![]() | Agriculture: Unsustainable Resource Depletion Began 10,000 Years Ago | The Oil Drum | Making the case for wind, again | ![]() |
160 comments on DrumBeat: October 21, 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
160 comments on DrumBeat: October 21, 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- What "Lower Consumption" Means
- Tricking and Treating the Future
- Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way - Potatoes?
TOD:Europe
- EROWI - energy return of water invested
- An interview with Stoneleigh - the case for deflation
- The Future of European Transport: iTREN-2030
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Saturday 7th November 2009
- The Bullroarer - Friday 30th October 2009
- Details of Solar Flagships Released
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
—Upton Sinclair
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
Interesting... sulfur comes from natural gas as a byproduct of refining it. Does anyone else know of any other byproducts from refining oil/natural gas? (Helium comes to mind in this context, as it is a byproduct of drilling for oil/nat. gas)... When facing Peak Oil, are we also facing Peak Sulfur, Peak Helium, and Peak something else...?
Hello Geckolizard,
My earlier post just considered the I-NPK beneficiation energy required vs ready-to-apply O-NPK guanos. Now think about how much more transport energy is present day required:
Olden days**
Virtually minimal with free wind in sails; just the one-way return trip from a guano island back to the seaport, then inland to the final square foot topsoil dispersion.
Modern day**
Get sulfur moved from Athabasca oilsands, plus Potash[K] moved from Saskatchewan, plus raw ore phosphate[P] rock moved from Morocco, plus natgas Haber-Bosch ammonia[N] moved from Russia or Trinidad-->all four Elements then meet in Louisiana to be processed to the specific finished product [DAP, MAP, MOP, TSP, MIRACLE-GRO, VIGORO, etc].
Then, load the product on a truck, RR, river barge, or ship to then send to final destination for topsoil application. This is a simplified example, but it is easy to see how the total embedded transport energy over many, many miles can be huge.
Ok, now this gets more complicated, but I'll follow...
Consider Peak Oil: it's not necessarily how long that oil lasts, but the flow rate that counts...
So, less oil (and natural gas, because we're running into that wall too) means less energy...
And less energy means that the flow of things derived from energy (even if it has absolutely nothing to do with oil/gas) also is reduced.
Less N, P, K from around the world because the 'energy flow' (i.e. energy needed for transportation) is restricted by energy;
Less food because the 'energy flow' (i.e. energy needed to run tractors, water pumps, etc) is less;
Less water because the 'energy flow' (i.e. energy needed to pump wells from aquifers) is less;
Less synthetic fertilizer (I-NPK) because the 'energy flow' (i.e. energy needed to create the chemicals needed for fertilizers) is less...
I guess it is all about flows. If you have 3 million people living in a city, and only enough food to feed 1.5 million is flowing in, you have problems. If you have only enough heat or electricity to heat and provide for 1.5 million, you have problems. If you only have enough water for 1.5 million, again, problems.
Flows...
Yep,Yep,Yep--it's not the size of beerkeg, it's the size of the tap.
Imagine if every bottleneck beer's aperture was even smaller than this o
Yikes!