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?