[HN Gopher] Urea prices increase 270% in 1 year
___________________________________________________________________
Urea prices increase 270% in 1 year
Author : copperwater69
Score : 126 points
Date : 2022-01-07 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.indexmundi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.indexmundi.com)
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| giantg2 wrote:
| At least adding it as a yeast nutrient doesn't require much.
| Should have limited impact to my wine making.
| mrfusion wrote:
| At what point would it be cost effective to sell urine?
|
| (Asking for a friend.)
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| This a huge venerability in our supply chain. If we run out of
| DEF urea, trucking will grind to a halt. I hope engine makers
| like Cummins and Detroit have contingency plans where they could
| release a software patch for their engines that would temporarily
| bypass the DEF requirement. However, I doubt they have any
| contingency plan and this is actually a huge venerability that I
| guarantee our enemies know of.
| kragen wrote:
| As long as price controls aren't imposed, there's no danger of
| a DEF shortage. The price has gone from US$250/tonne (25C//kg)
| to US$1000/tonne (US$1/kg). Trucks consume perhaps 1 kg of urea
| per 100 km. Even at US$10/kg it wouldn't grind trucking to a
| halt, just raise the price a little.
| djrogers wrote:
| Adding $0.10/KM (side note, why are we doing math with USD
| and metric distances?) isn't raising the price 'a little' -
| it's over a 5% increase in trucking costs.
|
| Do you think most trucking operations have much more than a
| 5% margin in their businesses right now, or that if they did,
| they'd just eat such a huge increase?
|
| [1] (warning - math required, source is in $/Mile)
| https://www.paragonrouting.com/en-us/blog/post/want-
| optimize...
| kragen wrote:
| No, I think they'd raise their prices 7%, so shipping
| things over land would cost 7% more.
| yardie wrote:
| It's an open secret you can code out DEF on some diesel VWs.
| The older TDI Touaregs that were fixed during Dieselgate are
| nearing the end of their 120k mile warranty and owners are
| recoding the ECU to ignore DEF warnings rather than maintain or
| repair them. I'm sure the same could be done for Cummins and
| Detroit.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Uh, doesn't the state plug into their ECU for emissions
| inspections?
| yardie wrote:
| If you mean the poorly engineered OBD port most don't. They
| may run an exhaust probe and visual inspection of the CEL
| and safety equipment.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I wish we'd invest more in research to make all crops nitrogen
| fixing like beans and clover.
|
| It seems like we'd be close to the right level of technology.
| pharke wrote:
| We've been here before, set that graph to show the last 15 years.
| https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/879968
| adamc wrote:
| Do we have a theory for why it would be more than a chance
| correlation?
| nostrademons wrote:
| High input prices cause inflation, inflation causes central
| banks to tighten monetary policy, tight monetary policy
| causes financial crashes as the cash flows of assets are
| evaluated against higher discount rates.
| jyu wrote:
| Real interest rates are still massively negative and will
| not change much if our total 2022 hikes are 1%. It seems
| like monetary policy will result in financial crashes (like
| you allude in that comment) or potentially even more
| inflation crashing certain assets upwards, or a slight
| possibility of hyperinflation.
|
| Curious what odds you assign for each outcome?
| time_to_smile wrote:
| If HN had a slogan today it would be "this is fine."
| djrogers wrote:
| We've been here before isn't the same thing as 'this is
| fine'. The earth has had several extinction-level events in
| it's history - it wouldn't be 'fine' to have one again.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Well, the earth would be fine. The earth would carry on
| without us and it wouldn't be long until there were no
| traces of our incredibly short term existence. I've always
| been amused by "Save the Earth" campaigns. The proper
| phrase is "Save the Humans."
| sremani wrote:
| Shale revolution saved US and indirectly rest of the world of
| many things. We had one heck of decade with cheap Natural Gas
| prices in the US and the market adjusted to that. The days of
| Cheap NG are over given that it is now the preferred input
| for electricity generation including the peaker plants. The
| next step is US banning NG and Oil exports which can happen
| before next presidential election.
|
| There are many reasons but the second and third order effects
| of 'plague' have to run through the system and it would take
| a decade for all these things to wash through.
|
| It is not a coincidence famine follows plague and war follows
| famine. The bush fires have already started if you are paying
| attention.
| exhilaration wrote:
| If anyone is curious, the US had a ban on natural gas and
| oil exports until 2015, when Republicans in Congress passed
| legislation to overturn the ban, which Obama then proceeded
| to sign: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-
| oil/congress-k...
| phkahler wrote:
| I went back the full 30 years. Nice! so a spike in the price of
| pee is an indicator of financial crisis or instability.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| So are all the monopolies in our global supply chain waking up to
| how they can wring profits and ... even better ... government
| subsidies that are long lasting and function as barriers to entry
| for competitors?
| shtopointo wrote:
| What's there stopping supply from catching up to demand?
| lumost wrote:
| Curious how these big input cost swings translate to final
| product costs. We're seeing steady news reports for individual
| components such as SemiConductors oil and other costs
| skyrocketing by triple digits. Presumably downstream the costs
| are partially eaten by wage declines, profit margin shrinkage,
| supply reserves, and other costs which aren't spiking.
|
| I wish I had access to an approximate Soviet style planning
| machine to simulate the outcome and time delay to cost increases.
| We're probably still eating the food grown with last years food
| and fertilizer prices.
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| I am happy with my pre 2005 diesel truck purchase.
| chaoticmass wrote:
| I suspect you're being downvoted because, while your truck may
| not need this stuff, it will still be affecting you and
| everyone else since all of the goods we buy get transported on
| new semi trucks which do use it. However, at the risk of taking
| downvotes myself, I'll add that I am also happy with my
| purchase of a non-DEF diesel truck in 2020.
| nradov wrote:
| Korea had to airlift in emergency DEF supplies when they ran
| short. How ironic.
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/news/43065/korea-is-airlifting-thou...
|
| But still, the particulate emissions from diesel engines make
| them a health hazard. We really ought to phase diesel out in
| favor of gasoline, natural gas, and electric power.
| vondur wrote:
| Gas engines don't work very well for the really heavy loads
| and constant usage. Additionally, modern turbo diesels are
| pretty darn good with fuel mileage compared to gas powered
| vehicles. I have a newer turbo diesel mid sized truck, and on
| the highway I get anywhere from 30-33 MPG, and 28-30 MPG
| around town.
| taneq wrote:
| Hopefully it's got that old-iron design where you can run it
| off used fryer oil or basically any other long chain liquid
| hydrocarbon. There's something to be said for not optimizing
| your engines too much.
| wcoenen wrote:
| It was already clear in September that this was going to happen,
| when fertilizer plants started to shut down because of the high
| gas prices[1]. (context: Natural gas is used to produce ammonia
| via the Haber process, and the ammonia is in turn used to produce
| ammonium nitrate and urea, which are used as fertilizer.) I
| already commented on it back then[2].
|
| I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea
| price?
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/16/fears-
| for-u...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29113533#29116895
| iSnow wrote:
| >I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea
| price?
|
| Probably because big urea producers have longer-term contracts
| for gas and the price hike would only occur after a set period.
| Chemical plants buy very little spot.
| stult wrote:
| > I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea
| price?
|
| They didn't. The futures price started climbing in September.
|
| https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/JC*1
| Keysers0ze wrote:
| Aside from agriculture, demand for urea has also increased due to
| recent introduction to maritime applications.
|
| International Maritime Organisation - Tier III emmission
| certification require lowered emissions in (S)ECA areas.
|
| Urea injection in exhaust lines convert SOx to CO2. "HUG-units"
| long used in greenhouses to also use the exhaust of generators
| used for lighting/heating as additional CO2 source. These same
| units are now being slapped on to seagoing vessels that of length
| under Class (Lloyds/Bureau Veritas etc.).
|
| Sidenote: Service engineers and subsequent calibration tools are
| fully booked at this time. Good business to be had.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I knew we shouldn't have thrown out those jars of urine.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Other than that, Mrs. Hughes, how did you like the play?
| PTOB wrote:
| "Harry King wasn't the hero we needed. He was the hero we
| deserved."
| spamizbad wrote:
| I should be more careful. I've been pissing this stuff away my
| entire life!
| colechristensen wrote:
| Prices and taxes on urine were occasionally huge political
| issues in Ancient Rome.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| For anyone curious why this was the case, it's due to a step
| in wool textile production called "fulling" [0]. Stale human
| urine was used for the ammonium, which cleaned away dirt and
| oil from the cloth and made it thicker (fuller).
|
| One of the more entertaining episodes in Don Quijote is when
| he and Sancho are confused by the persistent loud noise made
| by the hammers in a fulling mill.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Adding to this fun fact, they used urine because fulling
| societies hadn't yet invented soap. Cicero's family were
| fullers. Caesar, Cleopatra and Socrates lived in
| civilizations lacking soap!
| agumonkey wrote:
| Due to economics ? I thought Alep soap predated Cicero by
| a while.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It's unclear, though earliest even-dubious claims of its
| use go back only as far as Cleopatra, Cicero's
| contemporary [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_soap
| benjamir wrote:
| Maybe reintroducing a free modern amphora equivalent instead
| of making people pay and forcing them to waste it in a toilet
| could help?
| vondur wrote:
| "Money Doesn't Stink"
| elric wrote:
| And sweating, presumably.
|
| I wonder whether urea is recovered from waste water at water
| treatment plants.
| taneq wrote:
| When I first heard about the AdBlue shortage my response was
| "Time to reinstate the barrels outside the pubs for Monarch and
| Country!
