peak phosphorus p2o5 is only going to go up

Interesting article....

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The staff at the Energy Bulletin put together a great article today examining the peak production rate of phosphorus. By applying the same methods used by Dr. M. King Hubbert (the man who accurately described Peak Oil in the 1950s) to phosphorus production, the authors discovered that not only had the U.S. reached its peak production in 1988, but the world had peaked in 1989!

Why is phosphorus important, you might wonder? From the Energy Bulletin article:

The current major use of phosphate is in fertilizers. Growing crops remove it and other nutrients from the soil... Most of the world's farms do not have or do not receive adequate amounts of phosphate. Feeding the world's increasing population will accelerate the rate of depletion of phosphate reserves.

and

Phosphorus may be the real bottleneck of agriculture.

Population growth was only possible because we found phosphorus deposits and cheap energy to extract, transform and transport it to farms. When we plot data of world population versus world phosphate production, we find a significant correlation.

The problem of phosphorus depletion is just one more example of the imminent crunch in resource reserves we face. I wrote about a similar concern in my Peak Salt article nearly a year ago. The difference there is that we don’t actually face a salt shortage until we face an oil shortage -- an example of a subtle but critical interaction between resources. What we in the Peak Oil community are discovering is a complex system of feedbacks and tipping points, just as the world is discovering in the issue of global warming.
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Attached is a link to an interesting article on Peak Phosphorous

http://www.greb.ca/publicationspdf/Thephosphoruspeak.pdf

DYOR