http://www.kbr.com/technology/Ammonia-and-Fertilizer/Ammonia-Process-Technologies.aspx

The necessity for ammonia mega-plants is largely driven by the inefficiency of nitrogen application. Although that efficiency can be improved it will always require a great deal of nitrogen to produce high yields. Even 100% nitrogen recycling from human urine will be greatly dissipated once it’s actually applied to the fields. It will wash away, be taken up by other organisms, and evaporate.

“because of the inefficiencies of nitrogen uptake by plants and animals, only about 10 to 15 percent of reactive nitrogen ever enters a human mouth as food. The rest is lost to the environment and injected into the atmosphere by combustion.”
from:
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/05/15/addressing.nitrogen.cascade

Indeed, even the nitrogen that does get into your crops will be problematic as pests are attracted to nitrogen-rich crops (hence the need for pesticide). Nitrogen is precious stuff – it has served as a ceiling to the expansion of any species (until the last century). It is no wonder that Gaia-theorist James Lovelock surmises nitrogen is recycled in urine rather than exhaled (despite the wasteful loss of water to the individual organism). From a Gaian-perspective, nitrogen is far too valuable not to be sequestered and recycled.

Please take a look for at page 118 for a graph detailing the direct correlation between population and ammonia production:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2007/ertl_lecture.pdf

Again, if there had been a way prior to Haber-Bosch to go from a few billion people to nearly seven billion, we’d have found the way. Once civilization is sufficiently destabilized that the ammonia factories shut down, our carrying-capacity will go from 7 billion back down to just a few billion. I just don’t see a way around that fact. Nor would I characterize it as a bumpy transition – it’s a discontinuity which one can survive or not. Undoubtedly, intrepid farmers recycling their nutrients via composting toilets and chamber pots will have a better chance than some. But it’s a matter of surviving a severe discontinuity – not a transition, smooth, bumpy or otherwise.

Dewey-
The sooner the horror of the CAFOs end, the better!

I contend the yields will drop faster than you imagine, and even below what is actually possible. Networks are highly resilient structures – until they are not. Our society easily continues to produce food even as the price of fuel gyrates between $30 a barrel to $140 to $30 and back up again. It is a network that makes small adjustments between its many connections to keep the energy (human, fossil fuel, solar) flowing through the system and providing sustenance. But networks crash. At some point in the future there will be an event after which the farmers in the midwest will simply leave their combines and tractors in the pole barns. Just as the artisans of Easter Island one day set down their tools in the middle of carving massive head statues – and just walked away. I don’t know when that event will be or what that event will be. But that’s the problem with networks – they buffer a lot of instability and then they just break under a cascading failure. My guess is that the event will be a severe crop failure due to high temps during a growing season that prevents plants from uptaking water faster than it evaporates. Forty, fifty, sixty percent reduction in output and the center may not hold. People wake up to the fact that the jig is up and they stop participating in society and start looking after themselves. Once people lose the faith and trust that the hierarchical organization they participate in will continue to provide food and security, they’ll begin to defect. Each defection will drive another defection – until the cascade of defections become an abrupt fail.

This is Bart at Energy Bulletin. We re-posted this article and got two letters from allies in the peak oil community, objecting to the tone. Here is what I replied to one:

Thanks for the email.

You make an important point… We do need to avoid letting disagreements on issues degenerate into personal attacks.

My impression is that the article is much more reasonable than the title makes it sound. Sharon says, for example: “on energy [Kjell Aleklett has] done deeply important work,” and I think Sharon makes a plausible argument.

The issue about climate change is only one of many on which people in the peak oil community disagree. It’s very important that we be able to have conversations instead of yelling matches.

One thing I’ve learned is how damaging the use of a single word or phrase can be. People never forget what they interpret as personal attacks, whereas memories about disagreements on issues seem to fuzz over with time.

best wishes,
Bart

Feedlot cattle and CAFO chickens, and that’ll be good for both the animals and your arteries.

To be less smartass – I doubt yields will drop as far as you imagine, because we would do as Sharon suggests above and start farming and recycling nutrients more rationally, but they could drop hugely and the U.S. would still be able to feed itself.