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Grab a copy of William Hinton's _Fanshen_ if you have a chance.
| The family latrine was serious business in his village.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| There is a great quote I heard once that many people don't
| realize: "Modern agriculture is the conversion of the energy in
| fossil fuels to energy in food we can eat".
|
| That is, the vast majority of nitrogen-fixation for fertilizers
| is done using natural gas or other petroleum product:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production
| time_to_smile wrote:
| I'm surprised by how little people understand the relationship
| between fossil fuels (not just energy) and global food
| production.
|
| The primary reason that Malthus was wrong in his predictions
| about population growth and food supply isn't because of
| "science" it's because of fossil fuels.
|
| This wouldn't be an issue if fossil fuels were unlimited in
| supply and didn't have very severe externalities in their
| unrestricted usage.
|
| People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like
| under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen
| productions methods.
|
| edit: This comment getting quickly downvoted is objective
| evidence for my argument that "People don't like to talk
| about..." There's nothing controversial in this comment. In a
| world without fossil fuels we very likely would have seen
| Malthus's predictions come to be, fossil fuels are obviously a
| limited resource and their usage has extreme externalities.
|
| I get that people are scared, but it's still sad to see a
| community of otherwise curious people start to break down when
| they see facts that make them uncomfortable.
| Andys wrote:
| At least if we only used fossil fuels for agriculture that
| would cut back on 75% of the current use of them.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| >People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks
| like under a zero emissions scenario with our current
| nitrogen productions methods.
|
| I'd have to run the numbers... but offhand I'd guess it just
| means nitrogen gets 2.5x more expensive. (Call it 2-10x if
| you want some padding) That doesn't even mean food gets 2.5x
| more expensive, only that the percentage of costs due to
| nitrogen go up that much. I think this is such a non-issue.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's also worth noting that in the first world for "food-
| as-it's-consumed" the share of agriculture is just 10%-20%
| (depending on how it's consumed) of the final value, the
| majority of the cost comes from processing, transportation,
| retail, cooking and service or delivery; so if the price of
| agricultural products leaving the farmer would double, the
| increase in total price would not be as big. Of course, the
| poorer consumers in third world with actual problems with
| food security would bear the full effect of such a price
| increase.
| openasocket wrote:
| It would impact poorer consumers, though not evenly. The
| population facing the most food insecurity issues,
| subsistence farmers, would be largely unaffected, since
| they generally aren't using artificial fertilizer.
| elil17 wrote:
| Absolutely true. Food inflation in the US is about the same
| as average inflation. We're not paying more for food in
| comparison with other goods than we were a year ago.
| sremani wrote:
| We are evaluating the an upstream input cost and possible
| downstream effects. So, the consequences of high urea
| prices today will vividly show up sometime in the latter
| part of this year.
| [deleted]
| epistasis wrote:
| > People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks
| like under a zero emissions scenario with our current
| nitrogen productions methods.
|
| I, for one, love to talk about zero emission food production.
|
| It's not scary, and in fact it will be somewhat
| straightforward to replace our nitrogen sources with zero
| emission production methods.
|
| Electricity can be used to produce ammonia in many ways. The
| most obvious is electrolysis of water to hydrogen, and then
| through the Haber process. Large scale production is already
| being planned, for example by Fertiberia in Spain, who will
| deploy many MW of electrolyzers soon. Spain's target for
| electrolyzers is 4GW by 2030! We couldn't even build 4GW of
| nuclear by 2030, but we will be able to do elecrolyzers and
| the solar to power them.
|
| There is also a startup (blanking on the name) that creates
| ammonia on site, off grid, using high voltage in a box. This
| eliminates the transport cost of nitrogen, which is not
| insignificant. By focusing on small scale production on site
| a small startup can break in to a huge commodity market.
|
| I didn't downvote your comment, but your unnecessary
| pessimism does not accurately reflect the future that we can
| see already!
| agumonkey wrote:
| so malthus wasn't wrong, he was just early :)
| jka wrote:
| Extrapolating from your comment (neither disagreeing or
| agreeing, primarily trying to provide additional resources for
| people to learn about and to help explore the option space):
|
| The history of ammonia production has led to a fossil fuel
| dependency chain. This article at resilience.org seems to
| include some good history:
| https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-06-11/implications-f...
|
| One of the primary processes involved in the creation of
| ammonia is the Haber-Bosch process, as outlined on Wikipedia
| here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
|
| The International Energy Agency provides a good summary of a
| technology roadmap for migration of ammonia production
| processes to lower-emission methods:
| https://www.iea.org/reports/ammonia-technology-roadmap/execu...
|
| And finally - I've no connection with the University of
| Michigan but I did find this recent article about a research
| grant for solar-powered, energy-decentralized fertilizer
| production; I'm not clear on the details of the research yet
| but it does again re-iterate the nature of the problem and
| illustrates that there is effort directed towards overcoming
| fossil fuel dependence in this area:
| https://news.umich.edu/2m-to-replace-fossil-fuels-with-solar...
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| This is so disingenuous. The total energy input from fossil
| fuels is several fold less than the energy output since most of
| it is derived from the sun. [1](See figure 3)
|
| Around 50% of the input is indeed from nitrogen, but it need
| not be derived from fossil fuels since you could source energy
| elsewhere and use water electrolysis derived hydrogen in the
| nitrogen production process. That it is currently more
| economical to use fossil fuels is a separate issue.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935130/
| legutierr wrote:
| If you are saying that 50% of the energy input is from
| nitrogen, and if the most economical means of supplying
| nitrogen is from fossil fuel sources, such that the vast
| majority of it originates from fossil fuels, then wouldn't it
| be the case that nearly 50% of the energy input of the system
| is from fossil fuels?
|
| How would this input be "several fold less" than the energy
| output of the system?
| kragen wrote:
| 50% of the _marketed_ energy input, that is, which someone
| bought on the market, is from nitrogen (though I read the
| same article and I thought it said 90%). But that marketed
| energy input is only about 20% of the total energy input of
| the system; the other 80% is the sunlight that falls on the
| fields.
| legutierr wrote:
| A very important distinction! So, maybe fossil-fuel
| inputs to the system correspond to less than 10% of the
| total energy output? Would that be accurate?
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| YES, that was exactly my point.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > more economical
|
| In the same way that bunker fuel powered ships are just "more
| economical" than transporting goods by sail powered ships.
|
| People throw this term around like making it "less
| economical" to produce food is some minor detail.
|
| Things being their current level of "economical" is what
| drives our global economy at the current scale it runs at. We
| could not have our current lifestyle using sail powered ships
| to transport goods from China any more than we could maintain
| anything like our current lifestyle if we had to produce all
| of our nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis.
|
| Making food "less economical" means mass starvation.
| kragen wrote:
| It sounds like you disagree with the calculations Robotbeat
| presented in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842105,
| but it is unclear whether that is because you have done
| calculations of your own. Please elaborate.
|
| Robotbeat's calculations seem to show that producing all of
| the US's nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis would use
| something like 5% of US electricity production, which would
| not be a major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our
| current lifestyle", and presumably the numbers in other
| countries are even better, except for the Netherlands.
| bob29 wrote:
| I believe Robotbeats calculations are lacking if the
| intent is to demonstrate how much fossil fuel energy is
| embodied in one unit (joules, calories, etc) of food:
|
| -hydrogen is not a primary energy, no accounting for
| energy needed to produce 1kg of H2 gas -producing ammonia
| from hydrogen consumes energy -producing corn from
| ammonia requires more embodied energy than sunlight -
| other fertilizers, *cides, fuel and construction
| industrial sized agricultural machinery.
|
| Only measuring the chemical energy in quantity of H2 vs
| the dietary calories in associated corn produced is
| incomplete model of fossil fuels required in agricultural
| production.
|
| If you are saying the urea price spike has occured in a
| complete isolation, like temporary specific failure of
| urea manufacturing , maybe its not a problem. If its one
| of the first noticable effects of an overall fossil fuel
| shortage, its going to have huge feedback effects
| invalidating economic models such as slowing renewable
| growth, making the whole economy less productive.
| kragen wrote:
| I agree that it's important to include the complete model
| of fossil fuels in agricultural production, which is in
| the paper Enginerrd was citing (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842158). It turns
| out that even when you do that the number is still pretty
| low; most of the energy is used to make ammonia.
|
| You might want to put a blank line between your list
| items so they don't come out as a single paragraph and/or
| format them with *, *, or *.
|
| I think the urea price spike is due to a temporary
| collapse in natural gas production, which is indeed one
| of the first overall effects of reduced excess production
| capacity in natural gas, or shippable natural gas anyway.
| I don't think an overall fossil fuel shortage would slow
| renewable growth, though; it increases the returns to
| renewable generation, and renewables production is one of
| the sectors of the economy least dependent on fossil
| fuels.
|
| I think an overall fossil fuel shortage is unlikely
| because coal reserves are still enormous and
| interconversion of different kinds of fossil fuels is
| lossy.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Electrolytic production is significantly more expensive,
| but it isn't 10x or anything like that. Certainly not
| lifestyle altering. As a practical engineering matter,
| you'd want to use base load power for this, so it would
| have to be nuclear, which is why it will not happen in
| the foreseeable future.
