Metaspective

I was totally blown away when I first heard about this. I was reading “A Thousand Barrels a Second” by Peter Tertzakian and he pointed to the fact that in its natural state, the planet can only produce enough food to sustain a fraction of the current global population. Tertzakian  mentioned that the only reason why we have such a large global population now is because we learned to make fertilizer from hydrocarbons such as oil and natural gas.

Years later, I decided to dive deeper into that specific issue. I wanted to know exactly how our use of hydrocarbons can inflate our population to beyond the planet’s natural capacity.
Presented here is I was able to piece together, starting with the introduction of three elements.

Everything starts with the fact that plants need nitrogen. But dang it, they can’t get it from N₂ molecules because those molecules are too stable for plants to break down which is too bad because that’s what makes up 78% of the air.But all is not lost because plants CAN get nitrogen from nitrates and ammonia. These two molecules are made available through a natural process called Nitrogen Fixation in which bacteria converts unusable (N₂) molecules from the air, water and earth into ammonia. There is also another natural process called Organic Decomposition where nitrogen that is already in biological compounds like protein and DNA is converted into ammonia AND nitrates.

But these two processes have their limits. Nitrogen Fixation, which effectively moves nitrogen from the atmospheric reservoir to the biological reservoir, is very slow and limited. And organic decomposition is basically just recycling nitrogen that’s already in the biological reservoir is limited to what is already there. This is why agriculture has historically been nitrogen-constrained despite the abundance of nitrogen all around us. It’s matter of what kind of molecule the nitrogen is in.

For thousands of years, farmers have managed organic decomposition (without calling it that) by composting and allowing fields to fallow, but since that process can only recycle the nitrogen that is already there, it effectively limits the quantity (and quality) of food they can grow. Not only that but even the recycling can’t stop the soil from eventually losing its nitrogen through leaching and harvesting.Finding natural deposits of nitrates became an industry in itself. An industry so important that countries are willing to go to war over it. Such deposits include guano… droppings from bats and seabirds. Those piles of poop, rich in nitrates were important enough for the United States to pass a law in 1856, called the Guano Islands Act, that allow U.S. citizens to claim islands with large deposits of guano and empowers the president to use the military to defend those claim, if necessary.
Still, it’s estimated that all natural sources including nitrogen fixation, organic decomposition and nitrate deposits may only support 2-3 billion people at most. But then came perhaps the most influential invention of the 20th century… The Haber-Bosch process.

The Haber-Bosch process effectively unlocks nitrogen from stable N₂ molecules and makes it available to plants by transferring it to ammonia molecules (NH₃).
This is done by combining the N₂ molecules with H₂ molecules found in hydrocarbons like natural gas, oil or coal.By products of the process are carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water vapor (H₂O).