The staff at the Energy Bulletin put together a great article today examining the peak production rate of phosphorus. By applying the same methods used by Dr. M. King Hubbert (the man who accurately described Peak Oil in the 1950s) to phosphorus production, the authors discovered that not only had the U.S. reached its peak production in 1988, but the world had peaked in 1989!
Why is phosphorus important, you might wonder? From the Energy Bulletin article:
The current major use of phosphate is in fertilizers. Growing crops remove it and other nutrients from the soil... Most of the world's farms do not have or do not receive adequate amounts of phosphate. Feeding the world's increasing population will accelerate the rate of depletion of phosphate reserves.
and
Phosphorus may be the real bottleneck of agriculture.
Population growth was only possible because we found phosphorus deposits and cheap energy to extract, transform and transport it to farms. When we plot data of world population versus world phosphate production, we find a significant correlation.
The problem of phosphorus depletion is just one more example of the imminent crunch in resource reserves we face. I wrote about a similar concern in my Peak Salt article nearly a year ago. The difference there is that we don’t actually face a salt shortage until we face an oil shortage -- an example of a subtle but critical interaction between resources. What we in the Peak Oil community are discovering is a complex system of feedbacks and tipping points, just as the world is discovering in the issue of global warming.
Why the similarity? Because the resource extraction/consumption system is of the same type as the global climate system: chaotic. Despite the name, chaotic systems have a certain elegance and structure; however, they present severe problems when we attempt to model them.
In the next post, I will discuss the true nature of the chaotic Global Resource Crunch we’re already experiencing.
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Another phosphorus info source
Phosphorus depletion wasn't something that I had given any thought of until I read a really good book that covers phosphorus and nitrogen depletion. Phosphorus depletion is going to be more permanent that peak oil because there are zero substitutes for phosphorus! With energy, there are many other sources, albeit not nearly as compact, efficient, or easy to produce as oil. With the ways that we presently use phosphorus, nearly all of it eventually ends up in the ocean, and there is virtually no way to extract the phosphorus from ocean water. It will eventually form into deposits that will be lifted out of the oceans by geological forces, so we shouldn't have to wait more than a few tens of millions of years for that to occur!
The book I found is titled 'Feed or Feedback; Agriculture, Population Dynamics and the State of the Planet'. It's written by A. Duncan Brown. He is active in conservation and ecological movements in Australia. There are a lot of formulas and exponential math used throughout the book, and is at times a tough slog to get through, but does have a lot of good information. It covers a lot of generic human history starting from when man switched from a hunter/gather to agriculture, and all the things that come with that (towns, specialization, sanitation, soil depletion, fertilization, and the feedback loops required to keep the whole system going).
The conclusions are pretty grim as it talks a lot about how our current civilization is caught in a positive feedback loop with energy use and food that has placed us into a position of population overshoot and what the eventual outcome will be.
Agreed
The thought of phosphorous production had never crossed my mind either, but its scarcity could be catastrophic. One thing I would like to see is an inflation-adjusted plot of the price of phosphorus over time, to see if peak production has already led to a price impact. You would think that a peak of nearly twenty years ago would have quite an effect on prices at this point...
CFLs
Hmmm... My son and I just saw on TV's "How it's made" that phosphorus is critical for making fluorescent light bulbs, something I didn't know. So we have something touted as a partial solution to global warming and Peak Oil that is affected by a different aspect of the Global Resource Crunch.