If you work anywhere near defence procurement, mining, or the broader explosives supply chain, you already know something is off. TNT — trinitrotoluene, the workhorse explosive that fills everything from artillery shells to demolition charges — has become one of the most sought-after commodities in global defence. Prices have climbed sharply. Lead times have stretched from weeks into months. Governments are outbidding each other and private industry for supply that, frankly, does not exist in the quantities the world now requires.
What is happening is not a blip. It is not a short-term supply disruption that will correct itself by next quarter. The forces behind the current TNT shortage are deep, structural, and compounding — and they are reshaping the global munitions market in ways that will persist for years.
The most obvious driver is the sheer volume of ammunition being produced — and demanded — around the world right now. TNT remains the primary explosive fill in the majority of conventional artillery shells, mortar rounds, aerial bombs, and naval ordnance manufactured globally. It has been that way for over a century, and despite advances in alternative compositions, nothing has displaced it at scale.
The war in Ukraine changed the equation for everyone. At its peak, Ukrainian forces were burning through somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 artillery rounds a day. The Russians were firing even more. That kind of expenditure rate laid bare an uncomfortable reality: no Western country had the production infrastructure to sustain a high-intensity conventional war for more than a few weeks. Stockpiles that were meant to last months were being drawn down in days.
The response across NATO and allied nations has been a coordinated, large-scale ramp-up in ammunition manufacturing. The United States has tripled its 155mm shell production targets. The European Union committed to producing one million rounds per year. South Korea, Japan, India, Australia — everyone with an industrial base capable of producing munitions has announced expanded production lines. And every single one of those programmes needs TNT. Lots of it.
To put the numbers in perspective: a single 155mm high-explosive shell contains roughly 6.6 kilograms of TNT or a TNT-based composition. Producing one million of those shells a year means 6,600 metric tonnes of TNT — for one calibre, in one geography of demand. Now multiply that across every calibre, every nation, every branch of service. The math gets uncomfortable very quickly.
It is not just about the shells rolling off the production line today. It is about replacing everything that was given away over the past three years. The US, UK, Germany, France, Poland, and dozens of other countries drew down their own ammunition reserves to support Ukraine. Those reserves — built up carefully over decades — now have to be rebuilt, and the new targets are higher than the old ones.
NATO members are no longer planning for the kind of low-intensity expeditionary operations that defined the post-Cold War era. The planning assumption now is sustained peer-on-peer conventional warfare. That changes everything. Stockpile requirements are being measured in months of supply, not days. And rebuilding to those levels is a multi-year effort that creates sustained, predictable demand the market simply has not had to accommodate since the 1980s.
While the war in Ukraine dominates the headlines, it is far from the only source of demand pressure. The escalation between Iran and Israel has driven a procurement surge across the Gulf. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar have all accelerated their defence spending. The Red Sea crisis has kept naval munitions demand elevated. The military posture around Taiwan has intensified. Turkey has expanded both its domestic production and its arms exports.
India is investing heavily in indigenous ammunition manufacturing as part of its broader self-reliance push. Pakistan is scaling up. Even countries that have historically been minor players in the munitions market are now ramping up procurement in ways that would have been unthinkable five years ago.
Every one of these programmes draws on the same limited global pool of TNT and the same handful of precursor chemicals. The demand is coming from everywhere, all at once.
Defence gets the attention, but it is not the only sector feeling the squeeze. The global mining industry — copper, lithium, iron ore, rare earths — is in the middle of a massive expansion driven by the energy transition and electrification. Open-pit mines consume industrial explosives at enormous scale, and many of those formulations are TNT-based or use TNT as a sensitiser in ANFO and emulsion blends.
Then there is infrastructure. The construction boom across the Middle East — Saudi Arabia's giga-projects alone consume industrial explosives at a rate that would have been considered exceptional a decade ago. Tunnelling in Asia. Quarrying in Africa. Demolition across Europe's urban renewal programmes.
Military buyers and civilian buyers are now competing for the same feedstock, the same production capacity, and in many cases the same suppliers. There is simply no slack left in the system.
