Bishop Hill Potash rot
Jun 20, 2014 Greens The Geological Society is having a conference today on "Communicating Contested Geoscience", featuring sessions on carbon capture and storage and shale gas, and hearing from people like Iain Stewart and David Mackay.
I was interested by some tweets about Professor David Manning, the Geolsoc President, who was giving a keynote address at the start of the conference:
David Manning @geolsoc: supermarkets one of the biggest consumers of mining materials - alarmingly high potash usage for fertiliser #CCG14
A question is asked about supply - are we running out? David Manning says with #potash that is a big risk. #CCG14
I couldn't help but recall a blog post by Tim Worstall on the subject of mineral reserves and mineral resources. This was a response to a claim by Jeremy Grantham that use of potash was going to have to be scaled back dramatically over the next 20-40 years, a position Worstall described as a schoolboy error, Grantham having confused reserves and resources:
Reserves, the numbers that Grantham is using, are the deposits that we know where they are, have drilled and tested them, we know how to extract and process them using current technology and we also know that we can make a profit doing so. They are the known known: and yes, this really is the number that Grantham is using.
Resources is a very different number. This is a combination of the unknown knowns and the known unknowns described above. For potash?
Estimated world resources total about 250 billion tons.
At the current usage rate of 33 million tonnes a year that gives us an over 7,000 year supply.
It's amazing that Professor Manning would make the same claim. So who is this chap who has got it so completely wrong? Well, it turns out he is professor of soil science at Newcastle University, where, on his webpage, he tells us a bit more about his interests:
I'm interested in how soils and plants interact in response to climate change, and how we can exploit soil processes to minimise the effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
I use my research-based understanding of how soils and their constituent minerals interact with the biosphere in two contexts: 1) carbon capture (through carbonate precipitation or biochar addition), and 2) plant nutrient supply (especially novel sources of K).
K? Isn't that...potassium...potash? Now that's interesting. If you look at one of Prof Manning's papers, you see that Prof Manning is well aware that there are other mineral sources of potassium - it's what his research is about. He alludes to recent price rises in the abstract, but as Worstall points out elsewhere, this is because of the Russians misusing their market muscle rather than because of shortages.
So I'm struggling to believe that Prof Manning is not fully aware that there is no impending shortage of potassium. How then to explain his telling the Geological Society conference that there is?
Reader Comments (56)
There has been a lot lately about huge potash mining developments in the North Yokshire Moors. There have also been items on BBC Radio 4 (of all places) about potash resources. Potash cannot run out as potassium is a stable element. It's just a case of finding and reusing potash from where it ends up after first use as a fertiliser. Newcastle is hardly more than a cycle ride from the North Yokshire Moors.
The way I read his paper he's claiming that some of the other sources, those not included in that 13,000 year supply of potash, could also be used. That is, his very research shows that there's not a shortage at all (K being 2.5% of the entire lithosphere).
Amusing actually.
Do any of those vocal CAGW advocates actually believe what they say?
Richard Muller tried to tell us he was once a sceptic
Julia Slingo saw the signature of AGW extreme weather in the flooding
Now David Minning sees potash running out despite his own work
And Iain Steward, well he did the notorious "Climate Wars" enuff said!
All (and I mean all) warmists are either fools* or liars*, Manning is the latter.
*fools - the congregation, they don't question what they're told because it suits their pre-conceived notion that corporations are bad, environmentalists are good and that they ought to feel guilty about their existence and consumption. They buy a Prius without any thought to the mechanisms used to produce the lithium batteries and drive it to the airport for their skiing holiday. these people love their technology, health, wealth & freedom - but don't think it's appropriate for 'ordinary people' to aspire the the same standard of living.
*liars - the Cardinals & Bishops, the activist scientists making a living from research which must generate continued alarmist claims to secure further grants. The politicians who justify restrictions on people's freedom and higher taxes based on that research. Environmental groups like WWF and Greenpeace that have become huge political pressure groups promoting hidden agendas even to the detriment of their claimed objectives (RSPB supporting bird killing wind-turbines). And the companies that take the subsidies to deliver infrastructure and technology that they would never fund because they know it isn't really viable.
At what point do we stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt and start telling it like it is? They are scientivists who will say and pretend to believe anything that will further the global warming scam. What is worse they think we are stupid enough not to notice their mendacity. What is worse still is that too many of us apparently are!
