Soaring fertilizer prices could see millions more undernourished | Hacker News Reader

Soaring fertilizer prices could see millions more undernourished

phys.org

64 pointsrntn56 comments

Fertilizer has come up in our conversations around transitioning our farm to regenerative practices. The 40 acres of hay field have been conventionally farmed for a long time, and the soil is now pretty eroded.

Most of the traditional farmers I've spoken to are interested in going Organic, but haven't gotten the math to pencil out. A year like this, however, shows that relying on petrochemicals for fertilizer isn't always going to be the "cheap" option.

The reason Organic is expensive is in one simplified sense due to fertilization. Spreading compost on a field takes many many truck loads. If you want to be certified, your compost will probably need to be certified too.

The real end game for us is getting rotational grazing on our fields to restore health and fertility to the soil. Ultimately it's a game of inputs and outputs. Ideas like permaculture and Agroforestry incorporate guilds of plants and animals that are symbiotic and add up to more than their component parts — bringing in pollinators, fixing nitrogen from thin air via microorganisms in the roots of plants like clover, etc. Practices like terracing can help reduce soil loss, and efficient direction of water can lead to better hydrology over the long term, instead of creating deserts.

Overall, we have a system of modern agriculture today that feeds the whole world — it's very impressive! But it relies on things like cheap fossil fuels (partially due to ignoring negative externalities), a predictable climate, and even global stability in terms of war & peace and cooperation.

Anyway, something to think about the next time you buy food — when you purchase from farms making an effort at more sustainable practices, you're making a difference.

This. Monocrops/monocultures like many are pushing are the most cancerous things for the soil.

Plants must be rotated and the soil must be given time to rest and regenerate.

If you had a time machine and went back 100 years to tell this nugget of wisdom to a farmer, he'd think you were a fool. "Everybody knows this"

Like I keep on saying, most problems facing humanity are energy problems. We must harness abundant energy from all possible sources instead of categorically denying one source or another for ideological reasons. We're not as far removed from the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy as many in the West believe.

As far as I'm aware, ammonia currently can only viably be created with fossil fuels as inputs, for the same reason blast furnaces to smelt steel requires fossil fuels. But to follow where I think you're going, I expect nuclear to be the next most viable

Ammonia is made with hydrogen. If you are making hydrogen, nuclear biggest putative advantage, its lack of intermittency, becomes much less important.

If you are proposing thermochemical watersplitting using nuclear heat to make hydrogen, there is very great reason to be skeptical of that approach (superheated vaporized sulfuric acid, anyone?). These processes have never been practical, and the decline in cost of renewable electricity, and the decline in cost of electrolyzers, makes the thermochemical approaches even less competitive.

Ammonia can be produced from any power source. So in theory we could use renewable power to manufacture "green ammonia" for farming. So far that has only been done in small demonstration projects and all the real fertilizer manufacturing is still done using fossil fuels as the main input.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/from-fertilizer-to-fuel-can-g...

The level of power required is so high that renewables are nowhere near viable at this point.

> for the same reason blast furnaces to smelt steel requires fossil fuels

https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/

We’re well on our way to fossil free steel.

As of yet nonexistent tech just supports my point.

It doesn't NEED natural gas as input, there are other ways, but natural gas as input is saving a massive amount of energy, possibly near 10x current energy input, by not having to split hydrogen from water. And fertilizer production is already one of the most energy intensive processes we have, so increasing that multiple times over is a huge amount of energy.

Basically hydrogen production is the limiting factor in producing clean ammonia from the air instead of using fossil fuels, and clean (and cheap) hydrogen production is far from a solved problem.

>We must harness abundant energy from all possible sources instead of categorically denying one source or another

Would you not suggest doubling down on the cheapest sources of green energy and dispense with the most expensive and polluting sources?

I dont see much point in harnessing tidal energy or coal, for instance. One is very cost effective while the other pollutes massively.

I'm certainly not advocating that we pollute for fun. But if the choice is between polluting massively with fossil fuels or having people go cold and starve because there's not enough energy to produce fertilizer and heat people's homes, I'm saying it's downright immoral to prevent the former and cause the latter.

I'm not against green energy! By all means, build as many wind turbines and solar panels as we can. We need abundant, cheap, and ideally pollution-free energy; but until we can get there, burn as much fossil fuels as we need to alleviate human suffering and uplift the global poor.