|
| Ammonia is a highly fungible global commodity, and is
| commonly a means for countries with large natural gas
| resources to produce an easily transportable value-add
| product from excess natural gas. None of those countries
| are going to produce electrolytic ammonia because
| consuming natural gas is the entire point! If it wasn't
| being turned into ammonia, much of it would ended being
| vented to the atmosphere or burned off. While it doesn't
| look like it in isolation, a lot of industrial chemistry
| is actually reprocessing and finding value in the waste
| products of other industrial processes.
|
| The US currently produces ~10% of the global total, but
| we used to import ammonia like everyone else until a glut
| of domestic natural gas made it cost-effective to produce
| our own (again, a way to consume excess natural gas).
| Ammonia is feedstock for a ton of cost-sensitive
| industrial chemistry, not just fertilizer, so costs will
| show up in places people might not expect.
| kragen wrote:
| Interesting, why would you want to use baseload power for
| hydrogen electrolysis rather than solar peaks? That's the
| opposite of the conclusion I had reached, but maybe my
| crude models of hydrogen electrolysis are wrong.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > 5% of US electricity production, which would not be a
| major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our current
| lifestyle"
|
| I don't think there's any point in arguing if you think
| 5% of electricity (of which, as Robotbeat pointed out is
| 60% fossil fuel generated) is "not a major obstacle"
| while we also have to reduce/eliminate fossil fuel use in
| every sector. It also doesn't touch on the price increase
| in food production.
|
| Where in the world is all of this extra energy going to
| come from if you remove fossil fuels from the equation?
| Robotbeat's analysis there is terrifying to me, rather
| than reassuring. But you can put works like "just" and
| "only" as modifiers to whatever you want if it makes it
| sound more achievable.
| kragen wrote:
| I take it you agree with the calculations, then, but
| disagree with their implications?
|
| Increasing electricity production 5% would not mean mass
| starvation. China increased electricity production 5%
| every six months throughout the 02010s. The US did it
| every year in the 01960s. It's not some kind of
| impossible obstacle to "maintain[ing] anything like our
| current lifestyle".
| time_to_smile wrote:
| All of those gains are from an increase in the usage of
| fossil fuels. Yes China is making big growth in
| renewables but they're making even bigger growth in coal.
|
| This is the problem with our intuitions about energy,
| we're so used to abundant, high energy density,
| relatively cheap energy that we can't even get our heads
| around not having it.
|
| You quote me but miss the point where I say that this is
| fine so long as we have unlimited fossil fuels and there
| are no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage.
|
| Both of these conditions are false, but even your
| reasoning here is assuming these are true.
|
| If for some non-fossil fuel related reason we had to
| switch to primarily electrolysis hydrogen production,
| then yea, we'd be fine. We haven't even come close to
| really solving just replacing our current energy demands
| with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming
| perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the
| overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to
| intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy
| requirements that start popping up all over the place
| once you start removing fossil fuels.
|
| This has been a problem that has been well studied and
| understood for years, but because it leads to the scary
| conclusion that our current way of life is unsustainable
| it is brushed off.
| kragen wrote:
| This is not correct. I didn't miss your point; I was
| explaining why your point was wrong. Now I will do that
| again, even though you discourteously didn't answer the
| question in my comment: does that mean you agree with
| Robotbeat's calculations? The combination of apparently
| refusing to clarify your position with basing your
| arguments on easily checkable falsehoods, while accusing
| me of basing mine on "intuition", reduces my willingness
| to extend good faith to you. Please, do better.
|
| China's growth in _either_ solar _or_ wind generation
| capacity in 02020 was bigger than their growth in coal
| generation capacity. I haven 't seen the 02021 numbers
| yet but I expect that their coal generation capacity
| growth in 02021 will turn out to have been actually
| negative, _i.e._ , not growth but shrinkage, quite aside
| from the lower-capacity-factor crises resulting from
| their feud with Australia, their main coal supplier.
|
| Quoting from my notes in Dernocua
| (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua):
|
| > _Specifically, in 02020, the People's Republic of China
| installed 71.7 GW of new wind capacity, 48.2 GW of new
| solar capacity (which was already larger than the rest of
| the world combined), and 38.4 GW(e) of coal capacity.
| Assuming typical capacity factors of 40% for wind, 25%
| for solar, and 60% for coal, that would add up to 23 GW
| average new coal, 29 GW average new wind, and 12 GW
| average new solar. (But China's capacity factors are
| lower; see below.) New solar installations worldwide
| double on average every three years, which has slowed
| down from every two years in the 02010s. ..._
|
| > _But China is a larger country than Germany. Chinese
| marketed energy consumption was 28 PWh /year (3.2 TW) in
| 02010, of which 3.9 PWh/year (440 GW) was electric. In
| 02019 they produced 7330 TWh electric calculated as (+
| 4554 233 148 349 1270 32 405 224 113) rounded to three
| places. That's 836 GW. (The 32 TWh of pumped-storage
| hydro may be double-counted.) In 02019 224 TWh/year (26
| GW) was produced from solar and 405 TWh/year (46 GW) from
| wind, using 204 GW of solar capacity (capacity factor
| 13%) and 209 GW of wind capacity (capacity factor 22%).
| Also the 4554 TWh/year from coal (519.5 GW) is on a 1.041
| TW basis, so their capacity factor is only 50.0%.
| Hopefully they'll start installing their energy plants in
| more propitious places, like the Gobi, and the capacity
| factor will go up._
|
| > _So probably last year's new installations of 38.4 GW
| (coal), 71.7 GW (wind), and 48.2 GW (solar) will produce
| on average 19.2 GW (coal), 16 GW (wind), and 6.3 GW
| (solar). The resulting 22 GW (average) of renewable
| energy added last year amounts to 2.6% of the total
| current electric energy use of China. If we assume that
| China's total energy use has increased by 90% since
| 02010, just as their electrical energy use did by 02019,
| it would now be 6.1 TW, and 22 GW is 0.36% of it._
|
| Solar energy (127 PW at Earth's surface) is far more
| abundant than fossil-fuel energy consumption, which has
| never reached more than 15 TW, 0.012% of solar energy.
| Historically the big problem has been that solar energy,
| though abundant, was expensive to gather; that problem
| has now been solved, and solar panels are now cheaper in
| the world market than _either_ fossil fuels _or_ fossil-
| fuel plants, let alone the sum of the two.
|
| > _Both of these conditions are false, but even your
| reasoning here is assuming these are true._
|
| No, my reasoning is based on evidence that says it is
| feasible and economical to expand power generation using
| renewable energy. It is not assuming either "unlimited
| fossil fuels" or "no serious externalities with fossil
| fuel usage."
|
| > _We haven 't even come close to really solving just
| replacing our current energy demands with entirely
| renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery
| solutions, also requires growing the overall output of
| our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power
| needs), let alone additional energy requirements that
| start popping up all over the place once you start
| removing fossil fuels._
|
| Let's take these one by one.
|
| First, current renewable energy production is about 12%
| of world total primary energy consumption (https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...). More
| than half of this is hydro, which is, roughly speaking,
| not growing. The other half is solar and wind, which is
| growing 14% per year, which puts it on track to replace
| all of world total primary energy consumption in 02043.
|
| Wind is currently much larger, and already supplies most
| electricity in countries like Denmark, but solar is
| growing about 23% per year and has now reached about 1 TW
| peak, 150 GW average. That means that it is currently
| supplying about 0.8% of total marketed energy
| consumption, 1/128. (Since this is all electric, the
| percentage for electrical energy is higher.)
|
| Of course, when exponential growth is involved,
| prediction is very difficult, because sooner or later the
| exponential trend must stop, at which point the trend
| line diverges from reality by orders of magnitude. Even a
| small misprediction of the exponential growth rate
| results in misprediction by an order of magnitude after a
| few orders of magnitude of growth. https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Solar_power#/media/File:PV_cum... shows that the
| exponential trend was a fairly consistent 36% per year
| over the last 30 years, so it seems to be slowing down,
| but it's unlikely to stop anytime soon. I've investigated
| the fundamentals and can't find any resource limitation
| or demand limitation that would prevent it.
|
| Solar is currently on track to surpass wind around 02030,
| so probably we'll move to a majority-renewables energy
| system before the 02043 you get from extrapolating the
| overall non-hydro renewables growth rate.
|
| As for the intermittency question, it doesn't affect
| hydrogen electrolysis (a gasometer full of hydrogen is a
| perfectly reasonable way to store excess energy for up to
| a month or two) and to the extent that intermittency is
| managed at the peripheries of the grid rather than the
| center, it doesn't require additional transmission or
| distribution capacity as you say either. Moreover, even
| needing to double transmission or distribution capacity
| would not be a civilization-destroying crisis; as I said,
| PRC has done that three times over the last ten years,
| and to generation capacity too.
|
| Finally, the additional energy requirements that start
| popping up are basically only fixing nitrogen into
| ammonia, smelting steel, and plastics. All three of these
| are small compared to the use of fossil fuels as fuels.
