Miserabilist doomers have added "peak phosphorus" to their strand of worry beads.

Unremarked and unregulated by the United Nations and other high-level assemblies, the world’s supply of phosphate rock, the dominant source of phosphorus for fertilizer, is being rapidly — and wastefully — drawn down. By most estimates, the best deposits will be gone in 50 to 100 years.

This is fortunate. No good can come of politicizing yet another factor of agricultural production by rent seekers and power mad parasites. The idea that "the best deposits" are finite is hardly news and of little significance since the definition of "best" depends on the methods used to mine them and the value of the material being mined. There are vast amounts of phosphate rock that are readily usable when the easiest deposits play out. They would be more expensive to use now, but the cost of mining them in future is speculative at best since technologies will be developed only when they are needed, just as has happened with other mining technologies such as those for fossil fuels, metals and even gems.

peak phosphorus could be the unwelcome sequel to peak oil.

“It’s an emerging crisis,” said Stuart White, director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and a co-author of two phosphorus studies published recently by Global Environmental Change and the International Conference on Nutrient Recovery from Wastewater Streams.

“Right now, you can get phosphorus if you’re willing to pay for it,” White said. “But global reserves will peak in 20 to 25 years. Africa has not stirred in terms of its phosphorus use. Africa could take off, and that’s very scary.

This is miserabilist nonsense. Phosphorus is in no danger of short supply, though it is in danger of increased cost. It's an economic issue. It is also an environmental issue in the sense that a great deal of phosphorus is discharged into surface waters to the detriment of living things. This will be a self correcting problem. As the cost of phosphorus rises reclamation systems will arise to capture the value stream. This is already in progress.

Both oil and phosphate rock are finite, non-renewable fossil resources that were created in deep geological time, whether from decaying biomass for oil or millennia of pooping seabirds for phosphate. But there are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for phosphorus, an element that forms bones, sustains cell membranes and gives shape to the DNA and RNA in all living things.

“We are effectively addicted to phosphate rock,” said Dana Cordell, a Ph.D. candidate who works with White and co-authored the recent studies.

Well, it isn't pooping seabirds that created the phosphate rocks. They made a little, but the vast majority precipitated out of sea water, was excrement and bones of sea creatures, or was sediment carried into the coastal seas by rivers. It is a process that continues today.

The idea that there is no substitute for phosphorus is silly. There is no substitute for any of the nutrients, they are elements. We can't reliably produce any of these atoms. We do have clumsy methods to alter things at the atomic level but it is still far easier to mine gold than to transmute lead. Alchemy is based on false premises.

A more sensible view is that "There's no work around for phosphorus as some claim for nitrogen." Nitrogen makes up the vast majority of our atmosphere and there are organisms that can process air to make nitrogen compounds useful to plants, just as they process air to make useful carbon compounds such as sugar. Phosphorus is not an atmospheric gas like nitrogen or carbon, though it is present in vast quantities in water, especially sea water. An individual grower will always have to haul in replacement phosphorus compounds rather than making it on site as he can nitrates and carbohydrates. The same is true for most of the nutrients required in agriculture. Potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, manganese, selenium etc. etc. must be hauled in to replace that which is removed in crops. Duh!

Mature animals, including humans, excrete nearly 100 percent of the phosphorus they consume. But only half of animal manure — the largest organic and renewable source of phosphorus — is being recycled back onto farmland worldwide, studies show. And only 10 percent of what humans excrete is returned to agriculture as sludge or wastewater.

“We need to start talking about our pee and poo more seriously,” Cordell said. “We need to be thinking in terms of 50 to 100 years.”

"We" certainly do take it seriously. Perhaps the average urban denizen has no understanding of these issues, but growers are well aware of them, apparently to a far greater degree than the academic establishment. No surprise in that. Some wet-behind-the-ears grad student is hardly someone that has a useful grasp of reality.