Mike Jackson @ 10:58 nearly pinched the point I was going to make. Prof Manning states [my bold]:
You see, if he was just interested in 'how soils and plants interact', or how he could 'exploit' them, he wouldn't get a sniff of my tax Pounds; but add in the magic words 'Climate Change' etc and, bingo! you've got your grant and don't have to work too hard for the rest of your life.
I started reading New Scientist when I was about thirteen. I realised quite soon that there is a common deformation in the thought of scientists - they think in terms of stuff being available in fixed amounts, and therefore are forever banging on about something-or-other "running out".
You can run out of stuff, of course, especially if there are problems with property rights. This I know all too well, having participated in the depletion of some fishing waters when I was a bit older. But running out of potassium is a notion so silly that you have ask yourself the classic "fool or knave" question. Or rather, extending jaffa's point, is he a knave preaching to a congregation that he believes he can easily fool?
I think somebody is taking the wee wee!
That. word "Communicating" is a surefire sign of a propaganda offensive. A dead giveaway that the other side with all their arrogance and unearned trappings of authority just can't help.
Rhoda is currently risking midsummer at 44 north latitude. So you don't have to. No catastrophe so far. I think Oxfordshire could cope with this.
Thank God I got in and out of Newcastle Uni and got my degree in Agricultural Engineering in the days before Prof Manning arrived. Back then ('81-'84), soil science meant soil science - real practical stuff under the watchful eyes of Dan Hettiarachchi and the legendary Alan Reece (who then went on to make a fortune designing undersea cable-laying ploughs just as the internet exploded into life, and everyone needed undersea ploughs...).
We covered the mystical world of internal friction, Coulomb's equation, plough design, shear stresses.......I might adjourn to the farmhouse attic and find my notes. Somewhere up there is the proof that if a tank's length is bigger than its width by a certain factor, it will never be able to turn. The story went that a first world war prototype was driven out in front of the generals, went forwards....backwards....forwards..and back onto the shed, never to be seen again. I once met an officer from the Household Cavalry on a skiing holiday who could also do the proof, because they too used to get taught that sort of thing. Some evening in the chalet that was.
But in three years in the Porter Building, St Thomas;' Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, there was not a single mention of climate change or carbon (except in strengthening plough mouldboards) anywhere.
Ho Hum.
A simple case of creating a demand for a process you own IP for, is it not?
There was a time a university would have taken offence at being abused like this, now they probably think its a cool trick to play.
The wider issue is of course that a great deal of scientific research in many fields is based on an assumption that nobody ever bothered to verify. It seems that education makes this even worse because they have read something in one book many years ago and never updated their facts/theories. It is very amusing watching Hans Rosling comparing what is known by the actual data about poverty and population versus what is presumed to be true by a) the general public, b) academics and c) monkeys/random chance. The monkeys always win and academics are always last. The peak oilers too somehow never seemed to grasp that the current price of oil is what stimulates or hinders the search for more: Their paradigm only made sense if you ignored the most important variable.
Is it still a saying among farmers that you should listen carefully to the 'experts' and then do exactly the opposite of what they recommend?
Oh yes, JamesG, very much so!!!
Saskatchewan Canada has more than a thousand years of Potash reserves (probably 10 times that). Russia and Belarus another thousand years. Its just a type of Potassium salt that evaporated out of long-gone oceans and is now buried under other sedimentary rock. It will never run out.
JamesG/Charlie Flindt
There's an old saying in the Marines that the two most dangerous things a Marine is likely to encounter are a sailor with a rifle and an officer with a map.
I believe that recently has been added "a civilian (for which read 'government official') with a clipboard". Farming friends tell me this last one at least is very true!
Dear Professor Manning,
Just a quick Wiki search informs me that potash refers to a group of potassium bearing minerals, the most common being potassium chloride. Also potassium is the seventh most common element in the earth's crust, and is found in every cell of plants and animals and is essential to their growth. So by what measurement are we 'running out'?
You should be ashamed of yourself, Professor David Manning, the Geolsoc President, for trying to scare ordinary people with such nonsense.
Charlie, shouldn't you be out ploughing or harvesting, or some other obscure farming activity?