|
| This is indeed a problem that has been well studied for
| years, but until five years ago, we didn't know how we
| could scale up PV production; there was the concern that
| it might be physically possible but out of our
| technological reach, like fusion energy. That problem has
| now been solved, and that is why, for example, Peabody
| Coal went bankrupt and coal-fired power generation is
| globally in decline.
|
| Our current way of life _is_ unsustainable in many ways,
| but needing a lot of energy isn 't one of them. We can
| increase our energy usage by two orders of magnitude
| before it starts to be a sustainability problem.
| mst wrote:
| As a tangent, I'm curious why you're formatting years as
| five digits?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The rts website below suggests that "30-40 percent of the
| entire US food supply" is wasted. We could start by fixing
| that. I suspect those of us in wealthy countries also eat
| _alot_ more that than we should.
|
| We are a very long way from mass starvation.
|
| [1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-
| america/
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > That it is currently more economical to use fossil fuels is
| a separate issue.
|
| That's not a separate issue. That's the WHOLE issue. The
| first 2 words in the quote were "Modern agriculture". The
| point is not that there are many types of farming that can be
| done without using fossil fuels as an input, nor that in the
| future we couldn't transition away from fossil fuels for
| fertilizer. The point is that the output of modern
| agriculture would, at present, completely collapse if the
| energy input from fossil fuels wasn't available.
| tough wrote:
| I was watching fall of civilizations channel the other day
| on youtube, it was indeed eerie to see how most great civs
| depleted their soils and natural resources, and that with
| some drought times, put the civilization to its end.
|
| I just noticed, before these civs would be geographically
| separated and isolated, the demise of one, didn't mean the
| demise of the other, and the people that had settled and
| survived, would become nomadic until settling again or
| something like that.
|
| What will happen when this global civ collapses? Where
| would the survivors be able to go to, to persist?
|
| Nowhere?
|
| Dark indeed
| pstuart wrote:
| > Where would the survivors be able to go to, to persist?
|
| Mars! /s, kinda
|
| We have the science and technology to address these
| issues, the thing that fucks us is our
| political/economic/religious structures. If we
| collectively agreed on solving these problems we could,
| but unity seems to be the scarcest resource of all.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Global society has slightly different dynamics, though,
| because of emergent properties of that scale. For
| example, countries or even some continents could suffer
| ecological collapse without global society necessarily
| being threatened.
|
| The other side of that coin, though, is that global
| society has introduced global risks, in terms of the
| amount of CO2 it is able to put into the atmosphere
| (which is a shared resource we all rely on), and the
| ability to create weapons or pathogens of global
| destruction due to technology.
| duped wrote:
| I think that hypothesis needs to be challenged or at
| least framed differently, since there aren't that many
| examples of civilizations that "reverted" to nomadism
| from an agrarian society (it would probably be more
| accurate that climate change/human activity dampened
| agricultural output enough that nomadic peoples became
| more prevalent as the population of agrarian peoples
| collapsed/migrated elsewhere), at least outside larger
| contexts like the Bronze Age Collapse where there was a
| centuries long period of population decline in a large
| geographic area.
|
| And in more recent centuries, "collapse" is almost always
| synonymous with political turmoil/change while the
| peoples remain in place.
|
| I think that's important too, because we're not seeing so
| much of a "collapse" of our global civilization, but
| migrations of peoples across it, and a rise in political
| turmoil as a second order effect.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That latter point is false, though except in a trivial
| sense. Hydrogen can be and is easily made with electricity.
| There is plenty of clean electricity available to do it.
|
| Also, 50% of the energy does not come from fixed nitrogen.
| Majority is from the Sun.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| There currently aren't enough green hydrogen > ammonia
| manufacturing plants on the planet to do this though.
|
| Building the necessary renewable energy and ammonia
| plants and infrastructure _is_ technically trivial in
| that we needed approximately no innovation as the tech
| already exists.
|
| The scaled of the problem is _immense_.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It's not immense compared to almost anything else we've
| done (such as the transition to air conditioning... air
| conditioners consume about 6% of US electricity). To
| replace all US ammonia production would require less than
| 5% of US electricity (see my other post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842105).
|
| Heck, you can get about halfway there just on the nuclear
| power plants in the US that have been shut down in the
| last couple decades!
|
| (Works well with intermittent renewables, too, as
| hydrogen production can be throttled without much
| penalty.)
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| In what way is building forty odd new nuclear reactors
| not an _immense_ undertaking?
|
| Or the equivalent in new renewables, if that's your
| preference.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Again, we used to double grid capacity every decade or
| so. An extra 5 percent is nothing in comparison to what
| we did doubling electricity production each decade from
| roughly the 40s through the 70s.
|
| (And that's about 10-20 new nuclear reactors, not 40. A
| fraction of our current nuclear fleet.)
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 50% from (FIXED) nitrogen is wrong, though.
|
| Fixed nitrogen, ie ammonia (for instance), is made from
| gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen. 3kg of hydrogen makes 17kg of
| ammonia. 200 pounds of ammonia (16kg of hydrogen) will make
| about 250 bushels of corn. 1 bushel of corn is about 370MJ.
| 1kg of hydrogen is 142MJ. So 2.3GJ of hydrogen makes 92GJ of
| corn. That's about 3%, not 50%.
|
| BTW, the US produces about 17 megatonnes of ammonia per year,
| or 3 Megatonnes of hydrogen per year. At 60% efficiency, that
| would require about 22 Gigawatts of average electricity, or
| less than 5% of average US electricity usage. The US grid is
| about 40% clean, so that's still only about 10% of US'a clean
| electricity usage.
| kragen wrote:
| Thank you! Where are your production figures from?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Ammonia per bushel of corn from:
| https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/nitrogen-rate-trial-
| results-in...
|
| US Ammonia production per year: https://www.eia.gov/natur
| algas/weekly/archivenew_ngwu/2021/0...
| kragen wrote:
| This is great, thanks!
| [deleted]
| yholio wrote:
| The hero we need, he did the math.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| >1 bushel of corn is about 370MJ. 1kg of hydrogen is 142MJ.
| So 2.3GJ of hydrogen makes 92GJ of corn. That's about 3%,
| not 50%.
|
| This was basically my point.
|
| >50% from (FIXED) nitrogen is wrong, though.
|
| Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was saying that 50% of the
| artificial energy input (i.e. excluding free sunlight to
| the plants) IS from the nitrogen, rather than farming
| equipment, transportation, etc.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification! We are in violent
| agreement.
| [deleted]
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Couldn't we extract all the nitrogen we need from sewage?
| ivarv wrote:
| I don't know if we could get all the required nitrogen to
| sustain our current agricultural methods, but there are
| definitely people working towards normalizing the capture and
| reuse of the nutrients in urine. Our current practice of
| polluting waterways with our urine is a travesty though, and
| it behooves us to process our 'waste' in a more regenerative
| way.
|
| See https://richearthinstitute.org for more.
| redconfetti wrote:
| Fossil fuels were created from sunlight, so really it's all
| solar.
| Frost1x wrote:
| And a whole lot of time, temperature, and pressure driven
| through geological processes.
|
| Energy from gravity and radiation are contributing factors to
| fossil fuel production, even if the hydrocarbons broken down
| for use are largely photosynthetic in nature/origin, they owe
| their energy density that makes them a viable fuel source to
| factors beyond solar. Breaking that down has side effects
| beyond pure photosynthetic processes.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Essentially it's all "when did those solar photons hit the
| earth" time based arbitrage.
| surfpel wrote:
| Sunlight is from fusion, so really it's all nuclear.
| kragen wrote:
| I used to believe this, but it is a lie wrapped around a small
| kernel of truth. It is true that "the vast majority of
| nitrogen-fixation for fertilizers is done using" fossil fuels
| (mostly natural gas, which is not a petroleum product), but
| plants do not get their energy from those fertilizers.
| Moreover, the total energy obtained from agriculture is about
| five times greater than the energy input used to make
| fertilizers, as shown in
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935130/figure/...
| (thanks Enginerrd).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree, but I think you and others are missing the primary
| point of the quote, or interpreting it too literally (which
| is fair, that is what the quote says after all).
|
| The primary point is that agriculture, as it is currently
| practiced on a large scale, is _extremely_ dependent on non-
| renewable resources and the energy in those resources. It 's
| not just natural gas used for nitrogen, it's also things like
| phosphate mining.
|
| Yes, the amount of calories in the final product largely
| comes from the sun, but it is the energy in those (currently)
| petroleum products that unlocks a plant's ability to
| photosynthesize in the first place.
| kragen wrote:
| Each of these problems needs to be considered on its own
| merits, not lumped together in some sort of misleading
| generalization.
|
| I was worried about the phosphate thing for a while since,
| unlike resources like copper and rare earth metals, the
| used phosphate mostly ends up in the oceans, not
| conveniently concentrated in landfills. Getting it back out
| of the oceans is pretty difficult.
|
| But then I looked into it a few years back. It turns out
| that the absolute amount of phosphate in crustal phosphate
| rocks is staggeringly huge: about 0.1% of the crust is
| phosphorus, almost all as phosphate, conventionally
| measured as P2O5, which would thus be 142/62 of that, or
| about 0.2%. This works out to be on the order of 1019 kg of
| phosphate. World phosphate production is 53 million tonnes
| (https://www.fao.org/3/i6895e/i6895e.pdf), less than 1011
| kg, so at current consumption rates we will run out of
| phosphate in about 10 million years.
