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)
Rud Istvan
And as new technologies come on-stream so it becomes easier to extract, easier to find, and possibly easier to process. (I'm not just talking oil here).
The eco-activists appear to be completely blind to the fact that mankind is ever creative when it comes to finding new and better ways of doing things, finding things, using things and making things.
The tehnological developments of the back-end of the 20th century alone include things (not all necessarily adding the sum of human happiness maybe) that would have my mother totally confused and she died as recently as 1987!
Sylvite - potassium chloride (KCl) is a higher cycle evaporite proven extensively in the North Sea Zechstein Basin. There are numerous Southern North Sea wells drilled to exploit the Permian Rotliegendes Sandstone for gas, intersecting in the overburden seal the higher cycle magnesium-potassium evaporitic salt cycle. The basin extends right across the Southern North Sea from Yorkshire to Poland. Sylvite is highly soluble. We can be assured that if potash becomes that scarce an economic method of remotely dissolving and recovering it will be found. Unless someone tells the green zealots sylvite is mildly radioactive.
Bish: You quote Tim Worstall: "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." There certainly are other potential sources of potassium, but we don't know how much it will cost to obtain potassium from them. Presumably the cost will be somewhat higher, otherwise someone might already be obtaining potassium from such unconventional sources. Higher production costs will produce a lower demand and thereby lower production. We therefore will not be FORCED to scale back on use of something whose cheapest source is running out; consumers will VOLUNTEER to use less (especially in situations where it is least valuable) because the price will be higher. The free market is wonderful - when the government will allow it to work. However, too many citizens want their government to protect them from the consequences of catastrophic depletion of potash by over-consumption and too many academics become famous by "discovering" these crises.
Frank
And to apply my comment above, somebody somewhere will discover or invent another product or means of adapting another product to fill the gap left by the increased cost of whichever raw material we are talking about (in this case, potassium).
And we haven't the faintest idea what that will be or when or how it will make itself known. One of my favourite examples from The Skeptical Environmentalist was the fear that we were in danger of running out of silver. Then we stopped using it in the same volumes in photo-processing* because we all started using digital cameras. Who saw that one coming?
* which also used small quantities of potassium bromide!
John Shade:
"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."
I nominate the term 'professorilissimo'.
"There certainly are other potential sources of potassium, but we don't know how much it will cost to obtain potassium from them."
I think folk here have demonstrated that there are likely sources similar or identical to those currently being exploited, but we don't exploit them because to do so:
a) requires an investment that isn't necessary yet (simple time value of money judgement, used by the private sector since nearly forever);
b) would result, in the absence of an increase in demand, in a fall in prices that would do no one, currently producing, any favours