Global Fertiliser Shortages Manifest

[Admiral Valdemar]

Multiple links, so can't post the full articles for them, but the gist of it is many are unable to afford such a commodity and this is totally unprecedented.

• -The UK
  

  Problems have been blamed on many factors – the closure of phosphate mines in Russia; growing demand from biofuel farmers and use of former set-aside land; the rising price of oil; even cynical stockpiling by fertiliser companies. Advice from suppliers is to order now because it will be distributed on a first come-first served basis. This comes just as the price of lamb shows signs of recovery.
  
  Industry experts say the shortage will last at least two years, which may make more farmers consider converting to organic production, with the added bonus of a premium – although on reduced quantity.
  
  But a continued shortage will have serious implications for conventional farming, particularly in a world of climate change where governments, led by the United States, seem to think that biofuel from crops could provide an answer.
  
  After huge increases in feed, livestock farmers will be well advised to look to less intensive systems and get maximum value from pasture.

  -The US
  

  Sunday, January 20, 2008
  
  NEWS IN AGRICULTURE
  Fertilizer shortage a risk to our national security?
  
  By Dean Stites | The Morning Sun
  
  ...This means that American producers are no longer able to manufacture fertilizer at a competitive price so many plants have shutdown and are no longer manufacturing fertilizer and others are likely to stop production, so this manufacturing deficit is only going to get worse..
  
  As it stands now, more than half of the nitrogen fertilizer used by American farmers comes from places like Saudi Arabia, South America and Russia where natural gas is cheaper. So it shouldn't be hard to figure out what this whole article is about. It is about the fact that once again we find ourselves importing a very critical resource from countries that may at some future date, decide, for political reasons or other, to stop the supply of nitrogen fertilizers coming into this country.
  
  At some point, all of this could lead to food shortages in this country...

  -Canada
  

  THE WORLD'S HOTTEST COMMODITIES ARE IN YOUR CEREAL BOWL
  
  JOE FRIESEN AND MARCUS GEE
  
  February 16, 2008
  
  The jump in crop prices has been accompanied by a 150-per-cent increase in fertilizer cost, a boon to companies such as Agrium Inc. and Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan that have seen their stock prices soar, but has cut into farmers' profits. Diesel fuel has also shot up in the past year.

  -Zimbabwe
  

  Zimbabwe: 'Mother of All Poor Seasons' Forecast
  
  Zimbabwe Standard (Harare)
  
  3 February 2008
  
  ZIMBABWE'S much-ballyhooed "Mother of all seasons" looks set to become the "Mother of all poor harvests", agricultural experts warned last week.
  
  They warned, contrary to official predictions of a bumper harvest, of a "serious food crisis".
  
  Their projection: the harvest may only amount to 30 percent of the total national maize requirements...
  
  ...Most farmers failed to plant on time because they could not access seed, fertilizer and fuel, among other vital inputs...

  -Pakistan
  

  Fertilizer prices to go further up
  The Nation
  Dec. 2007
  KARACHI - The recent move of China to increase export duty on DAP fertilizers would cause a further rise in the prices of DAP, as Pakistan mostly imports DAP from China, said a report.
  China has decided to increase export duty on Di-Ammonium Phosphate (DAP) fertilizers to 35 per cent to secure fertilizer availability to the domestic market in the backdrop of surging food inflation and recent snow storms, curtailing the country’s power supply and limiting its DAP production...

[J]

Hmmm...I guess I should start researching and investing in various grain & food futures...

[Ryan Thunder]

So basically, this is it. We're all fucked.

Why me?

[Broomstick]

Oh, please - those of us in the industrialized world are FAR better off than those in the third world. We might get thin and our diets limited - they have a real risk of starving to death.

[Soontir C'boath]

We should switch to hair.

Of course that article doesn't espouse how effective it is compared to fertilizer, still...

[Eris]

I blame the politicians for this. Clearly their intensified use of bullshit in their rhetoric has diverted the precious resource from agricultural use.

More seriously, I can't see why anyone's surprised. Industrial agriculture is incredibly wasteful and intense this way. We were going to run out of cheap fertiliser sooner or later. We'll never run out, since it's very easily recycled, but it's much more expensive to reclaim than to mine, which is going to hurt Africa even more than it is now. I wonder if these coming few years will be what finally breaks their backs.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Broom is right. For us, this means the end of cheap food, so our food bill will once again be the vast majority of our income, as will energy.

The Third World goes without. Both.

[Stormin]

This bites. I work at a greenhouse that is pretty marginal as is. I guess it will be a race whether competition dropoff due to higher fuel prices will match raising operating costs (coal for heating and ferts).

[Aaron]

So basically, this is it. We're all fucked.

Why me?