Would we still be able to feed many people abroad? No, but under BAU, even if yields stayed high we would still end up cutting those people off so we could have more biofuels and factory meat. Fortunately, the countries that have been made to depend on our imports can feed a much larger proportion of their own populations than they currently do, and in the long run they’ll be much better off depending upon themselves than depending on a declining imperial center to care about their welfare.

Aaron, in _A Nation of Farmers_ Aaron (Newton) and I did a considerable bit of research into the presistence of nitrogen in human bodies, and we found that it is pretty much infinitely recyclable – that is, there’s a lot of nitrogen out there that due to the Haber-Bosch process wouldn’t exist naturally, but it is being consumed and used only once at this stage in modern agriculture – but it could be recycled. Urine can largely be recycled directly, and composted humanure (which will be needed to deal with natural limits on phosphates) can also be reused – basically, we can recycle the nutrients for a very long time. So no, I don’t think artificial nitrogen will be the defining limit – note that I don’t think dealing with this will be easy, or that we will make a smooth transition.

Sharon

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2207

Without the Haber-Bosch process our civilization would never have grown to nearly 7-billion-strong – nor would we have developed our myriad ways of fossil fuel consumption.

But without Haber-Bosch, can we feed 3 billion people? I’m not sure how it would be possible – nitrogen fixation has allowed us to outstrip the carrying capacity of the planet. Although we temporarily increased carrying capacity, other systems were overloaded in the process (namely, climate regulation and biodiversity). We did so in order to feed ourselves:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/study-claims-meat-creates-half-of-all-greenhouse-gases-1812909.html

The genie cannot be put back into the bottle. You cannot get parents to forego giving their children high-quality animal protein (if their economic status allows it) or cutting down rainforest to plant corn. And we cannot replace the nitrogen (produced in a chemical factory) that makes up an average first-worlder with some natural source which will somehow magically put into balance what is fundamentally out-of-balance. We are a successful species – and all successful species outstrip carrying capacity.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/86/8633cover3box2.html

Three billion people depend on the ammonium nitrate factories for their food, for the very nitrogen atoms that compose their bodies – where else can all that nitrogen come from? Massive bat colonies producing tons of guano? Huge unexploited deposits of saltpeter?

Peak oil and climate change are just symptoms of our removal of a natural ceiling to population increase – namely, the sequestration of bio-available nitrogen. If low-input agriculture keeps pace with high-input agriculture, why did we not reach 7 billion long before we began applying Haber-Bosch nitrogen to our fields? Corn has historically yielded 20 acres a bushel – and now thanks to hybrid varieties that can be planted close together maximizing nitrogen uptake (along with a liberal application of pesticides to make such unnatural practices possible) we get 200 acres a bushel. Who doesn’t get to eat when we go back to 20 acres a bushel?

(The corollary to that is that, if your goal is to see some parrots and cetaceans stay alive long-term, you cannot just assume that their problems will be solved by all the bald apes conveniently kicking the bucket. You have to try to find things to do to help the surviving humans to control themselves better, or be controlled better, or they’ll be right back denuding the landscape as usual.)

I’ve already given up on humankind as an utterly lost cause, an evolutionary dead end, God’s greatest mistake. I’ve shifted all of my investments away from humankind and into Nature since Nature actually has a future (of course these investments aren’t money, money is thankfully a meaningless concept within the natural world).

The problem with peak oil is that it didn’t happen soon enough. The problem with the economic collapse is that it failed to destroy the global economy. Humankind’s bad habits are going to cycle between recession and recovery until humankind has thoroughly trashed the planet. I would also say “… and guarantee the extinction of humankind” but that boundary was passed when carbon dioxide crossed 350 ppm.

I don’t trust anybody in the Peak Oil movement, especially anyone who has either a career or investments in the oil industry, and so patiently wait for Peak Oil to occur. The only real benefit of Peak Oil that I perceive is that it will eradicate the oil industry. It won’t save humankind from climate change or anything else.

Nor have I found “The Oil Drum” a reliable source of objective information about Peak Oil or anything else. The Peak Oil movement sounds too much like an astroturf for the American Petroleum Institute. Too many oil industry advocates and too many climate change deniers. Too many people with too much money invested in their own self-proclaimed expertise.

It is too late for humankind. So much for the future.