The U.S. now has only a 25-year supply left of phosphate rock, most of it is in Florida and North Carolina, studies show. China has the largest reserves — 27 percent of the total — but has clamped down on exports with a steep tariff. Morocco is occupying the Western Sahara and its reserves and is exporting them to the U.S, even as the U.N. condemns the trade.

Africa is now both the largest exporter of phosphate rock and the continent with the worst food shortages.

“We’re calling this the biggest problem no one’s heard of,” said James Elser, an Arizona State University ecologist who recently co-founded the Sustainable Phosphorus Initiative, a new research group on campus. (Arizona State will send representatives to the conference in Sweden this month, and next year, the university plans to host the second international summit on phosphorus.)

Rubbish. The rock formation being mined in Florida and N. Carolina is part of vast reserves all along the Atlanitic seaboard. They are the tip of a far larger sedimentary formation. They are the cheapest and easiest to mine, so it is reasonable that they would be mined first, but there is plenty more available when the price is right or the technology advances in ways that reduce the costs of mining. The worst thing that could happen is for ignorant politicians and activist groups to start meddling. Their only object is to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of society. We don't need more parasites, we need fewer of them.

they say, reducing demand means bucking a global trend and deliberately choosing to eat less meat. Meat- and dairy-based diets require up to three times as much phosphorus as vegetarian diets.

If the Western world switched en masse to a vegetarian diet, it could lower the world demand for phosphorus in fertilizers by as much as 45 percent, the studies show. If, on the other hand, Indians switched to a meat-based diet, it would triple India’s demand for phosphorus.

“It goes to the heart of what people see as affluence,” White said. “Can we afford to have 9 billion people in 2050 eating as high on the food chain as Americans and Australians do? The answer, clearly, is no. As Gandhi said, ‘There’s enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.’

“It’s not for me to tell other people what they should eat. But people in Western industrial countries have a choice. There is no need to eat meat.”

This is, as noted in the previous post, profoundly ignorant of agricultural reality. It is based on the triple threat stupidity of assuming that all land is the same, all animals are the same and all plants are the same and so it is all fungible. All the ignorant academic or activist needs to do is freely substitute one incommensurable thing for another until they find false but satisfying support for their cherished illusions.

The idiocy of activists and academics masks the real issues. To feed the world requires smarter use of all agricultural inputs and sophisticated agronomic systems. It isn't about peak anything. It isn't about politics or culture war or food fetishes. These are the concerns of the vermin that impede the deployment of sensible systems.

Update: Some detail

The name phosphorus comes from the Greek word phosphoros, which means bringer of light. Phosphorus is mined in the form of phosphate rock.

Phosphate rock is formed in oceans in the form of calcium phosphate, called phosphorite. It is deposited in extensive layers that cover thousands of square miles. Originally, the element phosphorus is dissolved from rocks. Some of this phosphorus goes into the soil where plants absorb it; some is carried by streams to the oceans. In the oceans the phosphorus is precipitated by organisms and sometimes by chemical reaction. Phosphorus-rich sediments alternate with other sediments (geologists say these beds are interstratified). Phosphorus-rich beds usually have very few fossils; however, deposits in Florida and North Carolina contain a large amount of marine fossils. Some geologists believe that the formation of these phosphorus layers occur under a very special condition in which no other type of sediment is present. In addition, it is believed that phosphorus-rich rock is deposited in a body of water in which there is no oxygen; this is called an anaerobic environment. Many theories say that phosphorus is absorbed by ocean plants that die. As they decompose, the phosphorus accumulates. Despite many theories, studies about the formation of phosphate rock continue and theories about its deposition are developing.

In addition to the sedimentary phosphate deposits, there are some igneous rocks that are also rich in phosphate minerals. Sedimentary phosphate deposits, however, are more plentiful.

The importance of phosphorus to agriculture and industry is not in dispute, but the attempts to exploit this importance for instrumental purposes by doomers is reprehensible. What is need are clear eyed approaches to phosphorus use and supply that can satisfy the growing needs of an ever more populous world.