So much for Peak Phosphorus?

Spring is always a season of conferences, and I seem to have been on my travels more than usual over the past few months, to San Antonio for the National Petroleum Refiners Association’s (NPRA) annual get-together, to Abu Dhabi for the Sour Oil and Gas Advanced Technology (SOGAT) conference, and to New York, where The Sulphur Institute (TSI) had its annual meeting. While picking out the highlights in terms of implications for the industry and the wider world, to my own mind one of the most significant things that I learned over the past two months is that we don’t need to worry about running out of phosphorus.

This is no idle concern; while for the sulphur industry phosphate fertilizers represent 55% of all sulphur and sulphuric acid demand, for the human race it is one of the key nutrients that goes to make up our own bodies – the most common mineral element in us apart from calcium. The Peak Phosphorus debate – like concerns about a number of strategic minerals – has come hard on the heels of Peak Oil fears, but the implications were always perhaps even more worrying; while it might be difficult and expensive, we can always find substitute fuels for oil, or other ways of getting about, but there is no substitute for the role that phosphorus plays in human health and nutrition.

So the prospect of running out of this vital nutrient should perhaps have raised far more global concern than it has done. Warnings began to emerge in 2006 that we would see peak phosphorus production before 2030, with the planet completely denuded of vital phosphate resources by 2050-2100, with the prospect of mass starvation ahead for humanity, and the price peak of 2008 helped give legs to the story. Well, if it did all pass you by, let me tell you that you can relax; it turns out we’re not running out of phosphorus after all. Steven Von Kauwenbergh, phosphate geologist and principal scientist with the International Fertilizer Development Centre, has spent the past couple of years reviewing the evidence for global phosphorus reserves, and at the TSI conference in New York he told me that concerns have been overblown. In fact even economically recoverable reserves – which he puts at 60 billion tonnes – should last us at least 375 years at current rates of usage, and he estimates that global phosphate resources probably total 290 billion tonnes; enough to last 1,800 years at present rates of use. And this is, he insists, a conservative estimate; Morocco alone may have 56 billion tonnes of mineable reserves and 140 billion tonnes of total resources.

The Hubbert Curve is of course a simple mathematical model, with no scope for new technological developments which can have dramatic consequences (such as the way shale gas has transformed the natural gas market). But it is also part of the more general problem of assuming that the future is amenable to a simple extrapolation from present trends. The idea that consumption will always continue to rise is one such. For example, per capita consumption of phosphorus is not rising, but in fact falling. In 1976 it was predicted that we would be using 210 million t/a of phosphates by 2000. The figure for 2000 was actually about 160 million, and like most fertilizer nutrients, consumption has been falling in the developed world since about 1990 as we find more efficient ways of using it. Peak usage in the developing world may not be too far down the line.

Dire predictions about the future, always advanced with the best of intentions, are nothing new. And they often draw our attention to a situation which if left unchecked could indeed be problematic, or contain within them sensible ideas that we should pay heed to. It would be very much to our advantage to continue to try to improve the efficiency of our use of phosphorus, for example. However, it is reassuring to know that this doomsday scenario in particular is not one we need lose much sleep over.