Broom's got the right idea, we'll have to pay more for food. Unless your totally useless you could plant a garden and offset some costs. A two pound box of seed potatoes can yield sixty pounds of edible spuds. Carrots are also easy to grow. Corn is a pain in the ass but there's a shitload of other stuff you can plant. A pack of seeds is what, two bucks?

Consider yourself lucky, Africa will probably be empty in a century.

[K. A. Pital]

What's the sound of that? Oh, that's China crushing and burning, I guess.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

What's the sound of that? Oh, that's China crushing and burning, I guess.

Especially when China's agricultural development is pathetically bad and some of the peasants in the country side are close to revolting. The situation is NOT pretty.

[Pelranius]

Well, most of what China does right now is mostly mom and pop stuff (most farmers there do with very little land per person which generally doesn't use too much fertilizer to begin with) though they'll pretty much have to stop eating meat.

If nothing else, they could always go back to using nightsoil (there's no shortage of that, at least. I must admit that I don't have any figures on the Chinese natural reserves for the material needed to manufacture fertilizer). It wouldn't be easy by any means, but they've got it better than places like Latin America and Africa, who'd be completely FUBARed.

[K. A. Pital]

The situation is NOT pretty.

I hope China maintains the central government even if they face a food crisis. Otherwise the consequences will be bad for the whole of SEA... well, they'd be bad anyway, but worse if China breaks up.

[Pelranius]

Stas: How would Russia do without fertilizer? I honestly don't know how much the Russian agricultural system depends on it. Especially now that the phosphate mines are closing down.

[K. A. Pital]

How would Russia do without fertilizer?

You mean how would Russia do without meat? The deal is: after the USSR stopped subsidies to agriculture and mass grain aquisitions for livestock feed, the livestock rapidly fell. Russia was out of meat. Now, Russia buys most of it's meat, produces around 70-80 million tons of grain (versus 100-110 for the 80s period), and wastes 1 million tons of fertilizer, whilst exporting 9 million tons of fertilizer.

If Russia stops exporting fertilizer, that means products become more expensive somewhere else; as we aren't food self-sufficient, that means rising prices, first of all for high-calorie foods, which is fairly bad for humans as I'm sure you know.

[Zablorg]

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?:evil:

Oh wait, we're not at a running outage, it's just going to cost more. Good.

[montypython]

Biofuels should be made from algae, thereby eliminating the problem of using arable land for energy production and returning it to food production, and greater use of organic fertilizers like pig manure could help things a bit.

Everyone planting gardens could also have a beneficial effect too.

[K. A. Pital]

Organic fertilizers are depending on livestock size. If people are getting poorer (regarding the price of food) the high-calory products like meat will be the first to take the consequences, resulting in a drop of livestock and reverting more into agricultures production - but at the same time reducing the organic fertilizer quantities as opposed to raising their volume.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

The situation is NOT pretty.

I hope China maintains the central government even if they face a food crisis. Otherwise the consequences will be bad for the whole of SEA... well, they'd be bad anyway, but worse if China breaks up.

Well, if the country side revolts, the bloody riots will make Tienanmen look like some walk in the park. Historically, riots of those variety result in a dead emperor, but that was then. Now things are driven by different ideology.

[Sikon]

As it stands now, more than half of the nitrogen fertilizer used by American farmers comes from places like Saudi Arabia, South America and Russia where natural gas is cheaper.

Wrong. A more reliable source than some local paper, the USGS, shows that U.S. fixed nitrogen (ammonia) consumption came 56% from domestic production, 24% from Trinidad and Tobago*, 7% from Canada, 5% from Russia, 4% from Ukraine, and 3.5% from all other sources combined (2007). It's not mostly imported from Saudi Arabia and the like, as any from there would be in the under 3.5% category.

* The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is a small Caribbean country nearby; the U.S. Department of State describes it and its fertilizer production here.

One thing the article does get right, though, is that nitrogen fertilizer is usually made with natural gas (or coal), not oil. The basis of nitrogen fertilizer is ammonia, which can applied directly (anhydrous ammonia) or made into ammonium nitrate or urea. Ammonia is NH3.

The Haber-Bosch process makes ammonia, the net result being N2 + 3H2 -> 2NH3 (at high pressure and a few hundred degrees Celsius in the presence of an iron catalyst). Up to around 90% of the total production cost of ammonia production is the hydrogen. The nitrogen is easily and cheaply obtained from the atmosphere, 80% nitrogen.

Natural gas is the primary method used to produce the hydrogen in the U.S. Like most things, that's not the only method for the goal, merely one that historically has usually been a little cheaper than the competition. Any other hydrogen generation method also functions. For example, the primary method in China is steam reforming of coal instead.

