John Phipps: Is the World On the Verge of Running Out of Phosphates?
USFR-John's World 2/28/2023
I was skimming through a science news website when photos of the Bou Craa mine and conveyor belt brought back a memory of touring a Moroccan phosphate mine and fertilizer plant with an ag group in 1988.
Taken from a satellite and an astronaut’s camera, they show the longest conveyor belts system in the world – about 60 miles through Western Sahara, before loading ships at the ocean. Incidentally the longest single conveyor is over 30 miles in Australia.
This manmade feature is visible from space with the naked eye, due to the while trail from phosphate dust. Western Sahara, which I thought was just a region name, is kind of a country. The UN classifies the area as a “non-self-governing territory." It’s a basically uninhabited desert whose emptiness prompted Morocco to help itself to the massive Bou Craa deposits, ignoring any disputed boundary lines.
Morocco is sitting on 75-85% of proven global phosphate reserves. Almost all experts basically agree on this reserve share, but recoverable supplies numbers are all over the place.
I discovered financial advisors, whose business is to encourage investors, tend to be more hysterical about future phosphate shortages and higher prices and profits than independent or government scientists. As a result, you can find projections of phosphate depletion running from 50 to 300 years. These numbers, however, are based on extraction using current technology.
Maybe there is no fracking surprise for phosphate, but I suspect concerns about peak phosphate are overblown. It reminds me of the oil reserve debates of the 90’s. Morocco is the largest rock phosphate exporter by far. Typically for developing countries, however, it is far from the largest phosphate fertilizer supplier.
The Bou Craa conveyor demonstrates the problem. It was built by European countries who are under pressure now to terminate maintenance contracts to punish Morocco for seizing the mine area from Western Sahara. This could shut down the conveyor. Regardless roughly one-sixth of global phosphate rock production is carried on this belt at 2000 tons per hour, so its shutdown would be noticed. Or maybe not.
The U.S. has consistently vetoed sanctioning the Moroccan annexation of Western Sahara at the UN because of the effect on fertilizer prices Like many other ag inputs, the small number of suppliers exert considerable pricing power regardless of actual supply numbers.
