Urea prices increase 270% in 1 year(indexmundi.com)
indexmundi.com
Urea prices increase 270% in 1 year
https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=urea&months=60
248 comments
I used to believe this, but it is a lie wrapped around a small kernel of truth. It is true that "the vast majority of nitrogen-fixation for fertilizers is done using" fossil fuels (mostly natural gas, which is not a petroleum product), but plants do not get their energy from those fertilizers. Moreover, the total energy obtained from agriculture is about five times greater than the energy input used to make fertilizers, as shown in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935130/figure/... (thanks Enginerrd).
I agree, but I think you and others are missing the primary point of the quote, or interpreting it too literally (which is fair, that is what the quote says after all).
The primary point is that agriculture, as it is currently practiced on a large scale, is extremely dependent on non-renewable resources and the energy in those resources. It's not just natural gas used for nitrogen, it's also things like phosphate mining.
Yes, the amount of calories in the final product largely comes from the sun, but it is the energy in those (currently) petroleum products that unlocks a plant's ability to photosynthesize in the first place.
The primary point is that agriculture, as it is currently practiced on a large scale, is extremely dependent on non-renewable resources and the energy in those resources. It's not just natural gas used for nitrogen, it's also things like phosphate mining.
Yes, the amount of calories in the final product largely comes from the sun, but it is the energy in those (currently) petroleum products that unlocks a plant's ability to photosynthesize in the first place.
Each of these problems needs to be considered on its own merits, not lumped together in some sort of misleading generalization.
I was worried about the phosphate thing for a while since, unlike resources like copper and rare earth metals, the used phosphate mostly ends up in the oceans, not conveniently concentrated in landfills. Getting it back out of the oceans is pretty difficult.
But then I looked into it a few years back. It turns out that the absolute amount of phosphate in crustal phosphate rocks is staggeringly huge: about 0.1% of the crust is phosphorus, almost all as phosphate, conventionally measured as P₂O₅, which would thus be 142/62 of that, or about 0.2%. This works out to be on the order of 10¹⁹ kg of phosphate. World phosphate production is 53 million tonnes (https://www.fao.org/3/i6895e/i6895e.pdf), less than 10¹¹ kg, so at current consumption rates we will run out of phosphate in about 10 million years.
Given this, you might wonder why "phosphate reserves" are stated as only a few tens of billions of tonnes! The answer is that currently most phosphate minerals are unprofitable to mine because they can't compete on price with the fairly pure concentrated apatite deposits in the US, Morocco, and China. When those deposits are exhausted (probably sometime in the next few centuries), the price of phosphate will rise, unless we're mining it from the Moon or the asteroids by then. That will make it profitable to extract phosphate from less concentrated resources.
So, while it is technically true that phosphate rock is a "nonrenewable resource", the implication that we will run out before the Pyramids have crumbled into dust is not.
The bigger problem with phosphate mining is phosphogypsum, not energy consumption or running out of phosphate minerals. Detoxifying phosphogypsum is not a difficult chemistry problem, but there is a lot of it and nobody is paying to detoxify it, so it sits in waste dumps. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a red-mud-style industrial disaster or two with phosphogypsum in the next few decades.
I was worried about the phosphate thing for a while since, unlike resources like copper and rare earth metals, the used phosphate mostly ends up in the oceans, not conveniently concentrated in landfills. Getting it back out of the oceans is pretty difficult.
But then I looked into it a few years back. It turns out that the absolute amount of phosphate in crustal phosphate rocks is staggeringly huge: about 0.1% of the crust is phosphorus, almost all as phosphate, conventionally measured as P₂O₅, which would thus be 142/62 of that, or about 0.2%. This works out to be on the order of 10¹⁹ kg of phosphate. World phosphate production is 53 million tonnes (https://www.fao.org/3/i6895e/i6895e.pdf), less than 10¹¹ kg, so at current consumption rates we will run out of phosphate in about 10 million years.
Given this, you might wonder why "phosphate reserves" are stated as only a few tens of billions of tonnes! The answer is that currently most phosphate minerals are unprofitable to mine because they can't compete on price with the fairly pure concentrated apatite deposits in the US, Morocco, and China. When those deposits are exhausted (probably sometime in the next few centuries), the price of phosphate will rise, unless we're mining it from the Moon or the asteroids by then. That will make it profitable to extract phosphate from less concentrated resources.
So, while it is technically true that phosphate rock is a "nonrenewable resource", the implication that we will run out before the Pyramids have crumbled into dust is not.
The bigger problem with phosphate mining is phosphogypsum, not energy consumption or running out of phosphate minerals. Detoxifying phosphogypsum is not a difficult chemistry problem, but there is a lot of it and nobody is paying to detoxify it, so it sits in waste dumps. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a red-mud-style industrial disaster or two with phosphogypsum in the next few decades.
Kragen, I want to say I am always impressed with your insight. Thank you.
I'm flattered and grateful.
This is so disingenuous. The total energy input from fossil fuels is several fold less than the energy output since most of it is derived from the sun. [1](See figure 3)
Around 50% of the input is indeed from nitrogen, but it need not be derived from fossil fuels since you could source energy elsewhere and use water electrolysis derived hydrogen in the nitrogen production process. That it is currently more economical to use fossil fuels is a separate issue.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935130/
Around 50% of the input is indeed from nitrogen, but it need not be derived from fossil fuels since you could source energy elsewhere and use water electrolysis derived hydrogen in the nitrogen production process. That it is currently more economical to use fossil fuels is a separate issue.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935130/
> That it is currently more economical to use fossil fuels is a separate issue.
That's not a separate issue. That's the WHOLE issue. The first 2 words in the quote were "Modern agriculture". The point is not that there are many types of farming that can be done without using fossil fuels as an input, nor that in the future we couldn't transition away from fossil fuels for fertilizer. The point is that the output of modern agriculture would, at present, completely collapse if the energy input from fossil fuels wasn't available.
That's not a separate issue. That's the WHOLE issue. The first 2 words in the quote were "Modern agriculture". The point is not that there are many types of farming that can be done without using fossil fuels as an input, nor that in the future we couldn't transition away from fossil fuels for fertilizer. The point is that the output of modern agriculture would, at present, completely collapse if the energy input from fossil fuels wasn't available.
I was watching fall of civilizations channel the other day on youtube, it was indeed eerie to see how most great civs depleted their soils and natural resources, and that with some drought times, put the civilization to its end.
I just noticed, before these civs would be geographically separated and isolated, the demise of one, didn´t mean the demise of the other, and the people that had settled and survived, would become nomadic until settling again or something like that.
What will happen when this global civ collapses? Where would the survivors be able to go to, to persist?
Nowhere?
Dark indeed
I just noticed, before these civs would be geographically separated and isolated, the demise of one, didn´t mean the demise of the other, and the people that had settled and survived, would become nomadic until settling again or something like that.
What will happen when this global civ collapses? Where would the survivors be able to go to, to persist?
Nowhere?
Dark indeed
I think that hypothesis needs to be challenged or at least framed differently, since there aren't that many examples of civilizations that "reverted" to nomadism from an agrarian society (it would probably be more accurate that climate change/human activity dampened agricultural output enough that nomadic peoples became more prevalent as the population of agrarian peoples collapsed/migrated elsewhere), at least outside larger contexts like the Bronze Age Collapse where there was a centuries long period of population decline in a large geographic area.
And in more recent centuries, "collapse" is almost always synonymous with political turmoil/change while the peoples remain in place.
I think that's important too, because we're not seeing so much of a "collapse" of our global civilization, but migrations of peoples across it, and a rise in political turmoil as a second order effect.
And in more recent centuries, "collapse" is almost always synonymous with political turmoil/change while the peoples remain in place.
I think that's important too, because we're not seeing so much of a "collapse" of our global civilization, but migrations of peoples across it, and a rise in political turmoil as a second order effect.
Global society has slightly different dynamics, though, because of emergent properties of that scale. For example, countries or even some continents could suffer ecological collapse without global society necessarily being threatened.
The other side of that coin, though, is that global society has introduced global risks, in terms of the amount of CO2 it is able to put into the atmosphere (which is a shared resource we all rely on), and the ability to create weapons or pathogens of global destruction due to technology.
The other side of that coin, though, is that global society has introduced global risks, in terms of the amount of CO2 it is able to put into the atmosphere (which is a shared resource we all rely on), and the ability to create weapons or pathogens of global destruction due to technology.
> Where would the survivors be able to go to, to persist?
Mars! /s, kinda
We have the science and technology to address these issues, the thing that fucks us is our political/economic/religious structures. If we collectively agreed on solving these problems we could, but unity seems to be the scarcest resource of all.
Mars! /s, kinda
We have the science and technology to address these issues, the thing that fucks us is our political/economic/religious structures. If we collectively agreed on solving these problems we could, but unity seems to be the scarcest resource of all.
That latter point is false, though except in a trivial sense. Hydrogen can be and is easily made with electricity. There is plenty of clean electricity available to do it.
Also, 50% of the energy does not come from fixed nitrogen. Majority is from the Sun.
Also, 50% of the energy does not come from fixed nitrogen. Majority is from the Sun.
There currently aren’t enough green hydrogen > ammonia manufacturing plants on the planet to do this though.
Building the necessary renewable energy and ammonia plants and infrastructure is technically trivial in that we needed approximately no innovation as the tech already exists.
The scaled of the problem is immense.
Building the necessary renewable energy and ammonia plants and infrastructure is technically trivial in that we needed approximately no innovation as the tech already exists.
The scaled of the problem is immense.
It’s not immense compared to almost anything else we’ve done (such as the transition to air conditioning… air conditioners consume about 6% of US electricity). To replace all US ammonia production would require less than 5% of US electricity (see my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842105).
Heck, you can get about halfway there just on the nuclear power plants in the US that have been shut down in the last couple decades!
(Works well with intermittent renewables, too, as hydrogen production can be throttled without much penalty.)
Heck, you can get about halfway there just on the nuclear power plants in the US that have been shut down in the last couple decades!
(Works well with intermittent renewables, too, as hydrogen production can be throttled without much penalty.)
In what way is building forty odd new nuclear reactors not an immense undertaking?
Or the equivalent in new renewables, if that’s your preference.
Or the equivalent in new renewables, if that’s your preference.
Again, we used to double grid capacity every decade or so. An extra 5 percent is nothing in comparison to what we did doubling electricity production each decade from roughly the 40s through the 70s.
(And that’s about 10-20 new nuclear reactors, not 40. A fraction of our current nuclear fleet.)
(And that’s about 10-20 new nuclear reactors, not 40. A fraction of our current nuclear fleet.)
> That latter point is false, though except in a trivial sense. Hydrogen can be and is easily made with electricity.
You mean, except in a $Trillion sense. One or two demonstrator plants don't prove anything, except that the advantages are underwhelming, if they exist at all.
How do we globally get there from here? Who is made worse off? Who benefits? How long does it take?
"Exercises for the student" are not always so simple.
You mean, except in a $Trillion sense. One or two demonstrator plants don't prove anything, except that the advantages are underwhelming, if they exist at all.
How do we globally get there from here? Who is made worse off? Who benefits? How long does it take?
"Exercises for the student" are not always so simple.
50% from (FIXED) nitrogen is wrong, though.
Fixed nitrogen, ie ammonia (for instance), is made from gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen. 3kg of hydrogen makes 17kg of ammonia. 200 pounds of ammonia (16kg of hydrogen) will make about 250 bushels of corn. 1 bushel of corn is about 370MJ. 1kg of hydrogen is 142MJ. So 2.3GJ of hydrogen makes 92GJ of corn. That’s about 3%, not 50%.
BTW, the US produces about 17 megatonnes of ammonia per year, or 3 Megatonnes of hydrogen per year. At 60% efficiency, that would require about 22 Gigawatts of average electricity, or less than 5% of average US electricity usage. The US grid is about 40% clean, so that’s still only about 10% of US’a clean electricity usage.
Fixed nitrogen, ie ammonia (for instance), is made from gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen. 3kg of hydrogen makes 17kg of ammonia. 200 pounds of ammonia (16kg of hydrogen) will make about 250 bushels of corn. 1 bushel of corn is about 370MJ. 1kg of hydrogen is 142MJ. So 2.3GJ of hydrogen makes 92GJ of corn. That’s about 3%, not 50%.
BTW, the US produces about 17 megatonnes of ammonia per year, or 3 Megatonnes of hydrogen per year. At 60% efficiency, that would require about 22 Gigawatts of average electricity, or less than 5% of average US electricity usage. The US grid is about 40% clean, so that’s still only about 10% of US’a clean electricity usage.