|
| Given this, you might wonder why "phosphate reserves" are
| stated as only a few tens of billions of tonnes! The answer
| is that currently most phosphate minerals are unprofitable
| to mine because they can't compete on price with the fairly
| pure concentrated apatite deposits in the US, Morocco, and
| China. When those deposits are exhausted (probably sometime
| in the next few centuries), the price of phosphate will
| rise, unless we're mining it from the Moon or the asteroids
| by then. That will make it profitable to extract phosphate
| from less concentrated resources.
|
| So, while it is technically true that phosphate rock is a
| "nonrenewable resource", the implication that we will run
| out before the Pyramids have crumbled into dust is not.
|
| The bigger problem with phosphate mining is phosphogypsum,
| not energy consumption or running out of phosphate
| minerals. Detoxifying phosphogypsum is not a difficult
| chemistry problem, but there is a lot of it and nobody is
| paying to detoxify it, so it sits in waste dumps. I
| wouldn't be surprised if we saw a red-mud-style industrial
| disaster or two with phosphogypsum in the next few decades.
| tragictrash wrote:
| Kragen, I want to say I am always impressed with your
| insight. Thank you.
| kragen wrote:
| I'm flattered and grateful.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| My hobby of peeing into bottles & storing them is about to pay
| off.
| oxymoran wrote:
| Forget diesel trucks and piss, ya'll are overlooking that urea is
| a major component of fertilizer.
|
| Higher urea prices->higher fertilizer prices->Less fertilizer
| demand->less food supply->more suffering via sick and hungry
| people->more potential for confrontation and war.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| After watching people lose their minds over toilet paper, this
| is not going to be pretty.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Indeed. Lack of food is, historically, the fastest way to
| revolution and war.
| eloff wrote:
| This is probably a question easily solved by querying
| Wikipedia, but I'll ask it here so the answer benefits others
| as well, where does the urea used in fertilizer come from?
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| The usual chain is natural gas -> ammonia -> urea. Thus, one
| of the key factors influencing the supply is Hurricane Ida,
| which led to remarkably long shutdowns in natural gas
| production. https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/weekly/archivenew_
| ngwu/2021/1...
| selectodude wrote:
| Ammonia (made from natural gas) and carbon dioxide.
| lcam84 wrote:
| Urea comes from the Harber process [1] Basically most of food
| fertilizer depends on fossil fuels.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
| motohagiography wrote:
| If the prices are denominated in USD, and the consumers are in
| countries with stronger (less elastic) currencies, it's likely
| caused by inflation pressure from obvious sources like QE-
| infinity policy, debt monetization, and de-facto negative
| interest rates. What we are watching is the controlled
| demolition of western economies. It's not a conspiracy, it's an
| ideology that has prevailed and this is all downstream of it. I
| hope you like eating bugs.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > If the prices are denominated in USD, and the consumers are
| in countries with stronger (less elastic) currencies
|
| Well, that's not what's going on in the market.
|
| This crisis is caused by a reduced supply of inputs, mostly
| natural gas and energy. One of the direct causes is Hurricane
| Ida, which had a massive impact on natural gas supplies.
| China has also experienced a coal shortage, and also a
| drought that reduced hydropower generation. Europe has done a
| lot to switch to renewables, but they've suffered low winds.
|
| So no, the people who are going to hurt aren't rich
| Westerners, who are best positioned to ride this out. It's
| the poor people (mostly in the "global south") who already
| spend massive portions of their income on food, who will bear
| the brunt of this crisis.
| piva00 wrote:
| Reading about this and considering the current price shock
| and inflation in Brazil makes me worried.
|
| Right now, even before this fertiliser crisis materialises,
| there's already been a sizeable increase in food prices
| there, the pandemic pushed a new wave of homelessness and
| food insecurity after already some bad years before
| Bolsonaro came to power. Coupled with higher unemployment
| and overall loss of competitivity of Brazilian industry
| there just seems nowhere to go for society... If there is
| another food price hike it'll very likely cause massive
| social strife, I really don't see a way out if this crisis
| materialises in next year or so.
|
| It will be brutal for the global south.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Which will probably mean we are headed into another round
| of popular uprisings. Lots of hungry people inevitably
| leads to lots is political instability.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I would agree that energy costs are a signifcant factor in
| fertilizer prices because slim margins mean significant
| price volatility as a result of the input factors, but what
| upper percentile of westerner qualifies as rich enough to
| ride this out, and what happens to the rest?
|
| Given US economic policy directly caused this, wrapping it
| in climate narrative merely post-hoc justifies that the
| humans who will suffer from this deserve it because of
| climate change, and that the humans who are positioned to
| weather it deserve to have their resources and land
| redistributed to said victims because of climate change. If
| I had to guess who makes those redistribution decisions,
| because their divine authority comes from climate change, I
| would say committees of appointed politically aligned
| experts.
|
| On this inflationary policy issue, the climate emperor is
| naked.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > the humans who are positioned to weather it deserve to
| have their resources and land redistributed to said
| victims because of climate change.
|
| I mean, can you really disagree with the logic of this?
| The richest are likely to be the ones who have consumed
| the most and who have thus contributed most to climate
| change, and also they have the most resources available
| to help mitigate the problems they've caused. Given that
| they've benefited most from society, and have the most to
| lose if society collapses, they should be keen to pay
| their fair share (i.e. in proportion to their net
| wealth).
|
| You may not like "committees of appointed politically
| aligned experts", but if they are appointed by
| democratically elected representatives (and unless you
| can point to some experts that are free from any
| political alignment), I'm not sure who would be better at
| making decisions for how resources are distributed to
| solve societal problems.
|
| (For what it's worth, I thought your earlier comment
| about "controlled demolition of western economies" was
| thought-provoking, so I upvoted it).
| motohagiography wrote:
| Indeed, the point I was making was that the experts
| wouldn't be experts at all, they will be aparatchiks and
| party loyalists who can be trusted to maintain the
| narrative and ideology, just like they have been in every
| other variation of this scheme in the last 100 years.
|
| What started with, "hey, maybe we shouldn't litter, and
| maybe we should stop companies from poisoning watersheds
| and wrecking land," has become, "we must centrally plan
| all economic activity according to political exigencies,"
| and I'm saying this has precedents that ended terribly
| and I don't see it working this time either.
|
| The issue of fertilizer prices is the effect of these
| policies designed to orchestrate a controlled demolition
| of the economy, which is a necessary step to
| disenfranchise the specific class of smallholders and
| business owners who naturally resist living under the
| regime of a planned economy, which operates on
| hallucinatory narratives designed to atomize and
| subjugate people. It's called "de-kulakization," and it's
| straight playbook.
|
| The kaleidescope of absurd narratives we see right now
| are designed to "neutralize" people, that is, to make
| them believe nothing is true and trust nothing enough to
| resist what this cadre of terrible people are creating.
| It's a trip to watch it happen in real time after only
| having read about it in history, and to have the
| opportunity to provide commentary while it's happening,
| but this goes so badly, if a few more people can see wtf
| is happening, maybe we can mitigate the consequences.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > has become, "we must centrally plan all economic
| activity according to political exigencies,"
|
| Could you give some examples of popular Western
| politicians currently advocating for centrally planning
| _all_ economic activity?
|
| If you stretch "all direct CO2 emissions" to mean the
| same as "all economic activity", and "taxing after the
| fact" to mean same as "centrally planning", then maybe
| 10% of Western politicians and voters would support what
| you're afraid of.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > urea is a major component of fertilizer
|
| Oh yes. And alarm bells are ringing.
|
| "I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a
| very low crop in the next harvest. I'm afraid we're going to
| have a food crisis." -- Svein Tore Holsether, CEO and president
| Yara International. https://fortune.com/2021/11/04/energy-
| crisis-food-shortage-s...
|
| "Major fertilizer producers Yara International ASA and CF
| Industries Holdings Inc. said soaring energy costs are forcing
| them to halt some output of nutrients crucial for growing
| crops." https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/europe-s-
| energy-woes...
|
| "In the fall, soaring electricity demand led the southwestern
| province of Yunnan, a key phosphate producer, to order drastic
| production cuts by energy-hungry industries, including
| fertilizer." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-
| fertilizer-...
|
| "Farmers in India are desperate. Trucks in South Korea had to
| be idled. Food prices, already high, could rise even further."
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
|
| "Among farmers and ranchers, very few topics are being
| discussed as much as the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer and
| increasing concerns regarding availability."
| https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...
|
| "High fertilizer prices could exert inflationary pressures on
| food prices, compounding food security concerns at a time when
| the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are making access to
| food more difficult."
| https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/soaring-fertilizer-pric...
|
| "Higher farm input costs, expensive shipping and good demand
| provide for a grim combination... We are under La Nina
| conditions, the second such event in as many years, and the
| weather cannot be expected to be normal until Q2 2022 at the
| earliest." -- Rabobank _Outlook 2022: Hell in the Handbasket_.
| https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/documents/842941_Raboba...
|
| Hell in the handbasket here we come!