> But if the choice is between polluting massively with fossil fuels or having people go cold and starve

These are definitely not the choices and using those a basis for logic leads to misguided opinions

A surprisingly large number of people are wanting us to burn zero fossil fuels in 2035. I don't think they know much about fertiliser production though... (other than that they dislike it and we should use natural farming)

2035 is the goal for carbon free electricity only.

Another way to look at it: burning coal produces natural resources, building powerplants from solar panels and wind turbines produces lots of non-recyclable plastic. Which one will pollute more once we generate energy from solar panels than coal plants? (serious question)

We reached a point at which most of our problems are distribution problems. Those that have too much don't want to share what they don't need, others want more than they already have and as long as you are poor society doesn't care about the things you are in need of.

To distribute you need energy, no?

Per capita we have surplus of most every material and energy.

But the distribution is so lopsided that some end up with too much while some end up with not enough.

Adding energy to the system is no guarantee that we will fix the distribution problem.

The problem isn't technical, it's social.

There’s enough energy globally to feed everyone. The problem is food markets don’t function in warzones or some totalitarian countries.

> We reached a point at which most of our problems are distribution problems.

That's not true at all. The world's average household income is estimated to be about $10,000 a year, meaning that even if you magically solved the distribution problem, people would still only live off of $800 a month. A vast improvement for the global poor that live on a few bucks a day, but certainly not luxurious living.

I want everyone in the world to be able to live the life that the average Texan or Swiss does now; I want everyone to be able to feed their families, enjoy a comfortable house with enough room for a garden, go on a vacation or two a year, save for retirement, develop a hobby that might take time and money, and more. I want everyone to be able to live it up every now and then, if they wanted to. I want everyone to enjoy secure property rights and rule of law. I want everyone to be able to have as many children as would make them happy, and for those children to live even better lives. There is nowhere near enough wealth produced yet that this is possible for everybody on the planet. We are very, very far away from no longer having production problems and only having distribution problems.

Average is not valid measure to use here as it's vulnerable to distribution skew.

It actually is a valid measure here because they’re using it to estimate total income.

Thats exactly why its a bad idea to use averages in this particular case.

Average is total divided by number of people. Therefore total is average times number of people.

$ income values are totally and utterly meaningless without context, and so are their averages. $10K/yr is a fortune in Cambodia. Even within the US or another major Western nation you can earn 5x in a major metropolis what a hick in the country earns and they may still have a vastly better standard of living than you.

Income is not a measure of real wealth or wellbeing. Period

Agreed that context is extremely important. Income is an imperfect measure of buying power, since prices vary significantly based on geography, but it is still a measure, and in the context of globally traded commodities such as energy or fertilizer it is quite important. The price of oil or fertilizer is likely very similar (if not more expensive) in Cambodia compared to a place like the US.

Well, $10 K/yr is only fortune in Cambodia because only few people live quality life and many people have to make compromises and sacrifices.

Whenever we analyze the such case, we must consider whole group. Nobody would live in city if the quality life is poor compared other place like rural area. Yes, there are few exceptions like people like to spend money over extravagance stuff. But they represent minority.

I would say Income does indicate a measure of real wealth or wellbeing.

>We reached a point at which most of our problems are distribution problems.

This is the point that Buckminster Fuller made decades ago. One day we'll all listen to him.

https://www.umsl.edu/~sauterv/analysis/Fall2013Papers/Purcel...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ3DXDONKmQ

Using solar and wind for fertilizer production seems like an obvious win. The prices are plummeting much more quickly than any other energy source, and the main objection — intermittency - can be worked around in this one application. Estimates say “green” pilot plants are still 3-4x as expensive as using fossil fuels, but presumably falling energy input prices and improvements (plus scale) will get us closer.

“Can be worked around in this application?” I know folks that do maintenance on the plant that produces ammonia among other things at the BASF plant in Ludwigshafen, Germany. They don’t shut this plant down. Maintenance is mostly done during production. If one stage fails, the products of the predecessor stages are usually burned - makes for a pretty spectacular evening sky.

It’s likely possible to re-engineer those plants to use an intermittent power source, but it’s far from trivial.

And the alternatives are what, exactly? Keep basing our technology on inexpensive access to fossil fuels until war or climate problems make that unworkable? Or hope that nuclear-powered hydrolysis somehow becomes more efficient and feasible at the necessary scale? I'm completely open to the second idea, just not convinced that it's less expensive than dealing with intermittency.