>1 bushel of corn is about 370MJ. 1kg of hydrogen is 142MJ. So 2.3GJ of hydrogen makes 92GJ of corn. That’s about 3%, not 50%.
This was basically my point.
>50% from (FIXED) nitrogen is wrong, though.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was saying that 50% of the artificial energy input (i.e. excluding free sunlight to the plants) IS from the nitrogen, rather than farming equipment, transportation, etc.
This was basically my point.
>50% from (FIXED) nitrogen is wrong, though.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was saying that 50% of the artificial energy input (i.e. excluding free sunlight to the plants) IS from the nitrogen, rather than farming equipment, transportation, etc.
Thanks for the clarification!
We are in violent agreement.
Thank you! Where are your production figures from?
Ammonia per bushel of corn from:
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/nitrogen-rate-trial-results-in...
US Ammonia production per year: https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/weekly/archivenew_ngwu/2021/0...
US Ammonia production per year: https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/weekly/archivenew_ngwu/2021/0...
This is great, thanks!
[deleted]
The hero we need, he did the math.
If you are saying that 50% of the energy input is from nitrogen, and if the most economical means of supplying nitrogen is from fossil fuel sources, such that the vast majority of it originates from fossil fuels, then wouldn't it be the case that nearly 50% of the energy input of the system is from fossil fuels?
How would this input be "several fold less" than the energy output of the system?
How would this input be "several fold less" than the energy output of the system?
50% of the marketed energy input, that is, which someone bought on the market, is from nitrogen (though I read the same article and I thought it said 90%). But that marketed energy input is only about 20% of the total energy input of the system; the other 80% is the sunlight that falls on the fields.
A very important distinction! So, maybe fossil-fuel inputs to the system correspond to less than 10% of the total energy output? Would that be accurate?
YES, that was exactly my point.
> more economical
In the same way that bunker fuel powered ships are just "more economical" than transporting goods by sail powered ships.
People throw this term around like making it "less economical" to produce food is some minor detail.
Things being their current level of "economical" is what drives our global economy at the current scale it runs at. We could not have our current lifestyle using sail powered ships to transport goods from China any more than we could maintain anything like our current lifestyle if we had to produce all of our nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis.
Making food "less economical" means mass starvation.
In the same way that bunker fuel powered ships are just "more economical" than transporting goods by sail powered ships.
People throw this term around like making it "less economical" to produce food is some minor detail.
Things being their current level of "economical" is what drives our global economy at the current scale it runs at. We could not have our current lifestyle using sail powered ships to transport goods from China any more than we could maintain anything like our current lifestyle if we had to produce all of our nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis.
Making food "less economical" means mass starvation.
It sounds like you disagree with the calculations Robotbeat presented in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842105, but it is unclear whether that is because you have done calculations of your own. Please elaborate.
Robotbeat's calculations seem to show that producing all of the US's nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis would use something like 5% of US electricity production, which would not be a major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our current lifestyle", and presumably the numbers in other countries are even better, except for the Netherlands.
Robotbeat's calculations seem to show that producing all of the US's nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis would use something like 5% of US electricity production, which would not be a major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our current lifestyle", and presumably the numbers in other countries are even better, except for the Netherlands.
Electrolytic production is significantly more expensive, but it isn't 10x or anything like that. Certainly not lifestyle altering. As a practical engineering matter, you'd want to use base load power for this, so it would have to be nuclear, which is why it will not happen in the foreseeable future.
Ammonia is a highly fungible global commodity, and is commonly a means for countries with large natural gas resources to produce an easily transportable value-add product from excess natural gas. None of those countries are going to produce electrolytic ammonia because consuming natural gas is the entire point! If it wasn't being turned into ammonia, much of it would ended being vented to the atmosphere or burned off. While it doesn't look like it in isolation, a lot of industrial chemistry is actually reprocessing and finding value in the waste products of other industrial processes.
The US currently produces ~10% of the global total, but we used to import ammonia like everyone else until a glut of domestic natural gas made it cost-effective to produce our own (again, a way to consume excess natural gas). Ammonia is feedstock for a ton of cost-sensitive industrial chemistry, not just fertilizer, so costs will show up in places people might not expect.
Ammonia is a highly fungible global commodity, and is commonly a means for countries with large natural gas resources to produce an easily transportable value-add product from excess natural gas. None of those countries are going to produce electrolytic ammonia because consuming natural gas is the entire point! If it wasn't being turned into ammonia, much of it would ended being vented to the atmosphere or burned off. While it doesn't look like it in isolation, a lot of industrial chemistry is actually reprocessing and finding value in the waste products of other industrial processes.
The US currently produces ~10% of the global total, but we used to import ammonia like everyone else until a glut of domestic natural gas made it cost-effective to produce our own (again, a way to consume excess natural gas). Ammonia is feedstock for a ton of cost-sensitive industrial chemistry, not just fertilizer, so costs will show up in places people might not expect.
Interesting, why would you want to use baseload power for hydrogen electrolysis rather than solar peaks? That's the opposite of the conclusion I had reached, but maybe my crude models of hydrogen electrolysis are wrong.
As a general rule, continuous chemistry processes are significantly more efficient than batch-y processes (just like data infrastructure). In practice, batch-y chemical processes also have higher capital costs. Operational efficiency of a given physical plant can vary widely based on operational parameters, and it is this that strongly recommends against variable duty cycles.
Chemistry is an exercise in biasing a stochastic process to produce high yields of a desired chemical. This is very sensitive to small changes in the environment e.g. temperature, pressure, pH, concentration, et al. At scale, it is impossible to have a uniform reaction environment as a matter of physics, so the objective is to get as much of the environment as close to the ideal point as possible with clever engineering and then keep the system in equilibrium around that point. This involves finding approximate solutions to vast and fiendishly intractable systems of partial differential equations, that can also be turned into a real physical plant.
If you have variable energy inputs, the system will very likely spend most of its time outside the high-yield sweet spot of its operational parameters. It also takes a long time for these systems to reach equilibrium (often hours or days). Effectively, these processes are binary -- at equilibrium or turned off -- with significant spin up and spin down times with terrible yields.
With base load power, you can have hydrogen electrolysis as part of your continuous chemistry process. A close (but not quite) drop-in for a methane reformation subsystem.
So how is variability (e.g. due to demand) often handled in real systems? They run several plants in parallel and shutdown a fraction of those plants, incurring the startup/shutdown costs. Some industrial chemistry is adequately done batch-y e.g. mining related, but most things asymptotically converge on continuous steady-state processes because there are significant economic benefits in doing so.
Hydrogen electrolysis is probably amenable to batch production without a significant loss of efficiency, though it would incur storage costs you would not have with a continuous plant. The bigger issue is that the downstream processes to which hydrogen is feedstock are unlikely to be amenable to efficient batch production. Because ammonia is produced at such exceptional scales, efficiency matters, and electrolysis is already more expensive than methane reformation.
Chemistry is an exercise in biasing a stochastic process to produce high yields of a desired chemical. This is very sensitive to small changes in the environment e.g. temperature, pressure, pH, concentration, et al. At scale, it is impossible to have a uniform reaction environment as a matter of physics, so the objective is to get as much of the environment as close to the ideal point as possible with clever engineering and then keep the system in equilibrium around that point. This involves finding approximate solutions to vast and fiendishly intractable systems of partial differential equations, that can also be turned into a real physical plant.
If you have variable energy inputs, the system will very likely spend most of its time outside the high-yield sweet spot of its operational parameters. It also takes a long time for these systems to reach equilibrium (often hours or days). Effectively, these processes are binary -- at equilibrium or turned off -- with significant spin up and spin down times with terrible yields.
With base load power, you can have hydrogen electrolysis as part of your continuous chemistry process. A close (but not quite) drop-in for a methane reformation subsystem.
So how is variability (e.g. due to demand) often handled in real systems? They run several plants in parallel and shutdown a fraction of those plants, incurring the startup/shutdown costs. Some industrial chemistry is adequately done batch-y e.g. mining related, but most things asymptotically converge on continuous steady-state processes because there are significant economic benefits in doing so.
Hydrogen electrolysis is probably amenable to batch production without a significant loss of efficiency, though it would incur storage costs you would not have with a continuous plant. The bigger issue is that the downstream processes to which hydrogen is feedstock are unlikely to be amenable to efficient batch production. Because ammonia is produced at such exceptional scales, efficiency matters, and electrolysis is already more expensive than methane reformation.
Thanks, this is really helpful in understanding the issues!
The reason nuclear-electric hydrogen appeared in past decarbonization plans was that electrolyzers were too expensive to only run at a 25% duty cycle and renewable electricity was more expensive even when the sun was shining. It currently appears that electrolyzer production is going to scale up and drop costs to meet renewables faster than nuclear projects can fix their cost/schedule problems.
Here's an industry-focused article that talks about growing manufacturing electrolyzer capacity and lists some recent projects for generating hydrogen with renewables:
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/12/12/sunday-read...
Here's an industry-focused article that talks about growing manufacturing electrolyzer capacity and lists some recent projects for generating hydrogen with renewables:
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/12/12/sunday-read...
Thank you very much!
I feel like inherently hydrogen production via electrolysis is just not that complicated a process: it's a bottle of lyewater with some sheet metal or graphite in it connected to a DC power supply, the sort of thing you could plausibly rig up if stranded on a desert island if you happened across some metal. So I'd think that, although you can surely improve efficiency in lots of ways that increase the cost of the electrolyzer, there's some kind of electrolyzer you can make that has an optimal cost/efficiency tradeoff when you know you're going to run it at a 25% duty cycle. Maybe it isn't cost-competitive with more highly optimized always-on nuclear-powered electrolyzers, but (as the article points out) they aren't cost-competitive with steam methane reforming, either.
It's wonderful to see RMI cited as "major industry analysts" next to BloombergNEF. Nobody deserves that title more.
I feel like inherently hydrogen production via electrolysis is just not that complicated a process: it's a bottle of lyewater with some sheet metal or graphite in it connected to a DC power supply, the sort of thing you could plausibly rig up if stranded on a desert island if you happened across some metal. So I'd think that, although you can surely improve efficiency in lots of ways that increase the cost of the electrolyzer, there's some kind of electrolyzer you can make that has an optimal cost/efficiency tradeoff when you know you're going to run it at a 25% duty cycle. Maybe it isn't cost-competitive with more highly optimized always-on nuclear-powered electrolyzers, but (as the article points out) they aren't cost-competitive with steam methane reforming, either.
It's wonderful to see RMI cited as "major industry analysts" next to BloombergNEF. Nobody deserves that title more.
I believe Robotbeats calculations are lacking if the intent is to demonstrate how much fossil fuel energy is embodied in one unit (joules, calories, etc) of food:
-hydrogen is not a primary energy, no accounting for energy needed to produce 1kg of H2 gas -producing ammonia from hydrogen consumes energy -producing corn from ammonia requires more embodied energy than sunlight - other fertilizers, *cides, fuel and construction industrial sized agricultural machinery.
Only measuring the chemical energy in quantity of H2 vs the dietary calories in associated corn produced is incomplete model of fossil fuels required in agricultural production.
If you are saying the urea price spike has occured in a complete isolation, like temporary specific failure of urea manufacturing , maybe its not a problem. If its one of the first noticable effects of an overall fossil fuel shortage, its going to have huge feedback effects invalidating economic models such as slowing renewable growth, making the whole economy less productive.
-hydrogen is not a primary energy, no accounting for energy needed to produce 1kg of H2 gas -producing ammonia from hydrogen consumes energy -producing corn from ammonia requires more embodied energy than sunlight - other fertilizers, *cides, fuel and construction industrial sized agricultural machinery.
Only measuring the chemical energy in quantity of H2 vs the dietary calories in associated corn produced is incomplete model of fossil fuels required in agricultural production.
If you are saying the urea price spike has occured in a complete isolation, like temporary specific failure of urea manufacturing , maybe its not a problem. If its one of the first noticable effects of an overall fossil fuel shortage, its going to have huge feedback effects invalidating economic models such as slowing renewable growth, making the whole economy less productive.
I agree that it's important to include the complete model of fossil fuels in agricultural production, which is in the paper Enginerrd was citing (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842158). It turns out that even when you do that the number is still pretty low; most of the energy is used to make ammonia.
You might want to put a blank line between your list items so they don't come out as a single paragraph and/or format them with ·, •, or ●.
I think the urea price spike is due to a temporary collapse in natural gas production, which is indeed one of the first overall effects of reduced excess production capacity in natural gas, or shippable natural gas anyway. I don't think an overall fossil fuel shortage would slow renewable growth, though; it increases the returns to renewable generation, and renewables production is one of the sectors of the economy least dependent on fossil fuels.
I think an overall fossil fuel shortage is unlikely because coal reserves are still enormous and interconversion of different kinds of fossil fuels is lossy.
