Why blocking Hormuz could threaten the world's food supply
www.euronews.com
While most of the world is focused on the impact of oil disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, the current blockade could also pose long-term risks to the global food supply.

Fun fact: industrial agriculture is overwhelmingly dependent on natural gas. Half of global agriculture relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, which are produced from methane (ie natural gas) by the Haber-Bosch process. And guess what countries produce the lion’s share of the world’s natural gas, and how the synthetic nitrogen they produce from it gets to the rest of the world?

Peak oil is also peak food. And I’m pretty sure we hit that peak about 2018, so it’s all downhill from here anyway. But if this war preemptive defensive action lasts too much longer we might all end up literally tightening our belts this fall.

  • tyler@programming.dev
    4·
    16 days ago

    Just an FYI, it’s not just fertilizer. Even organic farming uses natural gas, because they can’t use herbicides, so they use propane gas flames to destroy weeds.

  • fake_meows@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    16 days ago

    Peak oil is also peak food.

    People have looked at the numbers here for what fertilizer contributes:

    https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fertilizer-feed

    A ballpark estimate is that around 40% of all food comes from the fossil fertilizers. This is derived from tracing the nitrogen in food proteins back to the source inputs.

    Of course, you can also go through the carbon side of the food chain and there are lots of energies being spent throughout the system…

    We are currently exceeding the planetary boundary for nitrogen, about 63% of our fertilizer use would need to go down in order to preserve the global ecosystem. The fertilizers are so excessive that they are killing the natural ecosystems.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05158-2

    Excessive agricultural nitrogen use causes environmental problems globally, to an extent that it has been suggested that a safe planetary boundary has been exceeded

    Its hard to see how we can use only 1/3 of the fertilizer rates and still make enough food.

    Last time I looked the fertilizers were consuming only around 4% of annual global methane production, so 'peak oil ’ will hit for tractors, combines, refrigerated storage, transportation and other aspects (diesel fuel, electrical power) before we don’t have enough methane to make fertilizers.