JamesG, I was always told (probably by Charlie) that the definition of expert is: x, an unknown quantity, spurt, a drip under pressure.
Toodle pip!
Potassium adopts but a single +1 oxidation state in all the world outside of the pure metal in labs, so it's not line it's used up in any way any except that eventually it becomes fertilizer again as sewage and vegetable clippings. The more we take out of the ground injected into the biosphere, the better, whatever form of rock it comes from. Potash is a remarkably general term for POTasium containing powders that historically have been the residue of burned or boiled bio matter. But it's also in potash ore (table salt) which is just old naturally evaporated sea water. Such high potassium salts taste great too, not so harsh, but more savory instead. The rarity of processed farm and industrial grade potash is often due to the usual cartels taking over, just like De Beers vastly inflated the diamond market, or Enron tried to capture the carbon trading market back in the day.
Talking of Jeremy Grantham, I went to a GMO Investment Conference a while back where JG talked about investment for a couple of minutes (a subject which he really knows and has a great track record) and then went off on an unhinged rant about 'Climate' for the rest of his session. His colleagues, who must be used to this, stood around looking embarrassed, while the audience response was along the lines of: "Yes, well, anyway....about investment...."
Isn't potash renewable? We seem to get plenty from our regular garden bonfires...
Funnily enough there was a TV programme on recently with Tony Robinson about the worst jobs in history and one of them was medieval saltpetre (potash) collecters. They had the right to access your toilet, even if you were on the throne at the time, remove all the human waste (liquid and solid) then boil/burn it all down until they got saltpetre for gunpowder. As endorsed by Dr Ben Santer; it's the power of poo!
Don't we need a website and movement called "Peak Potash" with projections of complete depletion coupled with graphs showing the culpability of disfavored governments/administrations? Perhaps a doomsday clock. Not sure who the specific corporate villains would be..Big Fertilizer?
The title of 'professor' is now so degraded by inflation and opportunism that we really could do with another term for those who still demonstrate outstandingly high levels of knowledge, disinterest, and integrity in a given field.
NikfromNYC - your comment about the "rarity" of industrial or farm grade potash is incorrect. There is a general oversupply of good material and prices have fallen to about half of what they were several years ago. The mined material (whether conventionally mined or solution mined) is easily upgraded to recognized K2O standards for direct agricultural application. There are as has been noted here, thousands of years of reserves and resources and several large planned mines have been shelved at the moment pending price recoveries of product.
The other two necessary fertilizers - urea and phosphate - are also abundant. Urea is a byproduct of natural gas plants and phosphate is a mined product also.
It's quite amazing that these professors seem so enthralled with their own narrow research focus that they can't seem to find time for 15 minutes of outside reading before rendering an alarmist opinion on something that is completely wrong.
John Shade
Food for thought?
UK universities: from excellence to omnishambles
"The title of 'professor' is now so degraded…" (John Shade)
GB Shaw earned a crust, early on, as a music critic (under the name "Corno di Bassetto" - still huge fun to read). He only ever used the title 'professor' as an insult, so maybe it isn't altogether new.
to get rid of malaria, marshes got drained thereby creating arrable land.
win-win
same with the present day parasites: to get rid of champagne lefties and their many faux outrages and thieving
schemes, the PoshLeft's waterholes need to be drained.
this will create jobs, give new economic incentives, level playing fields and increase mobility.
6months for a vice chancellor assignment ? nah. oo long. 3 months will do after which : OUT with the toad. and no more taxoverpaid grandstanding position. back to real life. Someone else should have a chance
Andrew Douglas - as it happens, I've out in moi tractorrr turning my hay ready for the baler man to come in tomorrow and bale. Fabulous haymaking weather, no agrochemicals involved, no enormous complicated machines - just me, my 185 mower and my haybob vs. God and his elements (that's 'elements' as in weather, not LiBeBCNOFNe or even K). Just as it has been for centuries. If we get it baled tomorrow, it'll be one up to me. That'll make the score about 25 - 5 to me over the last thirty years.
Best job in the world.
Philip Bratby.