You might want to put a blank line between your list items so they don't come out as a single paragraph and/or format them with ·, •, or ●.
I think the urea price spike is due to a temporary collapse in natural gas production, which is indeed one of the first overall effects of reduced excess production capacity in natural gas, or shippable natural gas anyway. I don't think an overall fossil fuel shortage would slow renewable growth, though; it increases the returns to renewable generation, and renewables production is one of the sectors of the economy least dependent on fossil fuels.
I think an overall fossil fuel shortage is unlikely because coal reserves are still enormous and interconversion of different kinds of fossil fuels is lossy.
> 5% of US electricity production, which would not be a major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our current lifestyle"
I don't think there's any point in arguing if you think 5% of electricity (of which, as Robotbeat pointed out is 60% fossil fuel generated) is "not a major obstacle" while we also have to reduce/eliminate fossil fuel use in every sector. It also doesn't touch on the price increase in food production.
Where in the world is all of this extra energy going to come from if you remove fossil fuels from the equation? Robotbeat's analysis there is terrifying to me, rather than reassuring. But you can put works like "just" and "only" as modifiers to whatever you want if it makes it sound more achievable.
I don't think there's any point in arguing if you think 5% of electricity (of which, as Robotbeat pointed out is 60% fossil fuel generated) is "not a major obstacle" while we also have to reduce/eliminate fossil fuel use in every sector. It also doesn't touch on the price increase in food production.
Where in the world is all of this extra energy going to come from if you remove fossil fuels from the equation? Robotbeat's analysis there is terrifying to me, rather than reassuring. But you can put works like "just" and "only" as modifiers to whatever you want if it makes it sound more achievable.
I take it you agree with the calculations, then, but disagree with their implications?
Increasing electricity production 5% would not mean mass starvation. China increased electricity production 5% every six months throughout the 02010s. The US did it every year in the 01960s. It's not some kind of impossible obstacle to "maintain[ing] anything like our current lifestyle".
Increasing electricity production 5% would not mean mass starvation. China increased electricity production 5% every six months throughout the 02010s. The US did it every year in the 01960s. It's not some kind of impossible obstacle to "maintain[ing] anything like our current lifestyle".
All of those gains are from an increase in the usage of fossil fuels. Yes China is making big growth in renewables but they're making even bigger growth in coal.
This is the problem with our intuitions about energy, we're so used to abundant, high energy density, relatively cheap energy that we can't even get our heads around not having it.
You quote me but miss the point where I say that this is fine so long as we have unlimited fossil fuels and there are no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage.
Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true.
If for some non-fossil fuel related reason we had to switch to primarily electrolysis hydrogen production, then yea, we'd be fine. We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels.
This has been a problem that has been well studied and understood for years, but because it leads to the scary conclusion that our current way of life is unsustainable it is brushed off.
This is the problem with our intuitions about energy, we're so used to abundant, high energy density, relatively cheap energy that we can't even get our heads around not having it.
You quote me but miss the point where I say that this is fine so long as we have unlimited fossil fuels and there are no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage.
Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true.
If for some non-fossil fuel related reason we had to switch to primarily electrolysis hydrogen production, then yea, we'd be fine. We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels.
This has been a problem that has been well studied and understood for years, but because it leads to the scary conclusion that our current way of life is unsustainable it is brushed off.
This is not correct. I didn't miss your point; I was explaining why your point was wrong. Now I will do that again, even though you discourteously didn't answer the question in my comment: does that mean you agree with Robotbeat's calculations? The combination of apparently refusing to clarify your position with basing your arguments on easily checkable falsehoods, while accusing me of basing mine on "intuition", reduces my willingness to extend good faith to you. Please, do better.
China's growth in either solar or wind generation capacity in 02020 was bigger than their growth in coal generation capacity. I haven't seen the 02021 numbers yet but I expect that their coal generation capacity growth in 02021 will turn out to have been actually negative, i.e., not growth but shrinkage, quite aside from the lower-capacity-factor crises resulting from their feud with Australia, their main coal supplier.
Quoting from my notes in Dernocua (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua):
> Specifically, in 02020, the People’s Republic of China installed 71.7 GW of new wind capacity, 48.2 GW of new solar capacity (which was already larger than the rest of the world combined), and 38.4 GW(e) of coal capacity. Assuming typical capacity factors of 40% for wind, 25% for solar, and 60% for coal, that would add up to 23 GW average new coal, 29 GW average new wind, and 12 GW average new solar. (But China’s capacity factors are lower; see below.) New solar installations worldwide double on average every three years, which has slowed down from every two years in the 02010s. ...
> But China is a larger country than Germany. Chinese marketed energy consumption was 28 PWh/year (3.2 TW) in 02010, of which 3.9 PWh/year (440 GW) was electric. In 02019 they produced 7330 TWh electric calculated as (+ 4554 233 148 349 1270 32 405 224 113) rounded to three places. That’s 836 GW. (The 32 TWh of pumped-storage hydro may be double-counted.) In 02019 224 TWh/year (26 GW) was produced from solar and 405 TWh/year (46 GW) from wind, using 204 GW of solar capacity (capacity factor 13%) and 209 GW of wind capacity (capacity factor 22%). Also the 4554 TWh/year from coal (519.5 GW) is on a 1.041 TW basis, so their capacity factor is only 50.0%. Hopefully they’ll start installing their energy plants in more propitious places, like the Gobi, and the capacity factor will go up.
> So probably last year’s new installations of 38.4 GW (coal), 71.7 GW (wind), and 48.2 GW (solar) will produce on average 19.2 GW (coal), 16 GW (wind), and 6.3 GW (solar). The resulting 22 GW (average) of renewable energy added last year amounts to 2.6% of the total current electric energy use of China. If we assume that China’s total energy use has increased by 90% since 02010, just as their electrical energy use did by 02019, it would now be 6.1 TW, and 22 GW is 0.36% of it.
Solar energy (127 PW at Earth's surface) is far more abundant than fossil-fuel energy consumption, which has never reached more than 15 TW, 0.012% of solar energy. Historically the big problem has been that solar energy, though abundant, was expensive to gather; that problem has now been solved, and solar panels are now cheaper in the world market than either fossil fuels or fossil-fuel plants, let alone the sum of the two.
> Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true.
No, my reasoning is based on evidence that says it is feasible and economical to expand power generation using renewable energy. It is not assuming either "unlimited fossil fuels" or "no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage."
> We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels.
Let's take these one by one.
First, current renewable energy production is about 12% of world total primary energy consumption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...). More than half of this is hydro, which is, roughly speaking, not growing. The other half is solar and wind, which is growing 14% per year, which puts it on track to replace all of world total primary energy consumption in 02043.
Wind is currently much larger, and already supplies most electricity in countries like Denmark, but solar is growing about 23% per year and has now reached about 1 TW peak, 150 GW average. That means that it is currently supplying about 0.8% of total marketed energy consumption, 1/128. (Since this is all electric, the percentage for electrical energy is higher.)
Of course, when exponential growth is involved, prediction is very difficult, because sooner or later the exponential trend must stop, at which point the trend line diverges from reality by orders of magnitude. Even a small misprediction of the exponential growth rate results in misprediction by an order of magnitude after a few orders of magnitude of growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#/media/File:PV_cum... shows that the exponential trend was a fairly consistent 36% per year over the last 30 years, so it seems to be slowing down, but it's unlikely to stop anytime soon. I've investigated the fundamentals and can't find any resource limitation or demand limitation that would prevent it.
Solar is currently on track to surpass wind around 02030, so probably we'll move to a majority-renewables energy system before the 02043 you get from extrapolating the overall non-hydro renewables growth rate.
As for the intermittency question, it doesn't affect hydrogen electrolysis (a gasometer full of hydrogen is a perfectly reasonable way to store excess energy for up to a month or two) and to the extent that intermittency is managed at the peripheries of the grid rather than the center, it doesn't require additional transmission or distribution capacity as you say either. Moreover, even needing to double transmission or distribution capacity would not be a civilization-destroying crisis; as I said, PRC has done that three times over the last ten years, and to generation capacity too.
Finally, the additional energy requirements that start popping up are basically only fixing nitrogen into ammonia, smelting steel, and plastics. All three of these are small compared to the use of fossil fuels as fuels.
This is indeed a problem that has been well studied for years, but until five years ago, we didn't know how we could scale up PV production; there was the concern that it might be physically possible but out of our technological reach, like fusion energy. That problem has now been solved, and that is why, for example, Peabody Coal went bankrupt and coal-fired power generation is globally in decline.
Our current way of life is unsustainable in many ways, but needing a lot of energy isn't one of them. We can increase our energy usage by two orders of magnitude before it starts to be a sustainability problem.
China's growth in either solar or wind generation capacity in 02020 was bigger than their growth in coal generation capacity. I haven't seen the 02021 numbers yet but I expect that their coal generation capacity growth in 02021 will turn out to have been actually negative, i.e., not growth but shrinkage, quite aside from the lower-capacity-factor crises resulting from their feud with Australia, their main coal supplier.
Quoting from my notes in Dernocua (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua):
> Specifically, in 02020, the People’s Republic of China installed 71.7 GW of new wind capacity, 48.2 GW of new solar capacity (which was already larger than the rest of the world combined), and 38.4 GW(e) of coal capacity. Assuming typical capacity factors of 40% for wind, 25% for solar, and 60% for coal, that would add up to 23 GW average new coal, 29 GW average new wind, and 12 GW average new solar. (But China’s capacity factors are lower; see below.) New solar installations worldwide double on average every three years, which has slowed down from every two years in the 02010s. ...
> But China is a larger country than Germany. Chinese marketed energy consumption was 28 PWh/year (3.2 TW) in 02010, of which 3.9 PWh/year (440 GW) was electric. In 02019 they produced 7330 TWh electric calculated as (+ 4554 233 148 349 1270 32 405 224 113) rounded to three places. That’s 836 GW. (The 32 TWh of pumped-storage hydro may be double-counted.) In 02019 224 TWh/year (26 GW) was produced from solar and 405 TWh/year (46 GW) from wind, using 204 GW of solar capacity (capacity factor 13%) and 209 GW of wind capacity (capacity factor 22%). Also the 4554 TWh/year from coal (519.5 GW) is on a 1.041 TW basis, so their capacity factor is only 50.0%. Hopefully they’ll start installing their energy plants in more propitious places, like the Gobi, and the capacity factor will go up.
> So probably last year’s new installations of 38.4 GW (coal), 71.7 GW (wind), and 48.2 GW (solar) will produce on average 19.2 GW (coal), 16 GW (wind), and 6.3 GW (solar). The resulting 22 GW (average) of renewable energy added last year amounts to 2.6% of the total current electric energy use of China. If we assume that China’s total energy use has increased by 90% since 02010, just as their electrical energy use did by 02019, it would now be 6.1 TW, and 22 GW is 0.36% of it.
Solar energy (127 PW at Earth's surface) is far more abundant than fossil-fuel energy consumption, which has never reached more than 15 TW, 0.012% of solar energy. Historically the big problem has been that solar energy, though abundant, was expensive to gather; that problem has now been solved, and solar panels are now cheaper in the world market than either fossil fuels or fossil-fuel plants, let alone the sum of the two.
> Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true.
No, my reasoning is based on evidence that says it is feasible and economical to expand power generation using renewable energy. It is not assuming either "unlimited fossil fuels" or "no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage."
> We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels.
Let's take these one by one.
First, current renewable energy production is about 12% of world total primary energy consumption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...). More than half of this is hydro, which is, roughly speaking, not growing. The other half is solar and wind, which is growing 14% per year, which puts it on track to replace all of world total primary energy consumption in 02043.
Wind is currently much larger, and already supplies most electricity in countries like Denmark, but solar is growing about 23% per year and has now reached about 1 TW peak, 150 GW average. That means that it is currently supplying about 0.8% of total marketed energy consumption, 1/128. (Since this is all electric, the percentage for electrical energy is higher.)
Of course, when exponential growth is involved, prediction is very difficult, because sooner or later the exponential trend must stop, at which point the trend line diverges from reality by orders of magnitude. Even a small misprediction of the exponential growth rate results in misprediction by an order of magnitude after a few orders of magnitude of growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#/media/File:PV_cum... shows that the exponential trend was a fairly consistent 36% per year over the last 30 years, so it seems to be slowing down, but it's unlikely to stop anytime soon. I've investigated the fundamentals and can't find any resource limitation or demand limitation that would prevent it.
Solar is currently on track to surpass wind around 02030, so probably we'll move to a majority-renewables energy system before the 02043 you get from extrapolating the overall non-hydro renewables growth rate.
