5 ms·
We don't really have the infrastructure in place for doing that at the necessary scale, so it would be so much more expensive as to cause food prices to skyrock
by bendmorris 14y ago
We don't really have the infrastructure in place for doing that at the necessary scale, so it would be so much more expensive as to cause food prices to skyrocket. I'm sure that as supplies get lower more research will be done on recycling phosphate efficiently, though.
- Turing_Machine 14y agoYou don't need a lot of infrastructure. Krill nets are pretty low-tech. Also, it's not like we're going to wake up one morning and all the phosphate rock is gone (which is the usual unstated assumption with "peak" this or that). The price will go up gradually until the point where alternative sources become more economic.
- Turing_Machine 14y agoFor that matter, you could probably create engineered organisms that do a better job of extracting the phosphate from seawater. Animal kidneys are pretty good at this already. Before we were able to process phosphate rock on an industrial scale, animal waste was the primary source of agricultural phosphate and nitrate. There was a thriving industry in mining bird droppings (guano) from various islands all through the 19th century. The birds would eat the sea life, concentrate the minerals, and deposit them on land. There's no reason we couldn't cut out the middle man (or middle bird, in this case).