This is the crux of the problem. Global TNT production capacity is not sufficient for current demand, and new capacity cannot be built overnight.
Production is concentrated in a handful of countries — the United States, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, India, China, and Pakistan among the largest. Russia, historically a major producer, is now entirely consumed by its own wartime requirements and cut off from Western markets by sanctions. Many of the existing facilities are old, some dating to the Cold War, running below theoretical capacity due to maintenance backlogs, environmental constraints, and workforce shortages.
Building a new TNT production line is not like opening a new factory for consumer goods. It requires specialised engineering, hazardous materials handling infrastructure, environmental impact assessments, regulatory approvals, and trained personnel who understand energetic materials. Realistic lead times for meaningful new capacity are three to five years — and that is if everything goes smoothly.
In the meantime, governments with the deepest pockets are locking up supply through long-term offtake agreements, leaving smaller buyers scrambling.
Even where production capacity exists, running it at full output is not guaranteed. TNT is manufactured by nitrating toluene using nitric acid and sulfuric acid. All three of these inputs have faced their own supply pressures.
Toluene — a petrochemical from crude oil refining — is generally available, but the specific grades needed for military-spec TNT are more constrained. Nitric acid production in Europe has been buffeted by natural gas price swings, since ammonia — a key precursor — is extremely energy-intensive to produce. Sulfuric acid has tightened due to competing demand from the battery manufacturing and fertiliser sectors.
So it is not just the end product that is scarce. The entire supply chain, from raw chemistry to finished explosive, is under strain.
TNT manufacturing produces toxic byproducts — pink water, red water, various nitroaromatic compounds — that require careful treatment and disposal. Environmental regulations, particularly in Europe and North America, have become progressively stricter over the past two decades. Several legacy production sites have been shut down or restricted because of contamination issues. New facilities face lengthy environmental review processes, and in some jurisdictions, community opposition has blocked expansion plans outright.
None of this is unreasonable. The environmental concerns are real. But the regulatory framework was designed for a world of stable, predictable demand — not one where consumption doubles in three years. The result is a system where capacity expansion moves at a bureaucratic pace while demand moves at a wartime pace.
Sanctions on Russia have removed a significant chunk of production capacity from the pool available to Western buyers. China has the industrial base to produce at scale, but it is prioritising domestic military requirements and remains a politically fraught supplier for NATO nations. The effective supply available to Western-aligned countries is meaningfully smaller than global capacity figures would suggest.
Countries like Bulgaria, Romania, and Pakistan — historically secondary players in the TNT market — have suddenly found themselves in high demand. But their capacity is limited, their infrastructure is aging, and their ability to scale quickly is constrained by many of the same factors affecting larger producers.
What has emerged is essentially a bifurcated market: one supply pool for the West, another for Russia and its partners, and China operating somewhere in between. Each pool is tighter than the aggregate numbers imply.
TNT prices have risen by an estimated 40 to 70 percent since 2023, depending on grade, volume, and delivery terms. Military-specification product commands a significant premium over commercial grades. Spot prices — for buyers without long-term contracts — have climbed even higher.
These increases ripple through the entire munitions chain. The cost of a 155mm shell has risen substantially, and TNT fill accounts for a real share of that increase. At government procurement scale, the numbers add up to billions. For commercial users — miners, demolition firms, construction companies — the price pressure is squeezing margins hard and pushing some toward alternative formulations. But for military applications, where TNT's stability, castability, and performance are often written into the munition's specification, switching is not simple.
The forces driving TNT demand — the ammunition ramp-up, stockpile replenishment, regional conflicts, mining expansion — are not cyclical. They are structural and multi-year. New production capacity is being planned, but it will take years to come online in meaningful volumes.
For anyone in the defence supply chain, the takeaway is straightforward: TNT supply security is now a strategic issue, not a routine procurement line item. The governments and companies that lock in long-term supply agreements now will be far better positioned than those still relying on spot purchasing when the crunch tightens further.
The world is consuming more TNT than at any point since the Cold War. Supply is not keeping pace. And the gap between what the world needs and what the world can produce is, for now, only getting wider.