As for the intermittency question, it doesn't affect hydrogen electrolysis (a gasometer full of hydrogen is a perfectly reasonable way to store excess energy for up to a month or two) and to the extent that intermittency is managed at the peripheries of the grid rather than the center, it doesn't require additional transmission or distribution capacity as you say either. Moreover, even needing to double transmission or distribution capacity would not be a civilization-destroying crisis; as I said, PRC has done that three times over the last ten years, and to generation capacity too.
Finally, the additional energy requirements that start popping up are basically only fixing nitrogen into ammonia, smelting steel, and plastics. All three of these are small compared to the use of fossil fuels as fuels.
This is indeed a problem that has been well studied for years, but until five years ago, we didn't know how we could scale up PV production; there was the concern that it might be physically possible but out of our technological reach, like fusion energy. That problem has now been solved, and that is why, for example, Peabody Coal went bankrupt and coal-fired power generation is globally in decline.
Our current way of life is unsustainable in many ways, but needing a lot of energy isn't one of them. We can increase our energy usage by two orders of magnitude before it starts to be a sustainability problem.
As a tangent, I'm curious why you're formatting years as five digits?
The rts website below suggests that "30-40 percent of the entire US food supply" is wasted. We could start by fixing that. I suspect those of us in wealthy countries also eat _alot_ more that than we should.
We are a very long way from mass starvation.
[1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/
We are a very long way from mass starvation.
[1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/
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Extrapolating from your comment (neither disagreeing or agreeing, primarily trying to provide additional resources for people to learn about and to help explore the option space):
The history of ammonia production has led to a fossil fuel dependency chain. This article at resilience.org seems to include some good history: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-06-11/implications-f...
One of the primary processes involved in the creation of ammonia is the Haber-Bosch process, as outlined on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
The International Energy Agency provides a good summary of a technology roadmap for migration of ammonia production processes to lower-emission methods: https://www.iea.org/reports/ammonia-technology-roadmap/execu...
And finally - I've no connection with the University of Michigan but I did find this recent article about a research grant for solar-powered, energy-decentralized fertilizer production; I'm not clear on the details of the research yet but it does again re-iterate the nature of the problem and illustrates that there is effort directed towards overcoming fossil fuel dependence in this area: https://news.umich.edu/2m-to-replace-fossil-fuels-with-solar...
The history of ammonia production has led to a fossil fuel dependency chain. This article at resilience.org seems to include some good history: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-06-11/implications-f...
One of the primary processes involved in the creation of ammonia is the Haber-Bosch process, as outlined on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
The International Energy Agency provides a good summary of a technology roadmap for migration of ammonia production processes to lower-emission methods: https://www.iea.org/reports/ammonia-technology-roadmap/execu...
And finally - I've no connection with the University of Michigan but I did find this recent article about a research grant for solar-powered, energy-decentralized fertilizer production; I'm not clear on the details of the research yet but it does again re-iterate the nature of the problem and illustrates that there is effort directed towards overcoming fossil fuel dependence in this area: https://news.umich.edu/2m-to-replace-fossil-fuels-with-solar...
I'm surprised by how little people understand the relationship between fossil fuels (not just energy) and global food production.
The primary reason that Malthus was wrong in his predictions about population growth and food supply isn't because of "science" it's because of fossil fuels.
This wouldn't be an issue if fossil fuels were unlimited in supply and didn't have very severe externalities in their unrestricted usage.
People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
edit: This comment getting quickly downvoted is objective evidence for my argument that "People don't like to talk about..." There's nothing controversial in this comment. In a world without fossil fuels we very likely would have seen Malthus's predictions come to be, fossil fuels are obviously a limited resource and their usage has extreme externalities.
I get that people are scared, but it's still sad to see a community of otherwise curious people start to break down when they see facts that make them uncomfortable.
The primary reason that Malthus was wrong in his predictions about population growth and food supply isn't because of "science" it's because of fossil fuels.
This wouldn't be an issue if fossil fuels were unlimited in supply and didn't have very severe externalities in their unrestricted usage.
People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
edit: This comment getting quickly downvoted is objective evidence for my argument that "People don't like to talk about..." There's nothing controversial in this comment. In a world without fossil fuels we very likely would have seen Malthus's predictions come to be, fossil fuels are obviously a limited resource and their usage has extreme externalities.
I get that people are scared, but it's still sad to see a community of otherwise curious people start to break down when they see facts that make them uncomfortable.
> People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
I, for one, love to talk about zero emission food production.
It's not scary, and in fact it will be somewhat straightforward to replace our nitrogen sources with zero emission production methods.
Electricity can be used to produce ammonia in many ways. The most obvious is electrolysis of water to hydrogen, and then through the Haber process. Large scale production is already being planned, for example by Fertiberia in Spain, who will deploy many MW of electrolyzers soon. Spain's target for electrolyzers is 4GW by 2030! We couldn't even build 4GW of nuclear by 2030, but we will be able to do elecrolyzers and the solar to power them.
There is also a startup (blanking on the name) that creates ammonia on site, off grid, using high voltage in a box. This eliminates the transport cost of nitrogen, which is not insignificant. By focusing on small scale production on site a small startup can break in to a huge commodity market.
I didn't downvote your comment, but your unnecessary pessimism does not accurately reflect the future that we can see already!
I, for one, love to talk about zero emission food production.
It's not scary, and in fact it will be somewhat straightforward to replace our nitrogen sources with zero emission production methods.
Electricity can be used to produce ammonia in many ways. The most obvious is electrolysis of water to hydrogen, and then through the Haber process. Large scale production is already being planned, for example by Fertiberia in Spain, who will deploy many MW of electrolyzers soon. Spain's target for electrolyzers is 4GW by 2030! We couldn't even build 4GW of nuclear by 2030, but we will be able to do elecrolyzers and the solar to power them.
There is also a startup (blanking on the name) that creates ammonia on site, off grid, using high voltage in a box. This eliminates the transport cost of nitrogen, which is not insignificant. By focusing on small scale production on site a small startup can break in to a huge commodity market.
I didn't downvote your comment, but your unnecessary pessimism does not accurately reflect the future that we can see already!
>People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
I'd have to run the numbers... but offhand I'd guess it just means nitrogen gets 2.5x more expensive. (Call it 2-10x if you want some padding) That doesn't even mean food gets 2.5x more expensive, only that the percentage of costs due to nitrogen go up that much. I think this is such a non-issue.
I'd have to run the numbers... but offhand I'd guess it just means nitrogen gets 2.5x more expensive. (Call it 2-10x if you want some padding) That doesn't even mean food gets 2.5x more expensive, only that the percentage of costs due to nitrogen go up that much. I think this is such a non-issue.
It's also worth noting that in the first world for "food-as-it's-consumed" the share of agriculture is just 10%-20% (depending on how it's consumed) of the final value, the majority of the cost comes from processing, transportation, retail, cooking and service or delivery; so if the price of agricultural products leaving the farmer would double, the increase in total price would not be as big. Of course, the poorer consumers in third world with actual problems with food security would bear the full effect of such a price increase.
It would impact poorer consumers, though not evenly. The population facing the most food insecurity issues, subsistence farmers, would be largely unaffected, since they generally aren't using artificial fertilizer.
Absolutely true. Food inflation in the US is about the same as average inflation. We’re not paying more for food in comparison with other goods than we were a year ago.
We are evaluating the an upstream input cost and possible downstream effects. So, the consequences of high urea prices today will vividly show up sometime in the latter part of this year.
If that was true we would have seen a big spike in grain futures around September/October (when this data was published). Grain futures are up but the big spikes were in December, indicating that urea prices are not the cause.
According to some articles I’ve read targeted towards farmers [1], they are able to compensate by using less fertilizer-dependent crops. So, we can expect small price hikes and major shifts towards using soybeans in place of corn where possible.
[1] example: https://www.agriculture.com/markets/analysis/crops/fertilize...
According to some articles I’ve read targeted towards farmers [1], they are able to compensate by using less fertilizer-dependent crops. So, we can expect small price hikes and major shifts towards using soybeans in place of corn where possible.
[1] example: https://www.agriculture.com/markets/analysis/crops/fertilize...
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At least if we only used fossil fuels for agriculture that would cut back on 75% of the current use of them.
so malthus wasn't wrong, he was just early :)
Couldn't we extract all the nitrogen we need from sewage?
I don't know if we could get all the required nitrogen to sustain our current agricultural methods, but there are definitely people working towards normalizing the capture and reuse of the nutrients in urine. Our current practice of polluting waterways with our urine is a travesty though, and it behooves us to process our 'waste' in a more regenerative way.
See https://richearthinstitute.org for more.
See https://richearthinstitute.org for more.
You can say the same thing about all economics after the 1600s - wood, coal, whale oil, petroleum.
There is a direct causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. End the former and you end the latter. And you also kill off a ton of people because the system that enables their lives will falter and starve them to death.
There is a direct causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. End the former and you end the latter. And you also kill off a ton of people because the system that enables their lives will falter and starve them to death.
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Fossil fuels were created from sunlight, so really it's all solar.
Sunlight is from fusion, so really it’s all nuclear.
And a whole lot of time, temperature, and pressure driven through geological processes.
Energy from gravity and radiation are contributing factors to fossil fuel production, even if the hydrocarbons broken down for use are largely photosynthetic in nature/origin, they owe their energy density that makes them a viable fuel source to factors beyond solar. Breaking that down has side effects beyond pure photosynthetic processes.
Energy from gravity and radiation are contributing factors to fossil fuel production, even if the hydrocarbons broken down for use are largely photosynthetic in nature/origin, they owe their energy density that makes them a viable fuel source to factors beyond solar. Breaking that down has side effects beyond pure photosynthetic processes.
Essentially it's all "when did those solar photons hit the earth" time based arbitrage.
Forget diesel trucks and piss, ya’ll are overlooking that urea is a major component of fertilizer.
Higher urea prices->higher fertilizer prices->Less fertilizer demand->less food supply->more suffering via sick and hungry people->more potential for confrontation and war.
Higher urea prices->higher fertilizer prices->Less fertilizer demand->less food supply->more suffering via sick and hungry people->more potential for confrontation and war.
This is probably a question easily solved by querying Wikipedia, but I'll ask it here so the answer benefits others as well, where does the urea used in fertilizer come from?
Urea comes from the Harber process [1]
Basically most of food fertilizer depends on fossil fuels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
The usual chain is natural gas -> ammonia -> urea. Thus, one of the key factors influencing the supply is Hurricane Ida, which led to remarkably long shutdowns in natural gas production. https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/weekly/archivenew_ngwu/2021/1...
Ammonia (made from natural gas) and carbon dioxide.
Related article from yesterday that specifically calls out urea: "Global farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut use, raising food security risks"
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-farmers-f...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-farmers-f...
> urea is a major component of fertilizer
Oh yes. And alarm bells are ringing.
"I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest. I'm afraid we're going to have a food crisis." — Svein Tore Holsether, CEO and president Yara International. https://fortune.com/2021/11/04/energy-crisis-food-shortage-s...
"Major fertilizer producers Yara International ASA and CF Industries Holdings Inc. said soaring energy costs are forcing them to halt some output of nutrients crucial for growing crops." https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/europe-s-energy-woes...
"In the fall, soaring electricity demand led the southwestern province of Yunnan, a key phosphate producer, to order drastic production cuts by energy-hungry industries, including fertilizer." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Farmers in India are desperate. Trucks in South Korea had to be idled. Food prices, already high, could rise even further." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Among farmers and ranchers, very few topics are being discussed as much as the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer and increasing concerns regarding availability." https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...
"High fertilizer prices could exert inflationary pressures on food prices, compounding food security concerns at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are making access to food more difficult." https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/soaring-fertilizer-pric...
"Higher farm input costs, expensive shipping and good demand provide for a grim combination... We are under La Niña conditions, the second such event in as many years, and the weather cannot be expected to be normal until Q2 2022 at the earliest." — Rabobank Outlook 2022: Hell in the Handbasket. https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/documents/842941_Raboba...
Hell in the handbasket here we come!
Oh yes. And alarm bells are ringing.
"I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest. I'm afraid we're going to have a food crisis." — Svein Tore Holsether, CEO and president Yara International. https://fortune.com/2021/11/04/energy-crisis-food-shortage-s...
"Major fertilizer producers Yara International ASA and CF Industries Holdings Inc. said soaring energy costs are forcing them to halt some output of nutrients crucial for growing crops." https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/europe-s-energy-woes...
"In the fall, soaring electricity demand led the southwestern province of Yunnan, a key phosphate producer, to order drastic production cuts by energy-hungry industries, including fertilizer." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Farmers in India are desperate. Trucks in South Korea had to be idled. Food prices, already high, could rise even further." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Among farmers and ranchers, very few topics are being discussed as much as the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer and increasing concerns regarding availability." https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...
