How a Low-Carbon Contract Runs on Conventional Tonnes

Freeport Minerals has been taking ammonium nitrate solution out of El Dorado, Arkansas since the first days of January 2025. The contract it signed in May 2024 runs five years and calls the product low carbon ANS.

What has been arriving in the trucks is conventional ANS.

That is not a delivery failure and nobody is hiding it. LSB Industries has written it into every periodic filing since the contract started, in the same paragraph, in almost the same words: conventional now, low carbon later, once the carbon capture project at El Dorado is running.

The molecule never changes. The attribute does.

"What are you actually buying when you contract for a low carbon tonne two years before the attribute exists?"

LSB furnished a fresh investor presentation to the SEC on September 9, which is what sent us back through the filing sequence.

The deck restates the project. The filings underneath it tell you something the deck does not.

Zero New Tonnes

El Dorado's ammonia plant is rated at 493,000 tons a year, which LSB bases on 1,350 tons per day. Cherokee runs 188,000 and Pryor 246,000, and across all three the company made roughly 826,000 tons of ammonia in 2025.

The carbon capture project adds none of that. Not one incremental ton of ammonia.

What it does is take the CO2 coming off El Dorado's existing ammonia production and put it into saline aquifers underneath the site: 400,000 to 500,000 metric tons a year, which LSB expects to cut its total scope 1 emissions by about 25%. On the product side, that reclassifies 305,000 to 380,000 metric tons a year of ammonia as low carbon.

Put the units on a common footing and El Dorado's nameplate is roughly 447,000 metric tons. So the project relabels something like two-thirds to five-sixths of the site.

This is the shape of a lot of what is coming. The tonnes already exist, the plant already runs, and the thing being manufactured is a certificate.

The Sentence That Changed in July

Here is where the filings earn their keep. That paragraph about phasing in Freeport's low carbon volume has been carried forward, quarter after quarter, with one word group updated when reality moves.

Three filings in a row said the volume would phase in late 2026: the Q3 2025 10-Q filed October 30, the FY2025 10-K filed February 26, and the Q1 2026 10-Q filed April 30.

The Q2 2026 10-Q, filed July 30, says early 2027 (chart below).

A quarter is not a catastrophe. What makes it worth your attention is where it showed up: no press release, no mention in the September deck, no headline anywhere.

It showed up as a revised clause inside a paragraph that otherwise reads identically to the one before it.

And it landed in the same quarter LSB bought its partner out.