Worse Than Peak Oil? We're Quickly Running Out of a Chemical Essential to Growing Food

"P" is for phosphorus, the stuff of life, and “p” is for “peak phosphorus” by 2030, ecologists say, unless — presto! — pee can be turned into gold through modern-day alchemy.

Unremarked and unregulated by the United Nations and other high-level assemblies, the world’s supply of phosphate rock, the dominant source of phosphorus for fertilizer, is being rapidly — and wastefully — drawn down. By most estimates, the best deposits will be gone in 50 to 100 years.

Worse, phosphorus production could peak in just two decades, according to new research from Australia and Sweden. That’s when demand could outstrip supply, playing out a familiar scenario of scarcity, price shocks, riots, starvation and war.

In short, peak phosphorus could be the unwelcome sequel to peak oil.

“It’s an emerging crisis,” said Stuart White, director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and a co-author of two phosphorus studies published recently by Global Environmental Change and the International Conference on Nutrient Recovery from Wastewater Streams.

“Right now, you can get phosphorus if you’re willing to pay for it,” White said. “But global reserves will peak in 20 to 25 years. Africa has not stirred in terms of its phosphorus use. Africa could take off, and that’s very scary.

“We will continue to mine phosphorus. It’s just that if we want to extend the longevity of the resource, we’ll have to reduce extraction rates significantly and put in much bigger recycling.”

P in DNA

Peak phosphorus, as White and his colleagues describe it, based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the fertilizer industry, makes peak oil look like a cakewalk.

Both oil and phosphate rock are finite, non-renewable fossil resources that were created in deep geological time, whether from decaying biomass for oil or millennia of  of pooping seabirds for phosphate. But there are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for phosphorus, an element that forms bones, sustains cell membranes and gives shape to the DNA and RNA in all living things.

“We are effectively addicted to phosphate rock,” said Dana Cordell, a Ph.D. candidate who works with White and co-authored the recent studies. Cordell’s thesis, The Story of Phosphorus: Sustainable Implications of Global Phosphorus Scarcity for Food Security, was published as an e-book by Linköping University in Sweden on Feb. 4.

“The quality of the remaining phosphate rock is declining,” Cordell said. “We’re going to have to shift away from our use of it. There is no single quick fix solution.”

Worldwide, according to Cordell and White, five times more phosphorus is being mined than is being consumed. Stated another way, 15 million tons of phosphorus is mined yearly to grow food, but 80 percent never reaches the dinner table: It is lost to inefficiency and waste.

Farmers use too much fertilizer and it runs off the land, polluting streams, lakes and oceans. Industrial agriculture does not plow crop residues back into the soil after the harvest. In some countries, consumers throw away a third of their food, even when much of it is still edible.

Mature animals, including humans, excrete nearly 100 percent of the phosphorus they consume. But only half of animal manure — the largest organic and renewable source of phosphorus — is being recycled back onto farmland worldwide, studies show. And only 10 percent of what humans excrete is returned to agriculture as sludge or wastewater.

“We need to start talking about our pee and poo more seriously,” Cordell said. “We need to be thinking in terms of 50 to 100 years.”