"High fertilizer prices could exert inflationary pressures on food prices, compounding food security concerns at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are making access to food more difficult." https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/soaring-fertilizer-pric...
"Higher farm input costs, expensive shipping and good demand provide for a grim combination... We are under La Niña conditions, the second such event in as many years, and the weather cannot be expected to be normal until Q2 2022 at the earliest." — Rabobank Outlook 2022: Hell in the Handbasket. https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/documents/842941_Raboba...
Hell in the handbasket here we come!
This is why I don’t buy the Bitcoin “mined with free energy” narrative. Put a fertilizer plant near that hydro dam instead of doing proof of work calculations.
Ethereum 2.0 (uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining) can’t come soon enough for me.
Ethereum 2.0 (uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining) can’t come soon enough for me.
> uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining
I have an honest question that I haven't seen answered anywhere, and I'm not smart enough to answer it for myself by reading papers and whatnot.
Assume whatevercoin currently uses PoW and takes X energy to mine a single coin, but would take X/100 energy to mine it under PoS.
What stops people from simply throwing the 99/100 leftover energy from X into more mining operations, rather than just being content with the one and the leftover energy?
Or put another way, if mining a single coin suddenly costs 1/100 of what it used to, why would I not just mine 100 coins now?
It just all sounds to me like what happens when there's an increase in computational power/speed/capacity/whatever in PCs. When you can process a thing ten times as fast, you don't just do one thing ten times faster; you do ten things at once.
I have an honest question that I haven't seen answered anywhere, and I'm not smart enough to answer it for myself by reading papers and whatnot.
Assume whatevercoin currently uses PoW and takes X energy to mine a single coin, but would take X/100 energy to mine it under PoS.
What stops people from simply throwing the 99/100 leftover energy from X into more mining operations, rather than just being content with the one and the leftover energy?
Or put another way, if mining a single coin suddenly costs 1/100 of what it used to, why would I not just mine 100 coins now?
It just all sounds to me like what happens when there's an increase in computational power/speed/capacity/whatever in PCs. When you can process a thing ten times as fast, you don't just do one thing ten times faster; you do ten things at once.
Because it's not really an efficiency upgrade like you've envisioned.
The current PoW system turns energy directly into miner rewards.
A PoS system does not do that. You can't just throw more energy at the problem to get more rewards.
The current PoW system turns energy directly into miner rewards.
A PoS system does not do that. You can't just throw more energy at the problem to get more rewards.
Well, because it's not like PoS is just making PoW more efficient. You have no way to turn that extra energy into more stake.
It's like if I paid you previously for every strawberry you bring me, and now I pay you for how old you are. Previously, for 100 strawberries I gave you $20, and now for every 20 years you are old, I give you $20/hr. Now you need far fewer strawberries to make the same amount of money, but that doesn't mean you can now make more by giving me strawberries. You have no way of converting strawberries into age.
It's like if I paid you previously for every strawberry you bring me, and now I pay you for how old you are. Previously, for 100 strawberries I gave you $20, and now for every 20 years you are old, I give you $20/hr. Now you need far fewer strawberries to make the same amount of money, but that doesn't mean you can now make more by giving me strawberries. You have no way of converting strawberries into age.
Thanks, I think I kind of get it now. But now my follow up question is, what stops me from just recruiting, say, nine other people at least as old as me, give them each 10 strawberries, and then collecting the payout afterwards?
Haha, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that as an analogy for PoS. Just to make the point that it's two resources which can't be converted.
Mining economics depend on the mining reward. It doesn't get bigger if more people mine. The rewards just get spread out over more/larger participants until profits are tiny via difficulty adjustments.
The mining effort depends simply on the reward, and the reward is calibrated to the security needed. Bitcoin is highly secure, but the security model is essentially 1:1; if the network is secured with a billion dollars of mining effort, it will cost on the order of a billion to attack it. So it's expensive.
PoS can have a better security model, maybe 1:100 against network attackers. So you can reduce mining rewards and maintain a given security level.
The mining effort depends simply on the reward, and the reward is calibrated to the security needed. Bitcoin is highly secure, but the security model is essentially 1:1; if the network is secured with a billion dollars of mining effort, it will cost on the order of a billion to attack it. So it's expensive.
PoS can have a better security model, maybe 1:100 against network attackers. So you can reduce mining rewards and maintain a given security level.
Non proof-of-work "mining" typically requires another resource. Proof-of-stake rewards you based on your holdings, so additional mining compute power doesn't help.
I don't think Ethereum PoS is ever coming anymore, or at least it will not displace the PoW version. It's been coming (TM) for a few years now.
Ethereum PoS is live now through the beacon chain. Merge just hasn't happened yet.
It's sharding that's probably never coming.
It's sharding that's probably never coming.
Why do you think sharding is never coming? Don't tell me that haha!
L2s like Polygon and Arbitrum are doing a decent job solving the scaling problem and don't require changes to the core protocol.
Well I own Polygon too, so guess I'm covered both ways.
I get this comment every time I post about it also. It’s the only ammo they have left.
The difficulty bomb and merge is set for June 2022. Could it be delayed? Sure I guess but Bitcoin has absolutely no plans to fix its energy consumption.
The difficulty bomb and merge is set for June 2022. Could it be delayed? Sure I guess but Bitcoin has absolutely no plans to fix its energy consumption.
As you see, even in a price spike, urea only costs US$1/kg. That really makes it hard to produce urea in the middle of the Sahara; shipping it to the ocean would cost more than the price it would fetch. Consequently there are lots of places where producing energy is economical if used for Bitcoin but not for fertilizer and other low-value-density products.
This is why Namibia is looking at making hydrogen (and presumably ammonia): the desert there comes right down to the ocean. There are desert sand dunes right at the shore.
I agree with your general point (that crypto mining does come at the cost of energy for other purposes) but I'm not sure that's a good example -- I thought the energy input to fertilizer plants was from all the oil they take in which is chemically necessary; the major input isn't electricity per se, so being near a hydro dam wouldn't help.
I agree but this seems bigger than finding arbitrary hash values - after all, China shut down crypto mining months ago I think and yet they had to shut down a phosphate factory in December.
Same with CO2 ->
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/22/why-is-the-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-58626935
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/22/why-is-the-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-58626935
CO2 also helps plants grow.
We should increase the atmospheres CO2 and urea production. More food for all!
We should increase the atmospheres CO2 and urea production. More food for all!
there's really more than enough CO2 in the atmosphere right now. The plants aren't struggling for it.
Can you point to any research showing what the optimum level of co2 should be for plant growth?
It depends on the plant. Most plants grow faster at higher levels than the current 400ppm, so CO₂ supplementation in greenhouses is a thing, which you can read about if you like. Some plants grow fastest at levels around 1000ppm, and I think for others it's closer to 10'000 ppm, at which level it starts to become toxic for the humans. Of course if Earth's atmosphere were 10'000 ppm CO₂ we would see mass extinctions, major ocean acidification, etc.
Can you? You're presumably the one arguing, in the face of the majority of climate scientists, that more CO2 is actually a good thing.
For what it's worth, no gardener or farmer is having to pump CO2 into the air because their plants are dying.
For what it's worth, no gardener or farmer is having to pump CO2 into the air because their plants are dying.
Your claim was “plants aren’t struggling for it”
I’m asking if you can back up that claim. I guess not.
I’m asking if you can back up that claim. I guess not.
Struggling as in dying. I've seen no evidence that plants are dying of lack of CO2. In my research into permaculture I've never seen any issues with plants lacking CO2 - primarily plants struggle for nitrogen, hence the use of fertiliser (or in the case of permaculture, other nitrogen fixing techniques like using bacteria or cycling legumes, or cool stuff like using aquaponics to recycle fish poo into fertiliser).
Maybe they could grow even more successfully with some kind of CO2 biodome, I don't know - but my point was that lack of CO2 is not causing problems with plants growing, but it is causing problems with our biosphere slowly dying.
Maybe they could grow even more successfully with some kind of CO2 biodome, I don't know - but my point was that lack of CO2 is not causing problems with plants growing, but it is causing problems with our biosphere slowly dying.
Water helps people live. We should all be constantly drinking water. We will be so much more alive. Every living moment: drinking water.
Indeed. To be even more ridiculous: Being too cold kills people, therefore we should set ourselves on fire so we live forever.
If someone wants to argue "more CO2 is good for plants", they really need to provide a number for what atmospheric concentration they think is optimal, and what the costs/benefits of reaching it are. Would increasing the concentration by 10% make food 10% cheaper, for example? What sort of effects on the Earth's climate are historically associated with CO2 levels that high?
If someone wants to argue "more CO2 is good for plants", they really need to provide a number for what atmospheric concentration they think is optimal, and what the costs/benefits of reaching it are. Would increasing the concentration by 10% make food 10% cheaper, for example? What sort of effects on the Earth's climate are historically associated with CO2 levels that high?
That's not ridiculous, that's literally ancient history ongoing. Those early human tribes that managed to keep a fire going forever are us, today. Still living theoretically forever, as long as the water and fire (and the amazing combination thereof, hot water) keep on going.
After watching people lose their minds over toilet paper, this is not going to be pretty.
Indeed. Lack of food is, historically, the fastest way to revolution and war.
Wouldn't a 270% increase indicate a huge demand spike?
No it’s a supply side problem, urea is synthesized from ammonia which is synthesized from methane and atmospheric nitrogen. Methane and in general fossil fuel prices spiked and brought fertilizer prices with it. There is probably also a covid labor component as well.
The family farm is planting a lot less corn as a result.
The family farm is planting a lot less corn as a result.
The family farm is a thing of the past. They are called hobby farms
My father farming on ~400 acres purchased from the government ~140 years ago isn't a hobby. The records for the deed have only my relatives after the Louisiana Purchase. There aren't a whole lot of family farmers left out there, but they do exist (regardless of large operations branding themselves as "family farms" because "I have a family!" and what others classify them as).
How do I interpret this?
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/even-mega-farms-are-mos...
Most farms are "family" owned but perhaps OP was trying to communicate that nowadays farm owners are rarely farm workers?
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/even-mega-farms-are-mos...
Most farms are "family" owned but perhaps OP was trying to communicate that nowadays farm owners are rarely farm workers?
A very large proportion of farms of any size have a single owner or are split between e.g. brothers.
A rather small proportion of farms are singly/family owned and have a majority of the work done by that family.
A rather small proportion of farms are singly/family owned and have a majority of the work done by that family.
Hobby farms generally are run by an individual. Family farms are run by families, and thus tend to be much larger to be able to support families.
If I remember correctly, sheep urine used to be used to clean particulate traps in large diesel engines. I'm not sure why things moved to synthetic, but if it was for cost reasons then sheep urine may be more cost effective than it used to be.
It was never from urine. It was always chemically synthesized
I work with the bus industry, so this sort of stuff is on my periphery. This is what I was thinking of: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jun/10/transportintheu...
Goods whose supply has a natural upper limit in what's easily obtainable (given current methods and infra) and no easy substitutes in their use up the supply chain often have price spikes when (non-spiking) marginal demand suddenly bumps into that limit ... or else when there's a sudden limitation in the ability to deliver the usual supply of the good. Neither of these is a demand spike, per se.
Or a price increase in inputs, or a reduction in supply.
Most nitrogen fertiliser is supplied via natural gas formation (Haber-Bosch process). I'm not sure if urea is HB-formulated nitrogen or comes from other sources, but this wouldn't much matter as HB-formulated ammonia is near-exact substitute for urea and would follow similar pricing patterns.
Reading at Wikipedia iforms me that:
- Urea is CO2(NH2)2.
- Production is from ammonia + carbon dioxide.
Given that natural gas prices are presently spiking, my presumption would be that urea prices are following natural gas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea
Most nitrogen fertiliser is supplied via natural gas formation (Haber-Bosch process). I'm not sure if urea is HB-formulated nitrogen or comes from other sources, but this wouldn't much matter as HB-formulated ammonia is near-exact substitute for urea and would follow similar pricing patterns.
Reading at Wikipedia iforms me that:
- Urea is CO2(NH2)2.
- Production is from ammonia + carbon dioxide.
Given that natural gas prices are presently spiking, my presumption would be that urea prices are following natural gas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea
Depends what the cause is.
[deleted]
thankfully the WEF has the solution, the plebes will just have to get used to eating bugs for their protein
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...
Thesis -> Antithesis -> Synthesis
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...
Thesis -> Antithesis -> Synthesis
People eat shrimp and crab and lobster. Bugs are arthropods as well. They seem to perform similar functions in different contexts, eg, they feed on the waste of other animals.
