We didn't even link to the Norwegian phosphates story, it didn't seem like a very big deal. And the fact that most of the stories focused on batteries was just plain weird.
But, the post below is a solid return to reality and then, after the jump, some truth-bombs. We'll even have a money manager getting dressed down by a science guy.
From Ed Conway's substack, July 14:
Phosphogeddon Never
Why the "world-changing" discovery of phosphates in Norway isn't quite as world-changing as you might have been led to believe. But don't panic: we're not going to run out of this critical rock
If you’ve heard of phosphates before, there’s a chance you’ll have heard about them via articles like this or this. Every so often a newspaper runs a story screaming that we’re about to run out of this important category of minerals.
That would clearly be a Bad Thing. Because without phosphorous we are all dead. This element is essential to life. Without it our cells cannot grow, which would be the end of everything as we know it on this planet.
Alongside nitrogen and potassium, phosphorus is the backbone of plant life. This stuff, which we mostly get by mining it from rocks in the ground, is an essential fertiliser, part of the holy trinity of nutrients which crop up (no pun intended) repeatedly throughout Material World.
The fact that these days we also use a small but increasing fraction of the world’s mined phosphorus inside electric car batteries adds an extra piquancy to these stories. This element is a big deal, and getting bigger.
So yes, phosphogeddon, or “peak phosphorus” as it’s sometimes called, is indeed a very scary prospect. And many of those scary stories derive from simple calculations that look at how much phosphorous we’ve classified as reserves, comparing that with annual consumption and then working out how many years we have left of the stuff. Here’s what that chart looked like back in 2009: only another couple of decades until we’d hit the peak. Argh!
All of which perhaps helps explain the excitement over the recent discovery of large amounts of phosphates under the ground in Norway. The quantities of phosphates found by Norge Mining are so great, trumpeted some of the stories, that they had effectively doubled the global stocks of phosphates overnight. Amazing, right??
Except that there are a few problems here. Most glaringly, while this discovery is of course encouraging and exciting, actually it turns out the numbers are significantly less exciting and world-changing than they look on the surface. In fact, nearly all of the news organisations covering the discovery have fallen foul of a common but I’m afraid quite bone-headed statistical mistake....
....MUCH MORE
In 2012 GMO's Jeremy Grantham was given some prime editorial real estate to write about phosphate and potassium in the journal Nature. And Vaclav Smil, donning his Professor's cap, took out his correcting pen. Here's the second of two posts:
December 10, 2012Vaclav Smil Takes on Jeremy Grantham Over Peak Fertilizer
To date it hasn't. Also to date I haven't come through on my assurance in Nov. 24ths "Jeremy Grantham "On the Road to Zero Growth" as His Co-head of Asset Allocation Does the Full Monty". I promise I'll get to it.
We have almost as many posts on Professor Smil as we do on Mr. Grantham. This is the first time they've been together. I feel very uncomfortable being on the opposite side of Mr. G on just about anything but in this case Smil is right.
From The American:
Jeremy Grantham, Starving for Facts
A column by legendary asset manager Jeremy Grantham is more suitable for the tabloids than for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific weekly magazines.Some of our other posts on Smil:
Jeremy Grantham, a well-known presence in the financial world, recently published a World View column in the journal Nature in which he concludes that, “simply, we are running out’’ of almost all commodities whose consumption sustains modern civilization. There is nothing new about such claims, and since the emergence of a vocal global peak oil movement during the late 1990s, many other minerals have been added to the endangered list. Indeed, there is now a book called Peak Everything. What makes Grantham’s column – published under the alarmist headline “Be Persuasive. Be Brave. Be Arrested (If Necessary)” – worth noticing, and deconstructing, is that he puts his claims in terms more suitable for tabloids than for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific weekly magazines.
His direst example is “the impending shortage of two fertilizers: phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash). These two elements cannot be made, cannot be substituted, are necessary to grow all life forms, and are mined and depleted. It’s a scary set of statements…. What happens when these fertilizers run out is a question I can’t get satisfactorily answered and, believe me, I have tried.’’ Well, he could have tried just a bit harder: an Internet search would have led him, in mere seconds, to “World Phosphate Rock Reserves and Resources,” a study published in 2010 by the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
This detailed assessment of the world’s phosphate reserves (that are the part of a wider category of resources that is recoverable with existing techniques and at acceptable cost) concluded that they are adequate to produce fertilizer for the next 300 to 400 years. As with all mineral resource appraisals (be they of crude oil or rare earths), the study’s conclusions can be criticized and questioned, and the statement by the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative is perhaps the best document of that kind. But even the most conservative interpretation of IFDC’s assessment shows that phosphates have a reserve/production ratio well in excess of 100 years, higher than that of many other critical mineral resources.
Grantham could have also checked the standard, and the most often quoted, sourcebooks on the world’s mineral resources, Mineral Commodity Summaries, published annually by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). In the latest edition, he would have found that the USGS made significant revisions to its phosphate rock reserves data for Morocco, Russia, Algeria, Senegal, and Syria, and that it now puts the global reserve/production ratio at about 370 years....MORE
Energy: "The man who’s tutoring Bill Gates … "
Vaclav Smil: "The Manufacturing of Decline"
Bill Gates Reviews Vaclav Smil's "Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines"
Oct 2010
Serious Thinking on Energy: An Interview With Dr. Vaclav Smil
Smil is one of the heavyweights in the cogitating-about-energy biz....July 2010
A Major Piece: "Why the tech revolution isn’t a template for an energy revolution"
We've been following Mr. Smil for a while. Some interesting links after the headline story, from the Financial Times' Energy Source...Vaclav Smil: "Why Jobs Is No Edison" (AAPL)
Those are just the early links on Smil there are another eleven years worth since that post. Ditto for links to Mr. Grantham.