When you say "it's likely possible, but not trivial" what I hear is: it's a matter of calculating the cost of alternatives and then making strategic investments, preferably as soon as possible (because CO2 emissions are cumulative and we don't have an efficient technology for CO2 removal.)

It’s definitely worth working on, don’t get me wrong. But the timelines for these projects are decades, not years. Expecting large scale payoffs anytime soon would be fooling yourself. In Germany, I see a very dangerous trend of expecting that such changes will save us, but the timelines just don’t work out.

So the primary effort should be directed to places where faster results are viable - heating/warm water via heat pumps where possible, insulation efforts, reducing car traffic, replacing existing power generation with non-fossil methods, energy reuse. For example, waste heat from industrial processes and data centers is mostly lost in germany, often due to planning/legal restrictions. (Sorry, source in German https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Green-IT-Abwaerme-aus-Reche...) Datacenter alone use about 3% of germanys electricity and turn it into heat - recapturing even half of that would place use closer to the goal.

I don't see a path to global decarbonization that doesn't include major reductions in fossil fuel production, and I don't see a path to major reductions in fossil fuel production that doesn't produce major price variability in (fossil) fertilizer production inputs. It's good that we aim to reduce our datacenter energy usage, but that may not prevent the avoidable starvation of millions of people.

Reducing car size and mileage would be a good start - I don‘t have numbers at hand for the US, but in Germany, the individual mobility via cars produces about 20% of the entire CO2. Even a speed limit would already cut that by a few percent. Immediately, as in „the day after the law is in force“.

In 2021, cars (trucks not included) used 60 billion tons of fuel in Germany alone and rising https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38... Shutting down the BASF steamcrackers would be equivalent to a reduction of that fuel consumption by 0.5% or so. So, a speed limit would be more effective and faster to implement.

But that’s a holy cow no one touches, neither here, nor in the US.

Note that just because that would cut CO2 does not mean its worth doing. E.g. that speed limit could easily cost more QALYs (e.g. via longer commutes meaning more tired people and less quality time with kids and more spousal arguments) than are saved with it. Particularly if, for example, geoengineering via sunshades or somesuch proves viable this century.

Like civilization died in all the surrounding European states? It’s a bleak wasteland of people trecking for days to reach their workplace, ravaged by wars kicked off because a spouse got tired of waiting for their husband.

I’m sorry for the ridicule, but that’s frankly the worst argument I’ve ever heard rejecting speed limits.

I'm stating that it may not be worth doing. You'd have to actually do the maths to confirm either way.

Disclaimer: as a public transport user I have no dog on this fight.

I can try a back of the envelope I guess...

If I assume a time in a car is around 0.9x as good as average time (which feels about right to me and indeed seems to match actual usage with risk level tolerance from 40 years ago), assume moderately large speed limit reduction enough to increase travel time by 20% and use a figure of 10kg of CO2 per hour (seems about right looking at estimates of modern car gas consumption) and the NICE QALY value of £30k we get around £100 worth of QALY loss per ton of CO2. This is a bit over the largest estimates for a CO2 tax that would cover CO2 emission externalities ($100 per ton) (using the latest estimates for the costs of climate change over the next 100 years).

Given the large error bars in the rough work above, it looks quite plausible that the real calculation could go either way, with a speed limit possibly being net good or net bad.

Can I have something of what you are taking too make such nonsense more bearable? Just imagine what our grandgrandchildren will say when they rediscover such a comment, lol. I mean those having those sunshades then up in the sky...

The Netherlands has such a speed limit on its highways and it's quite effective.

Just to give you an idea of the timelines: The BASF is currently building a small test plant to evaluate steamcracking via (renewable) electricity - it‘s expected to fire up in 2023 and will process about 6 tons of hydrocarbons a day (so roughly 2000 tons per year). https://www.basf.com/global/en/media/news-releases/2022/09/p...

The actual plant with two steamcrackers processes about two million tons. https://www.basf.com/global/en/who-we-are/organization/locat... The plant is gigantic, and the core of the industrial park. A lot of further production depends on the output of the steamcrackers, so when they had to be shut down in 2016 due to a fire in the harbor supplying the plant, 26 other plants needed to be shut down. Restarting them took days. Even if the technology were proven, we‘d be talking about a huge, multi-year engineering effort just to replace the existing plants.

paying 4x as much is an "obvious win"?