The difference is historical and cultural inertia. Buttered cockroach could be the next big thing in Brooklyn.
The difference is historical and cultural inertia. Buttered cockroach could be the next big thing in Brooklyn.
Cockroaches smell terrible, but I suppose Stilton does too.
These are the guys that want us all to rent our stuff instead of buying it. "You will own nothing and you will be happy". Uh no.
I'm not going to buy bug burgers nor rent my stuff.
What we should do is more population control. As a first step stop incentives for having children (Inn the Netherlands you get more child benefit per child the more you have!). It's tough for the people that want big families but we can't continue growing humanity like this.
I'm not going to buy bug burgers nor rent my stuff.
What we should do is more population control. As a first step stop incentives for having children (Inn the Netherlands you get more child benefit per child the more you have!). It's tough for the people that want big families but we can't continue growing humanity like this.
The Netherlands has a fertility rate of less than 1.7 births per woman[0]. The only reason its population is slightly increasing is that people are living longer and people want to move to the country. In fact, the population of Europe as a whole actually declined slightly last year.[1]
So we shouldn't be worrying about "big families", we should be worried about voluntary self-extinction. What do you think the correct population should be for the Netherlands or Europe, and what do you suggest we do when we reach it? Obviously the current level of government benefits per child aren't enough to keep the population level stable.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NLD/netherlands/fertil...
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EUR/europe/population-...
So we shouldn't be worrying about "big families", we should be worried about voluntary self-extinction. What do you think the correct population should be for the Netherlands or Europe, and what do you suggest we do when we reach it? Obviously the current level of government benefits per child aren't enough to keep the population level stable.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NLD/netherlands/fertil...
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EUR/europe/population-...
I'm speaking about the world as a whole there. If the population of the Netherlands would decrease it would be good for the world as a whole. Of course any measures in asia would be far more powerful. But we have to set the example.
We have to stop viewing world problems as national issues. Just like the climate problem, we can be 'green' because we externalise a lot of our carbon problems to other countries. That's not helpful at all. It's just smart bookkeeping to keep behaving as we are.
We have to stop viewing world problems as national issues. Just like the climate problem, we can be 'green' because we externalise a lot of our carbon problems to other countries. That's not helpful at all. It's just smart bookkeeping to keep behaving as we are.
If the prices are denominated in USD, and the consumers are in countries with stronger (less elastic) currencies, it's likely caused by inflation pressure from obvious sources like QE-infinity policy, debt monetization, and de-facto negative interest rates. What we are watching is the controlled demolition of western economies. It's not a conspiracy, it's an ideology that has prevailed and this is all downstream of it. I hope you like eating bugs.
> If the prices are denominated in USD, and the consumers are in countries with stronger (less elastic) currencies
Well, that's not what's going on in the market.
This crisis is caused by a reduced supply of inputs, mostly natural gas and energy. One of the direct causes is Hurricane Ida, which had a massive impact on natural gas supplies. China has also experienced a coal shortage, and also a drought that reduced hydropower generation. Europe has done a lot to switch to renewables, but they've suffered low winds.
So no, the people who are going to hurt aren't rich Westerners, who are best positioned to ride this out. It's the poor people (mostly in the "global south") who already spend massive portions of their income on food, who will bear the brunt of this crisis.
Well, that's not what's going on in the market.
This crisis is caused by a reduced supply of inputs, mostly natural gas and energy. One of the direct causes is Hurricane Ida, which had a massive impact on natural gas supplies. China has also experienced a coal shortage, and also a drought that reduced hydropower generation. Europe has done a lot to switch to renewables, but they've suffered low winds.
So no, the people who are going to hurt aren't rich Westerners, who are best positioned to ride this out. It's the poor people (mostly in the "global south") who already spend massive portions of their income on food, who will bear the brunt of this crisis.
Reading about this and considering the current price shock and inflation in Brazil makes me worried.
Right now, even before this fertiliser crisis materialises, there's already been a sizeable increase in food prices there, the pandemic pushed a new wave of homelessness and food insecurity after already some bad years before Bolsonaro came to power. Coupled with higher unemployment and overall loss of competitivity of Brazilian industry there just seems nowhere to go for society... If there is another food price hike it'll very likely cause massive social strife, I really don't see a way out if this crisis materialises in next year or so.
It will be brutal for the global south.
Right now, even before this fertiliser crisis materialises, there's already been a sizeable increase in food prices there, the pandemic pushed a new wave of homelessness and food insecurity after already some bad years before Bolsonaro came to power. Coupled with higher unemployment and overall loss of competitivity of Brazilian industry there just seems nowhere to go for society... If there is another food price hike it'll very likely cause massive social strife, I really don't see a way out if this crisis materialises in next year or so.
It will be brutal for the global south.
I would agree that energy costs are a signifcant factor in fertilizer prices because slim margins mean significant price volatility as a result of the input factors, but what upper percentile of westerner qualifies as rich enough to ride this out, and what happens to the rest?
Given US economic policy directly caused this, wrapping it in climate narrative merely post-hoc justifies that the humans who will suffer from this deserve it because of climate change, and that the humans who are positioned to weather it deserve to have their resources and land redistributed to said victims because of climate change. If I had to guess who makes those redistribution decisions, because their divine authority comes from climate change, I would say committees of appointed politically aligned experts.
On this inflationary policy issue, the climate emperor is naked.
Given US economic policy directly caused this, wrapping it in climate narrative merely post-hoc justifies that the humans who will suffer from this deserve it because of climate change, and that the humans who are positioned to weather it deserve to have their resources and land redistributed to said victims because of climate change. If I had to guess who makes those redistribution decisions, because their divine authority comes from climate change, I would say committees of appointed politically aligned experts.
On this inflationary policy issue, the climate emperor is naked.
> the humans who are positioned to weather it deserve to have their resources and land redistributed to said victims because of climate change.
I mean, can you really disagree with the logic of this? The richest are likely to be the ones who have consumed the most and who have thus contributed most to climate change, and also they have the most resources available to help mitigate the problems they've caused. Given that they've benefited most from society, and have the most to lose if society collapses, they should be keen to pay their fair share (i.e. in proportion to their net wealth).
You may not like "committees of appointed politically aligned experts", but if they are appointed by democratically elected representatives (and unless you can point to some experts that are free from any political alignment), I'm not sure who would be better at making decisions for how resources are distributed to solve societal problems.
(For what it's worth, I thought your earlier comment about "controlled demolition of western economies" was thought-provoking, so I upvoted it).
I mean, can you really disagree with the logic of this? The richest are likely to be the ones who have consumed the most and who have thus contributed most to climate change, and also they have the most resources available to help mitigate the problems they've caused. Given that they've benefited most from society, and have the most to lose if society collapses, they should be keen to pay their fair share (i.e. in proportion to their net wealth).
You may not like "committees of appointed politically aligned experts", but if they are appointed by democratically elected representatives (and unless you can point to some experts that are free from any political alignment), I'm not sure who would be better at making decisions for how resources are distributed to solve societal problems.
(For what it's worth, I thought your earlier comment about "controlled demolition of western economies" was thought-provoking, so I upvoted it).
Indeed, the point I was making was that the experts wouldn't be experts at all, they will be aparatchiks and party loyalists who can be trusted to maintain the narrative and ideology, just like they have been in every other variation of this scheme in the last 100 years.
What started with, "hey, maybe we shouldn't litter, and maybe we should stop companies from poisoning watersheds and wrecking land," has become, "we must centrally plan all economic activity according to political exigencies," and I'm saying this has precedents that ended terribly and I don't see it working this time either.
The issue of fertilizer prices is the effect of these policies designed to orchestrate a controlled demolition of the economy, which is a necessary step to disenfranchise the specific class of smallholders and business owners who naturally resist living under the regime of a planned economy, which operates on hallucinatory narratives designed to atomize and subjugate people. It's called "de-kulakization," and it's straight playbook.
The kaleidescope of absurd narratives we see right now are designed to "neutralize" people, that is, to make them believe nothing is true and trust nothing enough to resist what this cadre of terrible people are creating. It's a trip to watch it happen in real time after only having read about it in history, and to have the opportunity to provide commentary while it's happening, but this goes so badly, if a few more people can see wtf is happening, maybe we can mitigate the consequences.
What started with, "hey, maybe we shouldn't litter, and maybe we should stop companies from poisoning watersheds and wrecking land," has become, "we must centrally plan all economic activity according to political exigencies," and I'm saying this has precedents that ended terribly and I don't see it working this time either.
The issue of fertilizer prices is the effect of these policies designed to orchestrate a controlled demolition of the economy, which is a necessary step to disenfranchise the specific class of smallholders and business owners who naturally resist living under the regime of a planned economy, which operates on hallucinatory narratives designed to atomize and subjugate people. It's called "de-kulakization," and it's straight playbook.
The kaleidescope of absurd narratives we see right now are designed to "neutralize" people, that is, to make them believe nothing is true and trust nothing enough to resist what this cadre of terrible people are creating. It's a trip to watch it happen in real time after only having read about it in history, and to have the opportunity to provide commentary while it's happening, but this goes so badly, if a few more people can see wtf is happening, maybe we can mitigate the consequences.
> has become, "we must centrally plan all economic activity according to political exigencies,"
Could you give some examples of popular Western politicians currently advocating for centrally planning all economic activity?
If you stretch "all direct CO2 emissions" to mean the same as "all economic activity", and "taxing after the fact" to mean same as "centrally planning", then maybe 10% of Western politicians and voters would support what you're afraid of.
Could you give some examples of popular Western politicians currently advocating for centrally planning all economic activity?
If you stretch "all direct CO2 emissions" to mean the same as "all economic activity", and "taxing after the fact" to mean same as "centrally planning", then maybe 10% of Western politicians and voters would support what you're afraid of.
The most obvious examples of planned economy measures include internal passports, lockdowns, debt monetization (money printing), corporate ESG investment requirements, etc.
Which will probably mean we are headed into another round of popular uprisings. Lots of hungry people inevitably leads to lots is political instability.
Time for lazy/ignorant farmers to switch to cover cropping with rotational grazing, which is just a better system as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
I think that you shouldn't call other profession lazy/ignorant in general. People only tend to maximize their profits and minimize efforts, and this is natural. This, in no way, means that farmers are lazy and certainly not ignorant. A better rephrasing would be: "Time for farmers to switch ..."
News flash: I'm not talking about all farmers, I'm specifically talking about farmers who are either lazy or ignorant. Rotational grazing with cover crops is vastly superior to running fields constantly by juicing them with fertilizer and tilling. It does require knowledge, however, and the will to move livestock around regularly, which a lot of bad farmers lack.
A general advice that I have found useful in life is that if you see something that requires a change (in organization, business process, lifestyle or just about anything that has humans as a component) that doesn't directly involve yourself, then the best way to point it out is never to start with the assumption that people are just "lazy/ignorant". This is hostile and will usually have a negative effect on the willingness of the concerned individual to change.
Even in this case, the farmer who are farming on their own land are under no obligation to change their way of life or farming process. Even though we know that the methods they are using may be sub-optimal and a net-negative in the long run, we simply cannot make them change it, and certainly never by labelling them negative. We can make them see the benefits, or how it plays out in the long run and help them choose a better solution but ultimately, it's them doing the choosing.
At the end, if something is really really required, then it must be the Governments making regulation. This is how it generally works (I'm not saying I like it).
Even in this case, the farmer who are farming on their own land are under no obligation to change their way of life or farming process. Even though we know that the methods they are using may be sub-optimal and a net-negative in the long run, we simply cannot make them change it, and certainly never by labelling them negative. We can make them see the benefits, or how it plays out in the long run and help them choose a better solution but ultimately, it's them doing the choosing.
At the end, if something is really really required, then it must be the Governments making regulation. This is how it generally works (I'm not saying I like it).
Let's try this: There are lazy/ignorant software engineers who write everything in a single file with no function because it's the easiest to write/initially run & test. This is a known terrible practice, but if you never have to deal with the code down the line, you wouldn't know this. There's nothing wrong with calling out the fact that these people are being lazy/ignorant.
Can the bad farmers continue to farm debt (primarily)? Sure, but if they're doing it to themselves we shouldn't feel bad for them, or bail them out.
Can the bad farmers continue to farm debt (primarily)? Sure, but if they're doing it to themselves we shouldn't feel bad for them, or bail them out.
No. If the code they write works for them, then they have done their job. People only realized that it was a bad practice once they found that the code was NOT doing their job (i.e. it was difficult to fix/debug when error occurred, it was immensely difficult to update, and it was nigh impossible to make sense of by your cohorts reading your code).