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| This is why I don't buy the Bitcoin "mined with free energy"
| narrative. Put a fertilizer plant near that hydro dam instead
| of doing proof of work calculations.
|
| Ethereum 2.0 (uses proof of stake- doesn't do energy
| intensive mining) can't come soon enough for me.
| kragen wrote:
| As you see, even in a price spike, urea only costs US$1/kg.
| That really makes it hard to produce urea in the middle of
| the Sahara; shipping it to the ocean would cost more than
| the price it would fetch. Consequently there are lots of
| places where producing energy is economical if used for
| Bitcoin but not for fertilizer and other low-value-density
| products.
| pfdietz wrote:
| This is why Namibia is looking at making hydrogen (and
| presumably ammonia): the desert there comes right down to
| the ocean. There are desert sand dunes right at the
| shore.
| throwaway3b03 wrote:
| I don't think Ethereum PoS is ever coming anymore, or at
| least it will not displace the PoW version. It's been
| coming (TM) for a few years now.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I get this comment every time I post about it also. It's
| the only ammo they have left.
|
| The difficulty bomb and merge is set for June 2022. Could
| it be delayed? Sure I guess but Bitcoin has absolutely no
| plans to fix its energy consumption.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Ethereum PoS is live now through the beacon chain. Merge
| just hasn't happened yet.
|
| It's sharding that's probably never coming.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Why do you think sharding is never coming? Don't tell me
| that haha!
| nostrademons wrote:
| L2s like Polygon and Arbitrum are doing a decent job
| solving the scaling problem and don't require changes to
| the core protocol.
| pulsarmx wrote:
| > uses proof of stake- doesn't do energy intensive mining
|
| I have an honest question that I haven't seen answered
| anywhere, and I'm not smart enough to answer it for myself
| by reading papers and whatnot.
|
| Assume whatevercoin currently uses PoW and takes X energy
| to mine a single coin, but would take X/100 energy to mine
| it under PoS.
|
| What stops people from simply throwing the 99/100 leftover
| energy from X into more mining operations, rather than just
| being content with the one and the leftover energy?
|
| Or put another way, if mining a single coin suddenly costs
| 1/100 of what it used to, why would I not just mine 100
| coins now?
|
| It just all sounds to me like what happens when there's an
| increase in computational power/speed/capacity/whatever in
| PCs. When you can process a thing ten times as fast, you
| don't just do one thing ten times faster; you do ten things
| at once.
| jccooper wrote:
| Non proof-of-work "mining" typically requires another
| resource. Proof-of-stake rewards you based on your
| holdings, so additional mining compute power doesn't
| help.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Because it's not really an efficiency upgrade like you've
| envisioned.
|
| The current PoW system turns energy directly into miner
| rewards.
|
| A PoS system does not do that. You can't just throw more
| energy at the problem to get more rewards.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, because it's not like PoS is just making PoW more
| efficient. You have no way to turn that extra energy into
| more stake.
|
| It's like if I paid you previously for every strawberry
| you bring me, and now I pay you for how old you are.
| Previously, for 100 strawberries I gave you $20, and now
| for every 20 years you are old, I give you $20/hr. Now
| you need far fewer strawberries to make the same amount
| of money, but that doesn't mean you can now make more by
| giving me strawberries. You have no way of converting
| strawberries into age.
| Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote:
| Mining economics depend on the mining reward. It doesn't
| get bigger if more people mine. The rewards just get
| spread out over more/larger participants until profits
| are tiny via difficulty adjustments.
|
| The mining effort depends simply on the reward, and the
| reward is calibrated to the security needed. Bitcoin is
| highly secure, but the security model is essentially 1:1;
| if the network is secured with a billion dollars of
| mining effort, it will cost on the order of a billion to
| attack it. So it's expensive.
|
| PoS can have a better security model, maybe 1:100 against
| network attackers. So you can reduce mining rewards and
| maintain a given security level.
| iSnow wrote:
| I agree but this seems bigger than finding arbitrary hash
| values - after all, China shut down crypto mining months
| ago I think and yet they had to shut down a phosphate
| factory in December.
| SilasX wrote:
| I agree with your general point (that crypto mining does
| come at the cost of energy for other purposes) but I'm not
| sure that's a good example -- I thought the energy input to
| fertilizer plants was from all the oil they take in which
| is chemically necessary; the major input isn't electricity
| per se, so being near a hydro dam wouldn't help.
| xibalba wrote:
| Wouldn't a 270% increase indicate a huge demand spike?
| nwatson wrote:
| Goods whose supply has a natural upper limit in what's easily
| obtainable (given current methods and infra) and no easy
| substitutes in their use up the supply chain often have price
| spikes when (non-spiking) marginal demand suddenly bumps into
| that limit ... or else when there's a sudden limitation in
| the ability to deliver the usual supply of the good. Neither
| of these is a demand spike, per se.
| conjectures wrote:
| Depends what the cause is.
| colechristensen wrote:
| No it's a supply side problem, urea is synthesized from
| ammonia which is synthesized from methane and atmospheric
| nitrogen. Methane and in general fossil fuel prices spiked
| and brought fertilizer prices with it. There is probably also
| a covid labor component as well.
|
| The family farm is planting a lot less corn as a result.
| short12 wrote:
| The family farm is a thing of the past. They are called
| hobby farms
| randomdata wrote:
| Hobby farms generally are run by an individual. Family
| farms are run by families, and thus tend to be much
| larger to be able to support families.
| colechristensen wrote:
| My father farming on ~400 acres purchased from the
| government ~140 years ago isn't a hobby. The records for
| the deed have only my relatives after the Louisiana
| Purchase. There aren't a whole lot of family farmers left
| out there, but they do exist (regardless of large
| operations branding themselves as "family farms" because
| "I have a family!" and what others classify them as).
| rcpt wrote:
| How do I interpret this?
|
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/even-mega-farms-are-
| mos...
|
| Most farms are "family" owned but perhaps OP was trying
| to communicate that nowadays farm owners are rarely farm
| workers?
| colechristensen wrote:
| A very large proportion of farms of any size have a
| single owner or are split between e.g. brothers.
|
| A rather small proportion of farms are singly/family
| owned and have a majority of the work done by that
| family.
| fullstop wrote:
| If I remember correctly, sheep urine used to be used to
| clean particulate traps in large diesel engines. I'm not
| sure why things moved to synthetic, but if it was for cost
| reasons then sheep urine may be more cost effective than it
| used to be.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| It was never from urine. It was always chemically
| synthesized
| fullstop wrote:
| I work with the bus industry, so this sort of stuff is on
| my periphery. This is what I was thinking of: https://www
| .theguardian.com/news/2005/jun/10/transportintheu...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Or a price increase in inputs, or a reduction in supply.
|
| Most nitrogen fertiliser is supplied via natural gas
| formation (Haber-Bosch process). I'm not sure if urea is HB-
| formulated nitrogen or comes from other sources, but this
| wouldn't much matter as HB-formulated ammonia is near-exact
| substitute for urea and would follow similar pricing
| patterns.
|
| Reading at Wikipedia iforms me that:
|
| - Urea is CO2(NH2)2.
|
| - Production is from ammonia + carbon dioxide.
|
| Given that natural gas prices are presently spiking, my
| presumption would be that urea prices are following natural
| gas.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea
| okl wrote:
| Same with CO2 ->
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/22/why-is-the-...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-58626935
| lettergram wrote:
| CO2 also helps plants grow.
|
| We should increase the atmospheres CO2 and urea production.
| More food for all!
| beaconstudios wrote:
| there's really more than enough CO2 in the atmosphere right
| now. The plants aren't struggling for it.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Can you point to any research showing what the optimum
| level of co2 should be for plant growth?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Can you? You're presumably the one arguing, in the face
| of the majority of climate scientists, that more CO2 is
| actually a good thing.
|
| For what it's worth, no gardener or farmer is having to
| pump CO2 into the air because their plants are dying.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Your claim was "plants aren't struggling for it"
|
| I'm asking if you can back up that claim. I guess not.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Struggling as in dying. I've seen no evidence that plants
| are dying of lack of CO2. In my research into
| permaculture I've never seen any issues with plants
| lacking CO2 - primarily plants struggle for nitrogen,
| hence the use of fertiliser (or in the case of
| permaculture, other nitrogen fixing techniques like using
| bacteria or cycling legumes, or cool stuff like using
| aquaponics to recycle fish poo into fertiliser).
|
| Maybe they could grow even more successfully with some
| kind of CO2 biodome, I don't know - but my point was that
| lack of CO2 is not causing problems with plants growing,
| but it is causing problems with our biosphere slowly
| dying.
| kragen wrote:
| It depends on the plant. Most plants grow faster at
| higher levels than the current 400ppm, so CO2
| supplementation in greenhouses is a thing, which you can
| read about if you like. Some plants grow fastest at
| levels around 1000ppm, and I think for others it's closer
| to 10'000 ppm, at which level it starts to become toxic
| for the humans. Of course if Earth's atmosphere were
| 10'000 ppm CO2 we would see mass extinctions, major ocean
| acidification, etc.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Water helps people live. We should all be constantly
| drinking water. We will be so much more alive. Every living
| moment: drinking water.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Indeed. To be even more ridiculous: Being too cold kills
| people, therefore we should set ourselves on fire so we
| live forever.
|
| If someone wants to argue "more CO2 is good for plants",
| they really need to provide a number for what atmospheric
| concentration they think is optimal, and what the
| costs/benefits of reaching it are. Would increasing the
| concentration by 10% make food 10% cheaper, for example?
