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Page added on May 8, 2014
Peak Phosphorus Will be a Shortage We Can’t Stomach
Here’s the good news. We probably don’t have to worry about peak oil just yet, as it isn’t going to run out anytime soon. The bad news is, as the IPCC has recently reported, we can’t afford the costs of what liberating all that carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere would do to the climate. So we will have to leave it in the ground and come up with alternatives fast.
The really bad news is that we may not even have to worry about peak oil or dangerous climate change – instead we can fret over peak phosphorous. Unlike moving from our current dependence on fossil fuels, there is no alternative to phosphorus and if it runs out our global food production system would grind to a halt.
Phosphorus is present in all cells in all forms of life because it makes up part of the backbone of DNA – you can’t make DNA without phosphorus. We get our phosphorus by eating plants that have drawn up phosphorus through their roots, or by eating animals that ate the plants (or from expensive tablets).
Many plants do just fine by consuming the natural levels of phosphorus in the soil, but modern intensive farming methods quickly suck up phosphorus, which needs to be continually replaced. If you keep growing high yield crops on land that is irrigated with water and doused with pesticides, then you are going to come up against phosphorus limitation. And if you don’t plug that hole with fertilisers yields will dramatically decline.
Did farmers have this problem in the past? Yes, but they solved it in different ways. They fertilised their fields with phosphorus and nitrogen from animal waste. Manure – from horses, cows, pigs, or chickens – has the nitrogen, phosphorus and other goodies that plants need.
Farmers would also change the types of crops grown on a particular field and leave it fallow for a season to recover. This system, crop rotation, has been used successfully since ancient times, and improved from two to three and four-field rotations during the middle ages. There are many good things about it, but in the quest for ever greater short term crop yields, the modern system of intensive monoculture (growing the same crop all the time) farming wins.
But it wins because we make up for the inefficiencies of the crop-rotation system (different crops, different planting times, unproductive fallow years) by providing all the benefits it brings to the fields in the form of added fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation. All these elements of the agricultural Green Revolution requires large amounts of energy.
Imagine how much energy it takes to dig up phosphorus-bearing minerals, grind, and physically and chemically process it. Then transport it many miles, load it onto a spreader and tow it behind a tractor so that it finally gets onto a field. Digging up and burning stored solar energy (in the form of fossil fuels) allows us to extract phosphorus and put that onto fields in order to increase the amount of solar energy-using organisms (plants) we can grow and then eat.
The chemical crunch
If, or rather when, easily accessible phosphorus runs out we will either have to eat less, or decrease the amount lost from the system by increasing the quantity of phosphorus that is recycled. Recycling phosphorus from human and animal waste – back to manure again – or reducing the amount washed off from farmland in runoff will also take energy, probably a lot of energy due to the need for significant new infrastructure. We have the energy sources for this now, but will we when phosphorus scarcity really starts to bite? And when will that be?
Unsurprisingly it depends on who you ask. Upper estimates of mineral phosphorus resources (known concentrations in the ground) are about 300 years. Lower estimates for reserves (known concentrations in the ground that are technically and economically feasible to extract) are a few decades. The only thing certain is that limitations in phosphorus supply will increase the cost of phosphorus fertilisers and so the cost of food.
An effectively non-renewable resource: a phosphate mine in Togo.Credit: Alexandra Pugachevsky
And here’s the double whammy: some estimates give a date of peak phosphorus around the middle of this century which is when the global population will reach its possible maximum of nine billion. This is also when Sir John Beddington, a previous UK Chief Scientific Officer argues that humanity will need to generate approximately 50% more power, gain access to 30% more fresh water and grow 50% more food. All while significantly reducing our total carbon emissions.
Just when we have the greatest number of mouths to feed in all of human history, our reserves of easy to obtain, low cost phosphorus may start to run out. The worse case scenario is that many people will starve. Avoiding that outcome will require more recycling and more efficient farming practices. Getting up and running on that will require energy. Where will that low carbon energy come from in the middle of the century?
Will we starve or will we cook the climate? OK, that’s a false dichotomy. We could instead look at the current situation in which one billion people go hungry while another billion overeat and consider alternative scenarios in which we all get access to healthy and nutritious food. That wouldn’t require breakthroughs in fusion power or wonder GM crops but something seemingly much more challenging: our ability to share the Earth’s resources more equitably.
19 Comments on "Peak Phosphorus Will be a Shortage We Can’t Stomach"
ghung on Thu, 8th May 2014 8:05 am
The article didn’t mention bone meal; great source of organic phosphorous. Won’t work on an industrial scale, but quite doable on a small scale. A little goes a long way, and adds other essential minerals. Maybe we need to start grinding up our dead.
dsula on Thu, 8th May 2014 8:10 am
Wait and see what happens to the shortage when price doubles. One – two – three…. shortage be gone.
GregT on Thu, 8th May 2014 8:21 am
Wait and see what happens further to the economy, when price doubles. Wait and see what happens when another 50 million people in the US cannot afford food.
ghung on Thu, 8th May 2014 8:29 am
“One – two – three….
shortage be gone” can be kicked a little farther down road.Meld on Thu, 8th May 2014 8:30 am
Moronic opening statement doesn’t understand peak oil. Will not read.
ghung on Thu, 8th May 2014 8:39 am
Jeez, Meld, if you read the entire first paragraph, it’s as close to reality as one can get, except, perhaps, the “…we will have to leave it in the ground and come up with alternatives fast” part, which is the problem I’ve been working for years now, albeit on a very local scale. Gave up worrying about what “we” will do. So,, out to put some bone meal on my plants.