U.S. consumption of fertilizer is about 13 million metric tons of fixed nitrogen. With a typical cost on the order of $300 per ton, such corresponds to about $4 billion expense annually, which is 0.03% of U.S. $13800 billion GDP (2007). And, no, we won't have major food shortages from inability to deal with a price fluctuation in one method for producing something comprising less than a thousandth of the economy in production cost.

In principle, the ~ 2.3 million metric tons of hydrogen used to fix the 13 million tons of nitrogen annually could be produced by nuclear reactors designed for thermochemical water-splitting for a cost as little as $1.42/kg, around $3.3 billion per year for the hydrogen, similar to the current production cost from natural gas but cheaper if natural gas prices increased a bit more. Just using electricity from existing nuclear reactors to produce hydrogen by electrolysis also works, except it isn't as cheap, so it oesn't tend to be done, though such is technically possible. (Other methods include hydrogen production by electricity from renewables or by biomass gasification).

Of course, in practice, the default action that will be taken if natural gas prices rise enough will be to substitute coal. Steam reforming is the hydrogen production process. Carbon/hydrocarbons plus hot enough steam react to produce a syngas of CO and H2. Natural gas is primarily the input today (aside from the steam), but coal is also used to a lesser degree, the default substitute. While not environmentally friendly, U.S. coal production is more than a billion tons annually, versus the few million tons relevant here.

But even current fertilizer production primarily from natural gas hasn't demonstrated a large enough price increase sustained over enough years to economically force switching the hydrogen source yet.



Natural gas prices go up and down a lot, as illustrated above. The EIA anticipates increased natural gas production in the short-term outlook, though also with some price increase:

The Henry Hub natural gas spot price averaged $7.17 per thousand cubic feet (mcf) in 2007 and is expected to average $7.83 per mcf in 2008 and $7.93 per mcf in 2009. [...]

Total U.S. marketed natural gas production is expected to increase by 2.2 percent in 2008 and by 0.8 percent in 2009. Projected growth in 2008 is primarily due to the start-up of new deepwater supply infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico and continued production growth from unconventional reserve basins in the lower-48 onshore region.

From here.

Fixed nitrogen (ammonia) price increased from $245 dollars per ton (average, f.o.b. Gulf Coast) in 2003 to $314/ton in 2005 but then decreased to $302/ton in 2006, continuing to 2007 at the $300/ton level. The trend varies slightly by region within the U.S., such as the northern midwest having the highest prices in 2006 rather than 2005, for anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, followed by a decline in 2007. A question for the near-term future is whether they will decline further, stay around the same, or eventually rise enough that coal gets substituted more for natural gas as the primary hydrogen source (and, ideally, eventually, more nuclear/renewables).

However, either way, there's still going to be fertilizer production, and its production cost remains less than a thousandth of the overall U.S. economy.

As for other countries, the situation varies, although China tends to be underestimated a lot. With more than 2 billion tons of coal production annually, far more than even the U.S., versus their 0.04 billion tons of nitrogen fertilizer production, they will continue to meet internal needs for fertilizer. Much of the preceding figure is exported, actually, as they are the world's top fertilizer producer. Most of their production already uses coal instead of natural gas:

The entire fertilizer industry uses less than 2% of world energy consumption, and this is overwhelmingly concentrated in the production of ammonia. The ammonia industry used about 5% of natural gas consumption in the mid-1990s.

About 97% of nitrogen fertilizers are derived from synthetically produced ammonia, the remainder being by-product ammonium sulphate from the caprolactam process and small quantities of natural nitrates, especially from Chile. [...]

For economic and environmental reasons, today natural gas is the feedstock of choice. [...]

Thus, even when oil and gas supplies eventually dwindle, very large reserves of coal are likely to remain. Coal reserves are sufficient for well over 200 years at current production levels, and their location is geographically diverse. 60% of China's nitrogen fertilizer production is currently based on coal. [...]

From here.

[His Divine Shadow]

I remember when I was little and my parents got cow shit from my grandfathers farm and spread out on the potatofield behind our yard. Too bad we ain't got no more cows.

[KlavoHunter]

Question from the ignorant;

Is there any major downside to using human waste for fertilizer? I know they used to do it in Asia.

[Shroom Man 777]

Disease?

And the fact that collecting it is a bitch.

[Broomstick]

Actually, human-derieved fertilizer is used not just in India but also many other places, including the US. Disease certainly can be an issue but properly treated and/or aged this is a problem that can be solved. The process needn't even be high-tech even energy intensive (although the less energy input the longer it needs to age).

Collecting it can be a problem, but it's another problem that various civilizations have solved. Disposal of human waste is, after all, something that has to be done anyway.

[PainRack]

Question from the ignorant;

Is there any major downside to using human waste for fertilizer? I know they used to do it in Asia.

Disease, and untreated human waste also has the potential for environmental degradation.

That being said, sewage treatment plants have turned out useful fertiliser and soil from our feaces.