If a technology is at the "pilot plant" stage and the major cost input is renewable energy (where costs have dropped precipitously and continue to do so), then 4x doesn't feel like an impossibility. Meanwhile the price of anhydrous ammonia produced using traditional methods nearly tripled between January 2020 and August 2022: the "cost" of relying on continued access to cheap fossil fuel is not low.

Remarkable that you're getting downvoted for this. The availability of energy substrate is almost entirely the reason why there are ~8 billion people today and not just under a billion. Infrastructure wouldn't have scaled this much, and neither would have agriculture, thanks to fossil fuel; both the ability to transport and fertilize crops (see the Haber process) on a massive scale originally became possible because of oil.

Restrict the flow of energy and you restrict the growth of civilization. To some, that's a good thing, and others bad. That's not really relevant. Little of what even modern primitivists and luddites value would be possible without energy being harnessed.

And yes, energy should come from wherever it makes sense as opposed to the "money for nothing and the chicks are free" attitude the West has in seeking clean energy. In some parts of the world, petroleum will continue to make sense until technology progresses to the point where it no longer does. In other places, solar makes sense and we should go with that. Use nuclear, and use other energy tech to fill the gaps. A nation that produces a lot of sugar cane may decide to use ethanol (see Brazil). Allowing sensible choice and application of energy allows us to try many things out, smooths the transition towards future energy advancements, and improves national security. Instead of focusing on the negatives, we need to give both present and future energy more credit for what it's given us. By constantly finding reasons why a energy tech is bad, we tread water. We're addicted to the "perfect mind-state" and no-human-impact perspective, and it's created an inferior outcome. Those who dote on negatives like "But EV batteries are heavy and not energy dense!" and "But nuclear waste!" and "But it wouldn't be viable without subsidies!" and "But it's not zero carbon!" are focusing on the wrong thing.

What is the purpose of the growth of civilization?

Does it need a purpose?

Well, if that purpose is consuming all available energy, then it seems you'll have a tautology on your hands. But otherwise, I don't know. I haven't really noticed one yet, but you seem to imply that it's a goal.

Although I don’t know what you’re saying based on your post, I can deduce it based on your comments.

Summing up opposition to fossil fuels as being because of

> ideological reasons

Is so reductive that it is dishonest.

I don’t know if you’re downplaying or denying the consequences of human induced climate change, but we are folly to ignore the destruction that it will cause.

Leading off a post by assuming ideology a declaration that there are some people who you see as unworthy of making a contribution and should not participate. It is not curious, it shuts down discourse, and it makes it hard for others to understand the point you’re making and why your believe what you believe.

Indeed. For most it's nor ideology, but a genuine difference of opinion regarding how bad CO2 climate change will be in the next 100 years and how easy it will be to mitigate.

That said, there's a fairly large degrowth faction who are very underrepresented in debate/discussion forums like this who would genuinely want to reduce energy consumption and fossil fuel consumption even if they didn't cause climate change. I encounter them a fair bit in the real world.

It's not "ideological" to want to stop setting the planet on fire so we can continue to live opulently and conveniently. Matter of fact, it's most practical to do so.

Besides, there is only so much readily extractible fossil fuel anyway, and for some forms (petroleum) we are near or past that limit, after which costs start going up... which can be a real bitch if you're dependent on those forms.

It's absolutely a problem - energy blindness [1] - and it is intricately intertwined, along with much more, in the domain of geopolitics [2], something of which recently I've come to have a better and deeper understanding.

[1] - https://natehagens.substack.com/p/frankly-3-energy-blindness [2] - https://zeihan.com/end-of-the-world/

+1 to the nod to Zeihan. He's had OP's point on blast on his free channels (newsletter, YouTube) for at least 12 months now.

Does Maslow's hierarchy include every individual commuting 30+ miles to work by car?

Outside of that - the US definitely has enough energy - and probably most of the West including almost all of Europe.

Russia is trying to get an ammonia pipeline from Toliati to Odessa restarted despite the war - is this why articles like this started popping up? Like we got a lot of hand-wringing around impending world hunger right before the grain deal allow Russia to export a lot of stolen Ukrainian grain.

You're looking at the news and think it's pro Russian? Are we living on the same planet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com