You are probably aware that wood ash contains potash. In fact the Royal Horticultural Society says Wood ash may contain useful levels of potassium (about three percent), a major plant nutrient associated with flowering and fruiting. However, the levels will vary depending on the age of the wood that was burnt; young wood such as from pruning will have higher potassium content than older, thicker branches..So converting Drax and other power stations to burning American wood may have an unforeseen consequence so far overlooked.that burning 16 million tonnes of wood at Drax will produce 160,000 tonnes of ash (1% of wood) which should contain round about 4000 tonnes of Potassium (<3% of ash). Recovering the Potassium from ash will save mining those 4000 tonnes, and this is only for Drax, just think how much mining we could save by converting all coal burning power stations to wood. (Remove tongue from cheek)
Sorry if anyone else has posted along similar lines I started this after lunch, but then had to move 1.5 tonnes of gravel.
These artificial potash mines are killing the planet, the Potassium is Radioactive!, think of the children!, its worse than we thought!. A while back greens tried to ban Chlorine, the case for banning Potassium as a precautionary measure seems convincing in comparison (how many cancer cases per year can be modelled as due to carcinogenic Potassium radiation?) The Sirius mining Whitby development would pump out far more bequerels into the ecosphere than Dart Energy's fraccing water. And obviously Bananas are out. Ban Bananas!.
The potash deposit in North Yorkshire is the largest known deposit in the world. Although the land area is comparatively small, the thickness is very deep.
The second largest is in the Congo, spread over a vast area, but the depth is shallow. These deposits are being worked and much of it sent in factory ships to India where it is converted into fertiliser on the journey.
I don't think we will be running out of potash any time soon, but as a benefit to human existence and population it will no doubt be a target for the greens to try to prevent it from being exploited, using over-regulation, as appears to be the case with the Yorkshire Potash.
Just as in the case of fracking, the land footprint for potash removal sites can be very small and relatively unobtrusive.
There seems to be a smell of manure about.
If you have a couple of dogs, you will not run out of potassium.
All chemists know that the chemical formula for dog piss is....K₉P.
Speaking of Jeremy Grantham, which Andrew Douglas was at 2:44 PM....
Grantham is a fascinating person. He has been a successful money manager for decades (he is in his mid-70s), building his reputation by avoiding the consensus, identifying areas of the market which are at valuation extremes.
Yet, in the climate and resource areas, he has unthinkingly gone along with the alarmist crowd, acting as if he is incapable of rational analysis. He listens to people like Bill McKibben and Michael Mann, showing pathetically bad judgement.
He was also a director of a company supplying Potash to organic farmers http://www.mineralsolutions.co.uk/products.php
There's about half a trillion tonnes of potassium in the ocean. It's not hard to get out, its just a bit more expensive than hard rock mining it is.
Bonus: after we consume the potash it all ends up back in the ocean again. Perfect recycling.
We will never run out of potassium. Nor will we ever run out of idiots.
"The peak oilers too somehow never seemed to grasp that the current price of oil is what stimulates or hinders the search for more"
I'm a bit of a peak oiler and I think the decline in the north sea is due somewhat to it 'running out'. In the end I think it will cause economic difficulties that will force changes in what we use to produce energy. Maybe shale gas will help us out a lot.
In the end you can't deny 'natural liquid in the ground' oil is a finite resource so does run out (or at least become uneconomic to extract eventually)
#innumerate
Phillip Bratby:
Potash cannot run out as potassium is a stable element.
Schoolboy error (just joking) - as we all know, potassium is radioactive - people, bananas etc. It is only 0.011% of the total but it decays to Calcium (89% - by beta decay) or Argon (11% - by electron capture). The good news is that the half-life is 1.251 billion years.
http://www.laradioactivite.com/en/site/illustration/images/DecayPotassium40_En.htm
I agree it would, eventually, Rob. But other hydrocarbon sources such as methane hydrates might conceivably extend the horizon by many human lifetimes. What I don't accept is an assessment by, say, Greenpeace as to when that will happen.
If it suited their purposes, they could quite truthfully also say that the sun will run out of hydrogen and [less truthfully] that we must do something about it today before it's too late.
@JohnShade, you say that "professor" as a term is degraded. So has "scientist". A new old term is being defined for the real scientists. "Boffin"
See El Reg at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/12/boffin_definition/
An honest question. Where does it go when you spread it on the ground? A bit is taken up by plants which in one form or another end up in the ground. Some will be leached and end up diluted in the ocean. It's still there though, we just haven't found a way to re-concentrate it into a useful form yet.