People only do what a) They are taught in the first place (programming classes, reliable blogs etc.), b) Their work environment imposes on them (organizations having coding practices or standards), c) They, through some personal experiences, find out that it makes their job easier down the line, or d) It is the right thing to do.
Expecting everyone to follow (d) is out of the question and in my experience all "good" work happens via (b) i.e. rules, regulations and standards that have been enforced. If some sub-optimal choice minimizes effort while maximizing rewards, then that is not sub-optimal, at least for the individual, even though it clearly could be a sub-optimal for the collective.
People only do what a) They are taught in the first place (programming classes, reliable blogs etc.), b) Their work environment imposes on them (organizations having coding practices or standards), c) They, through some personal experiences, find out that it makes their job easier down the line, or d) It is the right thing to do.
Expecting everyone to follow (d) is out of the question and in my experience all "good" work happens via (b) i.e. rules, regulations and standards that have been enforced. If some sub-optimal choice minimizes effort while maximizing rewards, then that is not sub-optimal, at least for the individual, even though it clearly could be a sub-optimal for the collective.
I plant cover crops, but have no interest in animals. I have a software job to worry about when I'm not on the land and it would be economically foolish to trade that for time spent in animal husbandry. Nobody seems to want to rent my cover crops to feed their animals either, so I'm guessing I'm not the only who doesn't see the economic value.
Crops prices have priced in the increased fertilizer cost already, so it is what it is. We're used to it.
Crops prices have priced in the increased fertilizer cost already, so it is what it is. We're used to it.
It's common for one farmer to plant and harvest thousands of acres pretty much by himself, at least in North America. Labour, particularly up in Canada, is often in short supply which makes moving livestock around impractical - and not all of them even keep livestock, because it's not profitable unless you're keeping thousands of head.
The conventional ag model where you have one farmer monocropping a thousand acres are the reason the #1 thing most farmers grow is debt. That requires expensive specialized equipment, and much heavier application of pesticides and fertilizers than a balanced system, so both your fixed and variable costs are high.
If you want to see a profitable, productive mid sized farm, check out Polyface. Joel makes a good living while treating his land and animals well.
If you want to see a profitable, productive mid sized farm, check out Polyface. Joel makes a good living while treating his land and animals well.
Thing is that conventional farming, as you call it, and startups have a lot of in common. The goal is not to earn a tidy profit each year, but instead to build up massive capital for one huge payday when you get bought out. I suspect nobody really cares to see a profitable mid-sized farm as that kind of misses the appeal of farming. If you just want a steady income there are much better paying and less stressful jobs out there.
The interesting thing is that there are a lot of young(ish) people interested in farming, who really do want to run a profitable mid-sized farm. Most of these people just don't have the resources to buy into land, so most of the ones that do it have inherited derelict farms. A few of them do it with leased land, but that's risky as regenerative ag requires a time investment and getting the rug pulled out from under you can be a real bummer.
I'd argue that our mega-ag model is a big part of the problem, it's given us stupidly cheap corn/soy while causing a lot of health and pollution problems, and basically ruining farming as an actual profession.
I'd argue that our mega-ag model is a big part of the problem, it's given us stupidly cheap corn/soy while causing a lot of health and pollution problems, and basically ruining farming as an actual profession.
Corn and soybeans are cheap because they're really easy to handle. The process is almost entirely automated at this point, allowing one person to do what would have required thousands of people in the past. Other areas of agriculture have not been so easy to remove the human element, requiring nearly as many people today as a century ago. With reduced scaling potential, you don't see the same cost reduction.
The problem is that the cost reduction is a bit of an illusion, since your fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide costs are going to go up over time as your land turns marginal, and since there are so many mega-farms running huge GPS controlled equipment you're never going to be cost competitive at a smaller scale for corn/soy, but you have to accept the market price, which leaves a razor thin margin (if any at all).
The economics of farming are all fucked up, because our current farming practices have a lot of externalities that aren't priced into conventional produce, and producers who try to improve things to remove these externalities either have to take a loss versus the producers who say "fuck the future, fuck everyone who isn't me" or create new markets for their goods (which is where the whole farmer's market movement and the local food guilt thing come from).
The economics of farming are all fucked up, because our current farming practices have a lot of externalities that aren't priced into conventional produce, and producers who try to improve things to remove these externalities either have to take a loss versus the producers who say "fuck the future, fuck everyone who isn't me" or create new markets for their goods (which is where the whole farmer's market movement and the local food guilt thing come from).
> you're never going to be cost competitive at a smaller scale for corn/soy, but you have to accept the market price, which leaves a razor thin margin (if any at all).
You don't really need to be able to compete if you aren't looking for a massive exit, though. My ~150 acres (most of it rented, no less) of corn/soy/wheat provides enough for me to live off of comfortably enough. For about a month's work a year, that's wonderful in my mind.
It seems you're just getting caught up in the capital building frenzy that I talked about earlier. If you want to have the huge payday when you sell then you take on huge debt, grow to massive scale, use all of your income to service the debt and then you're sitting on a fortune at retirement. This is what attracts most people to farming, seemingly you included, which is fair.
If you are content to stay small you can avoid the debt and what the big guy is giving to the bank you can pocket and live well off of. That's where I've settled and it works fine. I won't have the huge payday later, however. It's a tradeoff.
You don't really need to be able to compete if you aren't looking for a massive exit, though. My ~150 acres (most of it rented, no less) of corn/soy/wheat provides enough for me to live off of comfortably enough. For about a month's work a year, that's wonderful in my mind.
It seems you're just getting caught up in the capital building frenzy that I talked about earlier. If you want to have the huge payday when you sell then you take on huge debt, grow to massive scale, use all of your income to service the debt and then you're sitting on a fortune at retirement. This is what attracts most people to farming, seemingly you included, which is fair.
If you are content to stay small you can avoid the debt and what the big guy is giving to the bank you can pocket and live well off of. That's where I've settled and it works fine. I won't have the huge payday later, however. It's a tradeoff.
Good deal that you're able to make corn/soy work without being massively indebted. How much are you paying per acre? Also, I assume you're not selling to a coop or other large scale buyer?
How did you get into farming? Is the trade in your family? I'm surprised 150 acres is only a month's work a year.
If you're running multiple crops, don't you need specialized equipment for each? Making it a bigger investment in equipment, or more likely to not have the right equipment at the right time if you have to rent/borrow it?
That depends on the crop. Tree shakers and orchard/tree nut related equipment tends to be pretty standardized, and a lot of crops can share a small(-ish) common pool of tractor attachments, but if you choose your diversifications poorly you could be on the hook for some hefty equipment costs. Also, I would lean on cash crops where the SoTA is harvesting by migrant labor. There is definitely a knowledge/planning component to multi-cropping.
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I think there are real serious trade-offs here in income to the farmer. It's nothing about lazy or ignorance. Honestly to make a comment like that, add if you know more about their business than they do is both ignorant and arrogant - unless that really is your business and you know what you're talking about. But this feels like armchair commentary to me.
Looks like you're armchair voting without subject matter knowledge. Do some research on no-till rotational grazing systems for natural fertility.
"Do some research?" Feh. Show us P&L statements for your choice of no-till rotational-grazing farm, or even this "research" is just a hobbyist diversion.
Now myself, I like hobbyist diversions that involve growing food, but farmers don't farm because they want to have fun. They farm so they can make money. If they stop making money, or if they don't make enough, they have to go into some other line of work, and typically sell the farm to someone who does make money.
And when you're not just selling gourmet vegetables to HN hackers making $200k+ a year, you're selling generic commodities like corn and grain and soy, where the competition is fierce.
And you're selling it to a world where the poor have a hard time affording food as it is. If this can't compete with conventional fertilizer, then even if everyone switched, people would starve.
Now myself, I like hobbyist diversions that involve growing food, but farmers don't farm because they want to have fun. They farm so they can make money. If they stop making money, or if they don't make enough, they have to go into some other line of work, and typically sell the farm to someone who does make money.
And when you're not just selling gourmet vegetables to HN hackers making $200k+ a year, you're selling generic commodities like corn and grain and soy, where the competition is fierce.
And you're selling it to a world where the poor have a hard time affording food as it is. If this can't compete with conventional fertilizer, then even if everyone switched, people would starve.
https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.poly...
Joel is the best known example of informed, conscientious farming paying the bills, but certainly not the only one.
Joel is the best known example of informed, conscientious farming paying the bills, but certainly not the only one.
I'm curious if you are a farmer yourself or in some other way qualified for such a pejorative statement.
So while I'd agree that no-till/rotational farming is superior in many many ways, and while I would very much like to see its wide-scale implementation, I also note your final line:
>as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers, but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the current system.
Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto, or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of conditions (so all the fries look the same).
>as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers, but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the current system.
Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto, or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of conditions (so all the fries look the same).
They are not ignorant. They are following the discounting model imposed by "lenders".
Sounds to me like reducing the overall production.
What's the befit if fertilizer helps?
That it looks more natural?
What's the befit if fertilizer helps?
That it looks more natural?
Tilling and fertilizing gives you a great yield today, but damages the long term fertility of the land, and pollutes nearby waterways. The best analogy is buying things on credit. You might feel rich at first, but when the debt comes due and you can't afford it bankruptcy is a bitch.
It does require letting some land lie fallow to regeneration, so you need to devote more total land to agriculture, and it also requires fencing and for someone to go move the livestock to a new paddock every few days (though you save on tilling/herbicide application costs). On the plus side the unit cost of everything you produce is lower, and meat is typically much more profitable than vegetables so you've diversified.
It does require letting some land lie fallow to regeneration, so you need to devote more total land to agriculture, and it also requires fencing and for someone to go move the livestock to a new paddock every few days (though you save on tilling/herbicide application costs). On the plus side the unit cost of everything you produce is lower, and meat is typically much more profitable than vegetables so you've diversified.
I've never met a single successful farmer that is either lazy or ignorant. Most people would never last a full week working on a farm. As far as rotational grazing, if you don't think modern farmers understand nutritional cycles you are sadly misinformed.
We've been here before, set that graph to show the last 15 years. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/879968
I went back the full 30 years. Nice! so a spike in the price of pee is an indicator of financial crisis or instability.
Do we have a theory for why it would be more than a chance correlation?
High input prices cause inflation, inflation causes central banks to tighten monetary policy, tight monetary policy causes financial crashes as the cash flows of assets are evaluated against higher discount rates.
Real interest rates are still massively negative and will not change much if our total 2022 hikes are 1%. It seems like monetary policy will result in financial crashes (like you allude in that comment) or potentially even more inflation crashing certain assets upwards, or a slight possibility of hyperinflation.
Curious what odds you assign for each outcome?
Curious what odds you assign for each outcome?
Personally I think the answer is "all of the above", at different timescales. Long-term, I'm betting that it'll end in hyperinflation. But on the short term, asset prices tend to track nominal interest rates better than real ones, because investors have a hard time correctly predicting the effect of inflation on an individual firm's cash flows. (We saw this in the 1970s, where P/Es compressed from about 20 to about 8 in response to higher interest rates, but company profits also rose with inflation, so when interest rates normalized in the 80s stock prices took off.) So if the Fed raises rates, asset prices could crash by 50% or more, which may trigger them to drop rates again, which further pumps inflation and raises stock prices, which causes another cycle of tightening, etc.
Expect things to get messy, and less predictable than they were before. The long-term trend is toward a worthless U.S. dollar and infinite stock prices, but there could be a lot of ups and downs before then.
Expect things to get messy, and less predictable than they were before. The long-term trend is toward a worthless U.S. dollar and infinite stock prices, but there could be a lot of ups and downs before then.
If HN had a slogan today it would be "this is fine."
Shale revolution saved US and indirectly rest of the world of many things. We had one heck of decade with cheap Natural Gas prices in the US and the market adjusted to that. The days of Cheap NG are over given that it is now the preferred input for electricity generation including the peaker plants. The next step is US banning NG and Oil exports which can happen before next presidential election.
There are many reasons but the second and third order effects of 'plague' have to run through the system and it would take a decade for all these things to wash through.
It is not a coincidence famine follows plague and war follows famine. The bush fires have already started if you are paying attention.
There are many reasons but the second and third order effects of 'plague' have to run through the system and it would take a decade for all these things to wash through.
It is not a coincidence famine follows plague and war follows famine. The bush fires have already started if you are paying attention.
If anyone is curious, the US had a ban on natural gas and oil exports until 2015, when Republicans in Congress passed legislation to overturn the ban, which Obama then proceeded to sign: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-oil/congress-k...
We've been here before isn't the same thing as 'this is fine'. The earth has had several extinction-level events in it's history - it wouldn't be 'fine' to have one again.
