capacity, and its refiners are enormous acid producers. The loss of that supply is a headache for miners that use the acid-leaching method, including some of Chile's copper miners.
But miners are more able to compete for available supplies than, for example, Indian fertilizer producers, said Harrisson. Copper prices have been soaring, and producers mostly lock in acid prices in advance.
Friedland, meanwhile, is enjoying Ivanhoe's edge as a miner that produces acid over those that consume it. But he worries about the logistical chaos unleashed by the war stoking inflation and weighing on growth.
"Unless the Strait is open, you're going to see extremely bizarre disruptions in the supply chain," he said.
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Quoted
Podcast
The Data Point
The price of sulfur was climbing well before the Iran war kicked things into overdrive. A major factor in recent years was demand from Indonesia, where the fast-growing battery industry is a big consumer of sulfuric acid, according to Sarah Marlow, head of fertilizer pricing at Argus.
Corrections & Amplifications
The Philippine government asked the developer of the MTerra Solar project, in which infrastructure investor Actis owns a stake, about building more solar capacity. Last week's newsletter incorrectly said officials got in touch with Actis employee Rahul Agrawal.
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Today's email was written by Ed Ballard in London. Contact him at ed.ballard@wsj.com. Contact the team at climate@wsj.com.
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April 16, 2026 09:33 ET (13:33 GMT)
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