Davey on Thu, 8th May 2014 8:51 am
G, great idea to make use of all the cremations. We can put something on the back of drivers license indicating we donate our bodies to gardening in the quest to make soils more productive. A great gift to the younger generation. I am serious not poking fun, of course Fox news would lambast it!
ghung on Thu, 8th May 2014 9:43 am
Yeah, Davey, thanks. The traditional method was to boil the bones, lay them out in the sun to dry for a year, and crush them with something like this:
h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_crusher
People could go visit their family members’ bones and have a ceremony at the “crushing”. The next year they could honor their loved ones by symbolically eating them. Maybe we should ‘recycle’ their water as well; sort of a strange tradition in a strange land, eh? 😉
The only non-cultural problem I see is that industrial age bones are sort of loaded with heavy metals; lead, chromium and such.
Davey on Thu, 8th May 2014 9:57 am
Funny G I was just in the garden and I was thinking about toxins I was going to mention that to you you beat me to the punch
ghung on Thu, 8th May 2014 10:10 am
Looks like we’re stuck with the problem, either way. Google “heavy metals in NPK fertilizers” and you’ll get quite a few alarming hits. At least they won’t be as concentrated as they will be in soylent green 😉
green_achers on Thu, 8th May 2014 10:36 am
A better thing to do with bones is char them. They can be burnt in reduced O just like wood: the P doesn’t go anywhere, and the C is reduced to a form that will stay in your soil for generations. That’s what I do with deer bones around here.
zaphod42 on Thu, 8th May 2014 12:16 pm
ghung said: “People could go visit their family members’ bones and have a ceremony at the “crushing”. The next year they could honor their loved ones by symbolically eating them. Maybe we should ‘recycle’ their water as well; sort of a strange tradition in a strange land, eh?”
I was just thinking the same thing… we might run out of fresh water about the same time that we run out of phosphorus.
OTOH, we would certainly run out of family bones rather quickly. Also, many or most of the solutions I see proposed involve use of stored energy, be it coal, oil, gas or wood. With perhaps 9 billion people wanting to char their ancestors’ bones, to say nothing of cook their food and heat their huts, the woody vegetation on this planet will soon run out as well. Next, we’ll have to burn dung.
Fortunately (or maybe not) as long as we have politicians we will have a source of dung.
At some time, that hidden gorilla of overpopulation will always have to be dealt with in any proposed method for dealing with our predicament.
Craig
Boat on Thu, 8th May 2014 12:45 pm
Davy,
Have your bones ground and put into concrete. One good use is a man made reef for fish habitat.
Davey on Thu, 8th May 2014 1:08 pm
Boat, put me on a Native American raised platform and let the birds feast on me!
meld on Thu, 8th May 2014 3:36 pm
There is no way on earth that much of any oil is getting left in the ground, it will still be being pumped in a century, just at a very low level and probably from some militia somewhere or other. As long as the EROEI stays above 5-1 it’s getting pumped, end of story.
climate change is a hoax don’t you know, or at least that’s what the schools will soon be teaching when the governments of the world realise that renewables aren’t what they thought they were. Crack addicts do crack until they die or get arrested. Nobody is arresting the world.
Beery on Thu, 8th May 2014 3:50 pm
“We probably don’t have to worry about peak oil just yet, as it isn’t going to run out anytime soon.”
Erm… the time to worry is half way between when we started pulling the stuff out of the ground and the time when the last drop is extracted – that’s about 150 years BEFORE it runs out, which is about now, you f***ing idiot!
meld on Fri, 9th May 2014 6:06 am
Exactly Beery, if a writer can’t even get that very VERY simply fact right why the fuck should I listen to anything else they say. Personally I don’t use any chemical fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and I don’t till the soil. It’s a piece of piss to grow food.
farmlad on Fri, 9th May 2014 8:36 am
there is so much more to the phosphorus picture that this article just ignores.
What is commonly called the “green revolution” was only made possible by cheap energy, and what a waste it has been. Nitrogen and phosphorus are the 2 main pollutants causing the dead zones in the gulf of Mexico, lake Erie, etc. a lot of this phosphorus entered the waterways as part of the 4 tons of top soil that erode from the average acre of farmed ground every year. but as long as mined phosphorus remains so cheap the farmers don’t have to change their management to compete.
Many of the CAFOs in the US are concentrated in small areas, and often not even close to the agriculture fields so it becomes to expensive to spread the manure, which contains the majority of the nutrients that were harvested of those fields, back onto those fields. So a lot of manure ends up being a pollutant instead of the fertilizer it was meant to be.
So I wouldn’t be able to comprehend all the implications but with what I think I know so far, my guess is that we would be better off if the mines were shut down tody, or better yet, they would have never been started up.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Fri, 9th May 2014 9:23 am
Farmer, the unintended consequences of phosphorus mine shut down is collapse because it is the weak link to industrial food production and food is the weak link to the global system. All other tipping points and peaks will affect food. If this phosphorus change could have been done around 1960’s yes it is a great idea and maybe we could have taken agriculture in another direction. If we admit that BAU is crashing and we need alternative food production methods then yes we should phase out phosphorus mines. The top down will never admit to this nor can they by nature of the command and control structures. We still have unintended consequences of change to a brittle system. There is no way in hell we can feed the people we have now let alone any new ones. We are doing it now sure but it is not sustainable with what we know about AGW and PO. If we are ready to crash BAU and jump into the unknown your idea is a fantastic one. But spiritually as a species we will have to accept widespread food insecurity, outright hunger, and famine. This is basically a prescription for a die off and a global economic crash. I guess from the bottom up and in localized fashions alternative ag with alternative phosphorus will make those locations relatively more sustainable and resilient but only just so because we are still lacking far too many skills, resources and infrastructure to adequately return to a pre-industrial ag economy. Basically it is a die off with unknown results of how many survive and where this survival will be. It is the million dollar question and fascinating from a strictly scientific and objective mind’s eye!