TNT shortage has one company angling to get Canada back in the explosives business

Vulnerable on the battlefields, which are increasingly dominated by the side that can launch the most drones with the most explosives packed into or carried beneath them.

Vulnerable economically too, in a world where cars, computers and other hi-tech goods rely on critical minerals that must be blasted and mined from the ground or the rock.

Vulnerable because one of the Western world’s most important suppliers — a Polish firm operating out of a factory founded by Nazi occupation forces during World War II — is no longer able to keep up with the booming demand for its main product, trinitrotoluene.

Gagnon first learned of the global shortage in 2024 from his son, who works in the defence industry in California.

Clark Mica started hearing similar issues in the fall of 2024 from civilian members of the Washington-based industry association he runs, the Institute of Makers of Explosives.

“Their main supplier … was no longer able to guarantee supply due to NATO allies needing that TNT as a resource,” Mica said.

NATO militaries needed TNT to feed the Ukrainian military with the shells and other munitions needed to fight off invading Russians.

Ukraine had its own TNT plant, located in the eastern region of Luhansk, that was capable of producing 10,000 metric tonnes annually. But it was lost shortly after the war began in 2022, when the territory was invaded and occupied by Russian forces.

The war has seen Ukrainian drones and missiles targeting Russian explosives and ammunition plants. One particularly daring 2023 attack involved a remotely piloted Ukrainian boat, loaded with 450 kilograms of TNT, striking a Russian tanker.

The TNT shortages have sent a panic all along the West’s explosives supply chain as militaries and civilian mining and construction companies reliant on the explosive are confronted with delays and skyrocketing costs, with price increases reaching as high as 400 per cent at one point, according to Mica.

Adding to the costs of imported TNT, he said, are U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Efforts to convince the White House to exempt imported explosives from the trade duties, at least until domestic production gets up and running, have been unsuccessful.

The situation is a far cry from the Second World War, when Canada’s economy went on a war footing that saw it become the world’s fourth largest producer of munitions and a major producer of TNT.

But the cloak-and-dagger tactics of the Cold War, which emphasized detente over detonations, resulted in a movement to wind down domestic TNT production, which had left an environmental legacy of tainted and toxic soil and water.

The advent of stronger industrial environmental regulations in the 1970s and 1980s, coupled with globalization, made it more attractive to outsource explosives production, Mica said.

The keeper of the world’s largest explosives arsenal, the United States, shuttered its last TNT plant in 1986.

But Mica said there has long been an awareness that the long supply chain for what is known as energetics was a vulnerability.

“It wasn’t until everything kind of came to a head between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Gaza, and now Iran, that everyone woke up to the fact that we can’t be reliant on even our allies for these really critical materials that are used both for national security and our domestic economy.”

Canada is facing a similar reckoning as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government seeks both to build up Canada’s military strength and capabilities and to turbocharge the Canadian economy by fast-tracking infrastructure, energy and mining projects, all of which will require explosive charges in addition to massive financial investments.

The Polish TNT producer Nitro-Tech currently produces about 10,000 metric tonnes annually. In March, it announced plans for a new production line that would double output within four years.

The U.S. military is planning a TNT production facility in Kentucky that could be in operation by 2029, but it would reportedly only produce about 2,300 metric tonnes a year.

Similar projects have been launched in Sweden and Finland, and the British government has funded feasibility studies with an eye to building six new ammunition plants.

The Canadian proposal by Gagnon’s Nalagx Corp., which counts former Liberal cabinet minister Wayne Easter and retired general Maurice Baril as advisers, is to produce 10,000 metric tonnes of TNT annually with up to 40 per cent for civilian purposes and the remainder going to the militaries of NATO member states.

That still falls well short of Russia, which can produce about 50,000 metric tonnes of TNT a year, or China, which is also a major producer but restricts exports to the U.S. and Western countries.

Over the summer, Nalagx Corp. and the New Brunswick government agreed on a site for the proposed plant in the north of the province, near the Port of Belledune.

“This is going to be a Canadian project, built by Canadians, operated by Canadians and owned by Canadians,” Gagnon said, adding that the company plans to unveil more details about its financing and operations later this month.

“We’re answering the call and we are perfectly aligned with the vision that Prime Minister Carney has for Canada and NATO.”

If Gagnon sounds bullish, it’s because the competition is stiff.

Last month, PGZ, the state-owned Polish firm, told Reuters it was “in the discussion phase” about opening a Canadian production facility in Canada, although it had not found financing or a specific location.

In late 2025, Nalagx Corp. came to an understanding with a French firm, Eurenco, to operate its proposed TNT plant.

Gagnon said Eurenco later cast doubt on the feasibility of the project and backed away from it, only to later announce a partnership with PGZ.

It has the appearance of a cutthroat race just to get to the starting line.

“I think it’ll be interesting to see how many of these plants actually get built,” said Mica.

The other question is whether TNT plants should be built at all.

Certainly, there is a military and national-security case to support the scaling up of production among NATO allies, particularly as Europe increasingly braces for the possibility of direct war with Russia.

But activists have also challenged the use of explosives that have been produced in Europe and shipped through Canada for use in American shells, missiles and bombs that are provided to Israel for use in Gaza and across the Middle East.

It’s part of a “doubly destructive business” for which TNT production in Poland is responsible, Polish academic Ewa Górska, an assistant professor at Wroclaw University’s Digital Justice Centre, which studies the intersection of technology and criminal justice, wrote in a paper last month.

The Polish plant “not only facilitates explosive violence in war zones around the world but also precipitates ecological violence in Poland.”

The three-step chemical process for producing TNT results in wastewater “characterized by high toxicity, carcinogenicity, resistance to degradation and a tendency to accumulate in the natural environment,” Górska wrote.

A 2019 audit found that the presence of “explosive substances” in the Polish wastewater had been “significantly reduced.” But this was due to “natural processes, such as sunlight” rather than any technology implemented by the company.