| What sort of effects on the Earth's climate are
| historically associated with CO2 levels that high?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| That's not ridiculous, that's literally ancient history
| ongoing. Those early human tribes that managed to keep a
| fire going forever are us, today. Still living
| theoretically forever, as long as the water and fire (and
| the amazing combination thereof, hot water) keep on
| going.
| beambot wrote:
| Related article from yesterday that specifically calls out
| urea: "Global farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut
| use, raising food security risks"
|
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-farmers-f...
| [deleted]
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Time for lazy/ignorant farmers to switch to cover cropping with
| rotational grazing, which is just a better system as long as
| you're not financially dependent on planting your entire
| acreage every growing season.
| Kletiomdm wrote:
| Sounds to me like reducing the overall production.
|
| What's the befit if fertilizer helps?
|
| That it looks more natural?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Tilling and fertilizing gives you a great yield today, but
| damages the long term fertility of the land, and pollutes
| nearby waterways. The best analogy is buying things on
| credit. You might feel rich at first, but when the debt
| comes due and you can't afford it bankruptcy is a bitch.
|
| It does require letting some land lie fallow to
| regeneration, so you need to devote more total land to
| agriculture, and it also requires fencing and for someone
| to go move the livestock to a new paddock every few days
| (though you save on tilling/herbicide application costs).
| On the plus side the unit cost of everything you produce is
| lower, and meat is typically much more profitable than
| vegetables so you've diversified.
| eloff wrote:
| I think there are real serious trade-offs here in income to
| the farmer. It's nothing about lazy or ignorance. Honestly to
| make a comment like that, add if you know more about their
| business than they do is both ignorant and arrogant - unless
| that really is your business and you know what you're talking
| about. But this feels like armchair commentary to me.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Looks like you're armchair voting without subject matter
| knowledge. Do some research on no-till rotational grazing
| systems for natural fertility.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| "Do some research?" Feh. Show us P&L statements for your
| choice of no-till rotational-grazing farm, or even this
| "research" is just a hobbyist diversion.
|
| Now myself, I like hobbyist diversions that involve
| growing food, but farmers don't farm because they want to
| have fun. They farm so they can make money. If they stop
| making money, or if they don't make enough, they have to
| go into some other line of work, and typically sell the
| farm to someone who does make money.
|
| And when you're _not_ just selling gourmet vegetables to
| HN hackers making $200k+ a year, you 're selling generic
| commodities like corn and grain and soy, where the
| competition is fierce.
|
| And you're selling it to a world where the poor have a
| hard time affording food as it is. If this can't compete
| with conventional fertilizer, then even if everyone
| switched, people would starve.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-
| profiles.poly...
|
| Joel is the best known example of informed, conscientious
| farming paying the bills, but certainly not the only one.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| I've never met a single successful farmer that is either lazy
| or ignorant. Most people would never last a full week working
| on a farm. As far as rotational grazing, if you don't think
| modern farmers understand nutritional cycles you are sadly
| misinformed.
| bazzert wrote:
| I'm curious if you are a farmer yourself or in some other way
| qualified for such a pejorative statement.
| imtringued wrote:
| They are not ignorant. They are following the discounting
| model imposed by "lenders".
| mellavora wrote:
| So while I'd agree that no-till/rotational farming is
| superior in many many ways, and while I would very much like
| to see its wide-scale implementation, I also note your final
| line:
|
| >as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your
| entire acreage every growing season.
|
| which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers,
| but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the
| current system.
|
| Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto,
| or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a
| certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of
| conditions (so all the fries look the same).
| pddpro wrote:
| I think that you shouldn't call other profession
| lazy/ignorant in general. People only tend to maximize their
| profits and minimize efforts, and this is natural. This, in
| no way, means that farmers are lazy and certainly not
| ignorant. A better rephrasing would be: "Time for farmers to
| switch ..."
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| News flash: I'm not talking about all farmers, I'm
| specifically talking about farmers who are either lazy or
| ignorant. Rotational grazing with cover crops is vastly
| superior to running fields constantly by juicing them with
| fertilizer and tilling. It does require knowledge, however,
| and the will to move livestock around regularly, which a
| lot of bad farmers lack.
| pddpro wrote:
| A general advice that I have found useful in life is that
| if you see something that requires a change (in
| organization, business process, lifestyle or just about
| anything that has humans as a component) that doesn't
| directly involve yourself, then the best way to point it
| out is never to start with the assumption that people are
| just "lazy/ignorant". This is hostile and will usually
| have a negative effect on the willingness of the
| concerned individual to change.
|
| Even in this case, the farmer who are farming on their
| own land are under no obligation to change their way of
| life or farming process. Even though we know that the
| methods they are using may be sub-optimal and a net-
| negative in the long run, we simply cannot make them
| change it, and certainly never by labelling them
| negative. We can make them see the benefits, or how it
| plays out in the long run and help them choose a better
| solution but ultimately, it's them doing the choosing.
|
| At the end, if something is really really required, then
| it must be the Governments making regulation. This is how
| it generally works (I'm not saying I like it).
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Let's try this: There are lazy/ignorant software
| engineers who write everything in a single file with no
| function because it's the easiest to write/initially run
| & test. This is a known terrible practice, but if you
| never have to deal with the code down the line, you
| wouldn't know this. There's nothing wrong with calling
| out the fact that these people are being lazy/ignorant.
|
| Can the bad farmers continue to farm debt (primarily)?
| Sure, but if they're doing it to themselves we shouldn't
| feel bad for them, or bail them out.
| pddpro wrote:
| No. If the code they write works for them, then they have
| done their job. People only realized that it was a bad
| practice once they found that the code was NOT doing
| their job (i.e. it was difficult to fix/debug when error
| occurred, it was immensely difficult to update, and it
| was nigh impossible to make sense of by your cohorts
| reading your code).
|
| People only do what a) They are taught in the first place
| (programming classes, reliable blogs etc.), b) Their work
| environment imposes on them (organizations having coding
| practices or standards), c) They, through some personal
| experiences, find out that it makes their job easier down
| the line, or d) It is the right thing to do.
|
| Expecting everyone to follow (d) is out of the question
| and in my experience all "good" work happens via (b) i.e.
| rules, regulations and standards that have been enforced.
| If some sub-optimal choice minimizes effort while
| maximizing rewards, then that is not sub-optimal, at
| least for the individual, even though it clearly could be
| a sub-optimal for the collective.
| [deleted]
| cal5k wrote:
| It's common for one farmer to plant and harvest thousands
| of acres pretty much by himself, at least in North
| America. Labour, particularly up in Canada, is often in
| short supply which makes moving livestock around
| impractical - and not all of them even keep livestock,
| because it's not profitable unless you're keeping
| thousands of head.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The conventional ag model where you have one farmer
| monocropping a thousand acres are the reason the #1 thing
| most farmers grow is debt. That requires expensive
| specialized equipment, and much heavier application of
| pesticides and fertilizers than a balanced system, so
| both your fixed and variable costs are high.
|
| If you want to see a profitable, productive mid sized
| farm, check out Polyface. Joel makes a good living while
| treating his land and animals well.
| toast0 wrote:
| If you're running multiple crops, don't you need
| specialized equipment for each? Making it a bigger
| investment in equipment, or more likely to not have the
| right equipment at the right time if you have to
| rent/borrow it?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That depends on the crop. Tree shakers and orchard/tree
| nut related equipment tends to be pretty standardized,
| and a lot of crops can share a small(-ish) common pool of
| tractor attachments, but if you choose your
| diversifications poorly you could be on the hook for some
| hefty equipment costs. Also, I would lean on cash crops
| where the SoTA is harvesting by migrant labor. There is
| definitely a knowledge/planning component to multi-
| cropping.
| randomdata wrote:
| Thing is that conventional farming, as you call it, and
| startups have a lot of in common. The goal is not to earn
| a tidy profit each year, but instead to build up massive
| capital for one huge payday when you get bought out. I
| suspect nobody really cares to see a profitable mid-sized
| farm as that kind of misses the appeal of farming. If you
| just want a steady income there are much better paying
| and less stressful jobs out there.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The interesting thing is that there are a lot of
| young(ish) people interested in farming, who really do
| want to run a profitable mid-sized farm. Most of these
| people just don't have the resources to buy into land, so
| most of the ones that do it have inherited derelict
| farms. A few of them do it with leased land, but that's
| risky as regenerative ag requires a time investment and
| getting the rug pulled out from under you can be a real
| bummer.
|
| I'd argue that our mega-ag model is a big part of the
| problem, it's given us stupidly cheap corn/soy while
| causing a lot of health and pollution problems, and
| basically ruining farming as an actual profession.
| randomdata wrote:
| Corn and soybeans are cheap because they're really easy
| to handle. The process is almost entirely automated at
| this point, allowing one person to do what would have
| required thousands of people in the past. Other areas of
| agriculture have not been so easy to remove the human
| element, requiring nearly as many people today as a
| century ago. With reduced scaling potential, you don't
| see the same cost reduction.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The problem is that the cost reduction is a bit of an
| illusion, since your fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide
| costs are going to go up over time as your land turns
| marginal, and since there are so many mega-farms running
| huge GPS controlled equipment you're never going to be
| cost competitive at a smaller scale for corn/soy, but you
| have to accept the market price, which leaves a razor
| thin margin (if any at all).