Well, the earth would be fine. The earth would carry on without us and it wouldn't be long until there were no traces of our incredibly short term existence. I've always been amused by "Save the Earth" campaigns. The proper phrase is "Save the Humans."
It was already clear in September that this was going to happen, when fertilizer plants started to shut down because of the high gas prices[1]. (context: Natural gas is used to produce ammonia via the Haber process, and the ammonia is in turn used to produce ammonium nitrate and urea, which are used as fertilizer.) I already commented on it back then[2].
I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea price?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/16/fears-for-u...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29113533#29116895
I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea price?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/16/fears-for-u...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29113533#29116895
> I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea price?
They didn't. The futures price started climbing in September.
https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/JC*1
They didn't. The futures price started climbing in September.
https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/JC*1
that graph suggests urea prices are already going down?
>I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea price?
Probably because big urea producers have longer-term contracts for gas and the price hike would only occur after a set period. Chemical plants buy very little spot.
Probably because big urea producers have longer-term contracts for gas and the price hike would only occur after a set period. Chemical plants buy very little spot.
I should be more careful. I've been pissing this stuff away my entire life!
Prices and taxes on urine were occasionally huge political issues in Ancient Rome.
For anyone curious why this was the case, it's due to a step in wool textile production called "fulling" [0]. Stale human urine was used for the ammonium, which cleaned away dirt and oil from the cloth and made it thicker (fuller).
One of the more entertaining episodes in Don Quijote is when he and Sancho are confused by the persistent loud noise made by the hammers in a fulling mill.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling
One of the more entertaining episodes in Don Quijote is when he and Sancho are confused by the persistent loud noise made by the hammers in a fulling mill.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling
Adding to this fun fact, they used urine because fulling societies hadn't yet invented soap. Cicero's family were fullers. Caesar, Cleopatra and Socrates lived in civilizations lacking soap!
Due to economics ? I thought Alep soap predated Cicero by a while.
It's unclear, though earliest even-dubious claims of its use go back only as far as Cleopatra, Cicero's contemporary [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_soap
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_soap
"Money Doesn't Stink"
Maybe reintroducing a free modern amphora equivalent instead of making people pay and forcing them to waste it in a toilet could help?
Interestingly, elemental phosphorus was originally isolated from urine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus#Discovery
which is funny considering that economists and such are worried that mining phosphorus rock might have a limit soon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus#Discovery
which is funny considering that economists and such are worried that mining phosphorus rock might have a limit soon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus
Grab a copy of William Hinton's Fanshen if you have a chance. The family latrine was serious business in his village.
And sweating, presumably.
I wonder whether urea is recovered from waste water at water treatment plants.
I wonder whether urea is recovered from waste water at water treatment plants.
When I first heard about the AdBlue shortage my response was "Time to reinstate the barrels outside the pubs for Monarch and Country!
This a huge venerability in our supply chain. If we run out of DEF urea, trucking will grind to a halt. I hope engine makers like Cummins and Detroit have contingency plans where they could release a software patch for their engines that would temporarily bypass the DEF requirement. However, I doubt they have any contingency plan and this is actually a huge venerability that I guarantee our enemies know of.
As long as price controls aren't imposed, there's no danger of a DEF shortage. The price has gone from US$250/tonne (25¢/kg) to US$1000/tonne (US$1/kg). Trucks consume perhaps 1 kg of urea per 100 km. Even at US$10/kg it wouldn't grind trucking to a halt, just raise the price a little.
Adding $0.10/KM (side note, why are we doing math with USD and metric distances?) isn't raising the price 'a little' - it's over a 5% increase in trucking costs.
Do you think most trucking operations have much more than a 5% margin in their businesses right now, or that if they did, they'd just eat such a huge increase?
[1] (warning - math required, source is in $/Mile) https://www.paragonrouting.com/en-us/blog/post/want-optimize...
Do you think most trucking operations have much more than a 5% margin in their businesses right now, or that if they did, they'd just eat such a huge increase?
[1] (warning - math required, source is in $/Mile) https://www.paragonrouting.com/en-us/blog/post/want-optimize...
No, I think they'd raise their prices 7%, so shipping things over land would cost 7% more.
It's an open secret you can code out DEF on some diesel VWs. The older TDI Touaregs that were fixed during Dieselgate are nearing the end of their 120k mile warranty and owners are recoding the ECU to ignore DEF warnings rather than maintain or repair them. I'm sure the same could be done for Cummins and Detroit.
Uh, doesn’t the state plug into their ECU for emissions inspections?
If you mean the poorly engineered OBD port most don’t. They may run an exhaust probe and visual inspection of the CEL and safety equipment.
[deleted]
The cause of this is that natural gas prices have dramatically risen in much of the world. For example, in the UK, natural gas has gone up 5x.
Urea is made from ammonia which is made from natural gas.
The effect of this will mostly impact the agricultural sector, where it is the main component of many fertilisers.
Urea is made from ammonia which is made from natural gas.
The effect of this will mostly impact the agricultural sector, where it is the main component of many fertilisers.
The same website has the price for Natural gas for 30 years. https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=natural-ga...
Natural gas prices were a lot higher multiple times in the past, with no corresponding peaks in Urea prices. Just wondering if Natrual gas is the sole reason or if something else also is at play.
Natural gas prices were a lot higher multiple times in the past, with no corresponding peaks in Urea prices. Just wondering if Natrual gas is the sole reason or if something else also is at play.
Looks like September is when the buffer in the global supply chain ended. At that point people realize what they took for granted and were definitely willing to pay more when it meant shutting down their operation otherwise.
Eh more like you often apply fertilizer after harvest and thus buy it. There was also a coincident price increase in fossil fuels.
A similar spike can be seen in August 2008.
Aside from agriculture, demand for urea has also increased due to recent introduction to maritime applications.
International Maritime Organisation - Tier III emmission certification require lowered emissions in (S)ECA areas.
Urea injection in exhaust lines convert SOx to CO2. "HUG-units" long used in greenhouses to also use the exhaust of generators used for lighting/heating as additional CO2 source. These same units are now being slapped on to seagoing vessels that of length under Class (Lloyds/Bureau Veritas etc.).
Sidenote: Service engineers and subsequent calibration tools are fully booked at this time. Good business to be had.
International Maritime Organisation - Tier III emmission certification require lowered emissions in (S)ECA areas.
Urea injection in exhaust lines convert SOx to CO2. "HUG-units" long used in greenhouses to also use the exhaust of generators used for lighting/heating as additional CO2 source. These same units are now being slapped on to seagoing vessels that of length under Class (Lloyds/Bureau Veritas etc.).
Sidenote: Service engineers and subsequent calibration tools are fully booked at this time. Good business to be had.
Curious how these big input cost swings translate to final product costs. We're seeing steady news reports for individual components such as SemiConductors oil and other costs skyrocketing by triple digits. Presumably downstream the costs are partially eaten by wage declines, profit margin shrinkage, supply reserves, and other costs which aren't spiking.
I wish I had access to an approximate Soviet style planning machine to simulate the outcome and time delay to cost increases. We're probably still eating the food grown with last years food and fertilizer prices.
I wish I had access to an approximate Soviet style planning machine to simulate the outcome and time delay to cost increases. We're probably still eating the food grown with last years food and fertilizer prices.
Lumber shot up in price for a few months, and then it came back down. Unless this is sustained I think it is safe to attribute to a supply shock.
Lumber has now gone back up. Very interesting market.
Lumber has doubled in the last six weeks. Eight foot 2x4’s are now $6 in the Midwest.
But still down on where it was in May.
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/commodities/lbs
Lumber peaked at $1400, fell to $500, but now is approaching $1200 again.
Lumber peaked at $1400, fell to $500, but now is approaching $1200 again.
Yeah it's back up... I started planning a home renovation in January 2020 and I've been waiting on prices to come back down :(
Starting to consider doing it myself as much as possible to recoup lumber costs with reduced labor costs.
Starting to consider doing it myself as much as possible to recoup lumber costs with reduced labor costs.
It’s a fossil fuel thing, part of synthesis, not just a supply shock (but probably also).
For those lacking context:
Urea is a component of AdBlue which is used in modern diesel motors. There has been a shortage recently, hence the increase in price.
Urea is a component of AdBlue which is used in modern diesel motors. There has been a shortage recently, hence the increase in price.
Urea is a critically important fertilizer. It's a 46-0-0 NPK fertilizer. Diesel Exhaust Fluid is a relatively minor usage compared to nitrogen fertilizer.
https://www.ppclubricants.com/understanding-urea-pricing-and...
https://www.ppclubricants.com/understanding-urea-pricing-and...
> Urea is a component of AdBlue
The other component being water.
The other component being water.
I am happy with my pre 2005 diesel truck purchase.
I suspect you're being downvoted because, while your truck may not need this stuff, it will still be affecting you and everyone else since all of the goods we buy get transported on new semi trucks which do use it. However, at the risk of taking downvotes myself, I'll add that I am also happy with my purchase of a non-DEF diesel truck in 2020.
Korea had to airlift in emergency DEF supplies when they ran short. How ironic.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/43065/korea-is-airlifting-thou...
But still, the particulate emissions from diesel engines make them a health hazard. We really ought to phase diesel out in favor of gasoline, natural gas, and electric power.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/43065/korea-is-airlifting-thou...
But still, the particulate emissions from diesel engines make them a health hazard. We really ought to phase diesel out in favor of gasoline, natural gas, and electric power.
Gas engines don't work very well for the really heavy loads and constant usage. Additionally, modern turbo diesels are pretty darn good with fuel mileage compared to gas powered vehicles. I have a newer turbo diesel mid sized truck, and on the highway I get anywhere from 30-33 MPG, and 28-30 MPG around town.
Hopefully it's got that old-iron design where you can run it off used fryer oil or basically any other long chain liquid hydrocarbon. There's something to be said for not optimizing your engines too much.
There's a local sewage treatment plant that's producing fertilizer[1] and selling it. Why couldn't this be done on a large scale?
[1] https://www.cleanwatergrow.com/
[1] https://www.cleanwatergrow.com/
All of our sewage waste treatment could provide two things methane and fertilizer. Most treatment plants are aerobic so they don't produce methane. But, every treatment plant could provide fertilizer if regulations in the area allowed it and people bought it.
I would like to see a shift to anaerobic sewage treatment to produce methane for fuel everywhere that humans live. I have been thinking about what it would take to convert my septic tank to an anaerobic digester for many months. I would love to replace my propane supply with methane produced from my own shit. On a larger scale I believe that my remote community could similarly replace a large portion of the imported propane with natural gas if we had an anaerobic sewage treatment plant.
https://www.veolia.com/anz/our-services/our-services/energy-...
Edit: an EPA link on digester basics
https://www.epa.gov/agstar/how-does-anaerobic-digestion-work
I would like to see a shift to anaerobic sewage treatment to produce methane for fuel everywhere that humans live. I have been thinking about what it would take to convert my septic tank to an anaerobic digester for many months. I would love to replace my propane supply with methane produced from my own shit. On a larger scale I believe that my remote community could similarly replace a large portion of the imported propane with natural gas if we had an anaerobic sewage treatment plant.
https://www.veolia.com/anz/our-services/our-services/energy-...
Edit: an EPA link on digester basics
https://www.epa.gov/agstar/how-does-anaerobic-digestion-work
So are all the monopolies in our global supply chain waking up to how they can wring profits and ... even better ... government subsidies that are long lasting and function as barriers to entry for competitors?
I vaguely recall a recent article about teaching pigs or cows (on farms) to urinate and defecate in separate spots, to ease waste management. If the urine is valuable, and the farm is large enough...
Cow poop can be spread and pests eliminated by running birds through the enclosure after you rotate the cows out. If penned animals are using bedding, that bedding can also be directly composted into great fertilizer, no need to pee/poop in separate places.
I wish we’d invest more in research to make all crops nitrogen fixing like beans and clover.
It seems like we’d be close to the right level of technology.
It seems like we’d be close to the right level of technology.
At least adding it as a yeast nutrient doesn't require much. Should have limited impact to my wine making.
"Harry King wasn't the hero we needed. He was the hero we deserved."
What's there stopping supply from catching up to demand?
At what point would it be cost effective to sell urine?
(Asking for a friend.)
(Asking for a friend.)
This is because European gas prices spiked.
They're taking the piss!
These prices are just taking the piss.
Scanned the title as Uber, was very confused by the comments about pee…
This is fine.
I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently.
:S
I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently.
:S
I knew we shouldn’t have thrown out those jars of urine.
Other than that, Mrs. Hughes, how did you like the play?
My hobby of peeing into bottles & storing them is about to pay off.
That is, the vast majority of nitrogen-fixation for fertilizers is done using natural gas or other petroleum product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production