So it all ends up back in the Ocean?. This is terrible!, potassium is a strong Alkali (and a component of fraccing chemicals), scientific projections show that if all the available fossil potassium was mined and then dumped onto fields to boost farmers profits, and then allowed to leach into streams then the Oceans could become caustic and incapable of supporting anything apart from jellyfish by the year 2093!. This is worse than carbon!. Responsible governments should mandate potassium capture measures wherever this caustic chemical is used!.
You make a good point in distinguishing between reserves and resources. Changes in technology and market conditions can turn resources into economic reserves (and vice-versa) - case in point: the shale oil/gas boom.
New discoveries are being made for potash as well. For instance a new resource has been discovered in Arizona, see my blog: http://wryheat.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/arizona-may-become-a-major-producer-of-potash/
Jonathan DuHamel, economic geologist, Tucson, Arizona
http://www.cityam.com/1403281267/when-it-comes-our-homes-we-are-not-eco-aware Wondering what people make of this. I suspect that the questions would be loaded in favour of getting the answers that they wanted.
Potash rot? Rot. There is, as E.M.Smith points out, No Shortage of Stuff.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
There will need to be an enquiry; generous grants and lucrative positions on various bodies must be handed out in order to ascertain whether or not this is correct.
BH asked: "So I'm struggling to believe that Prof Manning is not fully aware that there is no impending shortage of potassium. How then to explain his telling the Geological Society conference that there is?"
There are not many comments so far that answer the question.
One commenter said (paraphrasing)... he is a knave preaching to fools.
My question is. Why is there no sanction in the British community for people like Prof. Manning?
Basically he is on the spectrum of "shouting FIRE in a crowded theatre"
Cannot someone in England bring an action against him for breaching the Duty of Care?
One brave Englishman brought a legal action against Al Gore's movie.
The legal process vindicated the complaintant.
We need more legal action against people in authority who seem to be incompetent or corrupt.
To those commenting about peak oil. It is not about how much more is in the ground waiting to be found (although that can be estimated using creaming curves and probit transforms, and does not change the peak answer by more than half a decade. Not is it about production economics, although oil prices will continue to rise at increasing rates to justify more enhanced oil recovery.
It is only about the geophysics of annual production. Peakmoilmis about the time when annual production begins to decline no matter how hard we try to increase it with more exploration, and more expensivd production methods.As the best reservoirs deplete, production from them must slow in order to eventually extract the last drop. Watercut is one example. Central Ghawar is now 65%, Samotlr is 85% watercut. Both are decades past peak production. Less good reservoirs (less permeability, lower API 'heavy oil' produce more slowly at the beginning, but otherwise follow the same gamma (long tail) distribution of annual production. The entire North Sea peaked about 2000, and no matter what, production from it will never rise again. The entire Alaskan North Slope peaked about 1990. The entire US peaked in 1981, and tight oil from shale will never get the US back to that level even according to the ever over optimistic EIA in its AEO 2013.
The worse reservoirs are the impermeable shales, where at most 3% of oil in place can be extracted ever with hydraulic fracking (Bakken is presently 1.2%, and for natural gas the US is running 13-17% - by comparison a big deal, and why the UK should get cracking on fracking). In those structures, individual wells produce much less, and they decline to stripper status in 3 years. The only solution is to drill more wells. Pretty soon you run out of room to do so, and then production peaks and declines very rapidly. Those structures have an inverted gamma production function ('cliff tail'). Bakken will peak as soon as an additional about 11,000 wells are drilled. At the present rate, that is between 2017 and 2019. Then North Dakota production will decline to stripper status by about 2022, then continue at that rate (less than 15bbl per well,per day) for decades.
Most of what you read about all this in the MSM reflects fundamental ignorance of petroleum geophysics, plus a lot of political spin.
If you wish to persue these matters factually, I have a book coming out in a few months that covers a lot of this in more but not gory detail. The two subjects covered are energy and climate. Oil is covered in gory detail in my first book, Gaias Limits, available as an ebook through all the usual channels. Goes into production and EOR facts, undiscovered, partial substitutes, and economics. Bit of a slog, but thorough at a laymans level. Covers food and water as well as transportation fuels.