|
| The economics of farming are all fucked up, because our
| current farming practices have a lot of externalities
| that aren't priced into conventional produce, and
| producers who try to improve things to remove these
| externalities either have to take a loss versus the
| producers who say "fuck the future, fuck everyone who
| isn't me" or create new markets for their goods (which is
| where the whole farmer's market movement and the local
| food guilt thing come from).
| randomdata wrote:
| _> you 're never going to be cost competitive at a
| smaller scale for corn/soy, but you have to accept the
| market price, which leaves a razor thin margin (if any at
| all)._
|
| You don't really need to be able to compete if you aren't
| looking for a massive exit, though. My ~150 acres (most
| of it rented, no less) of corn/soy/wheat provides enough
| for me to live off of comfortably enough. For about a
| month's work a year, that's wonderful in my mind.
|
| It seems you're just getting caught up in the capital
| building frenzy that I talked about earlier. If you want
| to have the huge payday when you sell then you take on
| huge debt, grow to massive scale, use all of your income
| to service the debt and then you're sitting on a fortune
| at retirement. This is what attracts most people to
| farming, seemingly you included, which is fair.
|
| If you are content to stay small you can avoid the debt
| and what the big guy is giving to the bank you can pocket
| and live well off of. That's where I've settled and it
| works fine. I won't have the huge payday later, however.
| It's a tradeoff.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Good deal that you're able to make corn/soy work without
| being massively indebted. How much are you paying per
| acre? Also, I assume you're not selling to a coop or
| other large scale buyer?
| randomdata wrote:
| _> How much are you paying per acre?_
|
| For rent? $265-275/acre, depending on the landlord.
|
| _> Also, I assume you 're not selling to a coop or other
| large scale buyer?_
|
| No, that's where it all goes. There is a co-op grain
| elevator. All of my IP soybeans go there as they pay a
| nice little premium. Pretty much everything else,
| including crusher soys, is sold to the closer-to-home
| commercial grain elevator.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| How did you get into farming? Is the trade in your
| family? I'm surprised 150 acres is only a month's work a
| year.
| randomdata wrote:
| I'm the seventh generation to farm, or something like
| that. My parents ran a dairy operation when I was a kid
| (and still operate their own farm), so I did grow up in
| agriculture. But, being a tech nerd, I was always more
| attracted to the big field equipment.
|
| In 2007 I invested $12,000 in a small parcel of land I
| found to rent, rent for the equipment I needed to do the
| job (along with hiring some customer operators), and lost
| money doing it! But then 2008 happened, sending commodity
| prices through the roof. I was able to turn a small
| profit the following year and used the proceeds to start
| to buy some equipment, and slowly started to grow from
| there.
|
| So, some definite luck, an investment, and most
| importantly having family to answer questions. I think it
| would have been impossible for me without that wealth of
| knowledge to draw on.
| randomdata wrote:
| I plant cover crops, but have no interest in animals. I
| have a software job to worry about when I'm not on the
| land and it would be economically foolish to trade that
| for time spent in animal husbandry. Nobody seems to want
| to rent my cover crops to feed their animals either, so
| I'm guessing I'm not the only who doesn't see the
| economic value.
|
| Crops prices have priced in the increased fertilizer cost
| already, so it is what it is. We're used to it.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| thankfully the WEF has the solution, the plebes will just have
| to get used to eating bugs for their protein
|
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...
|
| Thesis -> Antithesis -> Synthesis
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| These are the guys that want us all to rent our stuff instead
| of buying it. "You will own nothing and you will be happy".
| Uh no.
|
| I'm not going to buy bug burgers nor rent my stuff.
|
| What we should do is more population control. As a first step
| stop incentives for having children (Inn the Netherlands you
| get more child benefit per child the more you have!). It's
| tough for the people that want big families but we can't
| continue growing humanity like this.
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| Ever eaten shrimp or crab?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| No I don't like seafood.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| The Netherlands has a fertility rate of less than 1.7
| births per woman[0]. The only reason its population is
| slightly increasing is that people are living longer and
| people want to move to the country. In fact, the population
| of Europe as a whole actually declined slightly last
| year.[1]
|
| So we shouldn't be worrying about "big families", we should
| be worried about voluntary self-extinction. What do you
| think the correct population should be for the Netherlands
| or Europe, and what do you suggest we do when we reach it?
| Obviously the current level of government benefits per
| child aren't enough to keep the population level stable.
|
| [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NLD/netherlands/f
| ertil...
|
| [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EUR/europe/popula
| tion-...
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I'm speaking about the world as a whole there. If the
| population of the Netherlands would decrease it would be
| good for the world as a whole. Of course any measures in
| asia would be far more powerful. But we have to set the
| example.
|
| We have to stop viewing world problems as national
| issues. Just like the climate problem, we can be 'green'
| because we externalise a lot of our carbon problems to
| other countries. That's not helpful at all. It's just
| smart bookkeeping to keep behaving as we are.
| nefitty wrote:
| People eat shrimp and crab and lobster. Bugs are arthropods
| as well. They seem to perform similar functions in different
| contexts, eg, they feed on the waste of other animals.
|
| The difference is historical and cultural inertia. Buttered
| cockroach could be the next big thing in Brooklyn.
| kragen wrote:
| Cockroaches smell terrible, but I suppose Stilton does too.
| Forge36 wrote:
| A similar spike can be seen in August 2008.
| vertis wrote:
| For those lacking context:
|
| Urea is a component of AdBlue which is used in modern diesel
| motors. There has been a shortage recently, hence the increase in
| price.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Urea is a critically important fertilizer. It's a 46-0-0 NPK
| fertilizer. Diesel Exhaust Fluid is a relatively minor usage
| compared to nitrogen fertilizer.
|
| https://www.ppclubricants.com/understanding-urea-pricing-and...
| okl wrote:
| > Urea is a component of AdBlue
|
| The other component being water.
| taneq wrote:
| This is fine.
|
| I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently.
|
| :S
| pimlottc wrote:
| Scanned the title as Uber, was very confused by the comments
| about pee...
| jfzoid wrote:
| remember, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet
| bell-cot wrote:
| I vaguely recall a recent article about teaching pigs or cows (on
| farms) to urinate and defecate in separate spots, to ease waste
| management. If the urine is valuable, and the farm is large
| enough...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Cow poop can be spread and pests eliminated by running birds
| through the enclosure after you rotate the cows out. If penned
| animals are using bedding, that bedding can also be directly
| composted into great fertilizer, no need to pee/poop in
| separate places.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Lumber shot up in price for a few months, and then it came back
| down. Unless this is sustained I think it is safe to attribute to
| a supply shock.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Yeah it's back up... I started planning a home renovation in
| January 2020 and I've been waiting on prices to come back down
| :(
|
| Starting to consider doing it myself as much as possible to
| recoup lumber costs with reduced labor costs.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It's a fossil fuel thing, part of synthesis, not just a supply
| shock (but probably also).
| missedthecue wrote:
| https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/commodities/lbs
|
| Lumber peaked at $1400, fell to $500, but now is approaching
| $1200 again.
| HFguy wrote:
| Lumber has now gone back up. Very interesting market.
| solarhoma wrote:
| Lumber has doubled in the last six weeks. Eight foot 2x4's are
| now $6 in the Midwest.
| fullstop wrote:
| It went from $4.50 to $6.50 over the course of a week on the
| east-ish coast. I only needed 20 of them, but it increased
| the cost of my shelving by $40.
| solarhoma wrote:
| I was planning to build a cabin out on my land this summer.
| But have shelved (pun intended) that idea with the costs.
| iso1631 wrote:
| But still down on where it was in May.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| Can it be extracted as part of waste water processing?
| [deleted]
| xwowsersx wrote:
| This is because European gas prices spiked.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| There's a local sewage treatment plant that's producing
| fertilizer[1] and selling it. Why couldn't this be done on a
| large scale?
|
| [1] https://www.cleanwatergrow.com/
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| All of our sewage waste treatment could provide two things
| methane and fertilizer. Most treatment plants are aerobic so
| they don't produce methane. But, every treatment plant could
| provide fertilizer if regulations in the area allowed it and
| people bought it.
|
| I would like to see a shift to anaerobic sewage treatment to
| produce methane for fuel everywhere that humans live. I have
| been thinking about what it would take to convert my septic
| tank to an anaerobic digester for many months. I would love to
| replace my propane supply with methane produced from my own
| shit. On a larger scale I believe that my remote community
| could similarly replace a large portion of the imported propane
| with natural gas if we had an anaerobic sewage treatment plant.
|
| https://www.veolia.com/anz/our-services/our-services/energy-...
|
| Edit: an EPA link on digester basics
|
| https://www.epa.gov/agstar/how-does-anaerobic-digestion-work
| pdpi wrote:
| These prices are just taking the piss.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Looks like September is when the buffer in the global supply
| chain ended. At that point people realize what they took for
| granted and were definitely willing to pay more when it meant
| shutting down their operation otherwise.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Eh more like you often apply fertilizer after harvest and thus
| buy it. There was also a coincident price increase in fossil
| fuels.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The cause of this is that natural gas prices have dramatically
| risen in much of the world. For example, in the UK, natural gas
| has gone up 5x.
|
| Urea is made from ammonia which is made from natural gas.
|
| The effect of this will mostly impact the agricultural sector,
| where it is the main component of many fertilisers.
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