Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Yeah... but with all their "fracking" around... we might not live much longer than "peak water".....

More interestingly is the recent shade oil findings by Linc Energy in the untapped Arckaringa Basin surrounding Coober Pedy. Deposit estimates range from 3.5 billion to 233 billion barrels of oil. This could equate to a possible $20 trillion dollars in reserves and see Australia transfer into a nation of oil export rather than import. Its very exciting and I think Ill buy some shares in Linc and whoever decides to fund this massive project.

I kind of want to run out of oil.
They say necessity is the mother of invention, heavy serious research into sustainable energy is exciting.

Why is oil used to make fertiliser anyway? Mother nature shows us that things grew for millions of years without it, why in the last 100 years has it become a necessity?

not so crazy

I agree

There's unfortunately stacks of the stuff left.

Hardly a new discovery
This article is from 2005
http://geology.com/usgs/oil-shale/australia-oil-shale.shtml

clearly shows Australia has heaps of it.


It doesnt solve the cheap oil dilemma
Photovoltaic has a better return on energy invested than Shale Oil.
EROEI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EROI_ ... _-_USA.svg

When you have regular oil coming out at 1 to 40 and shale oil is about 1 to 10
that makes it roughly 4x dearer or less profitable.
Dont think you will get much economic activity if you had to pay 400% more for fuel.
Bio feuls and alternative fuels slide through now as the they are only a small percentage of overall fuel and their price is absorbed as a small percentage of total,but as conventional oil starts to slow down and the alternatives become a larger percentage you will see their true value or lack there of

Even when it comes to biofuels we still have way to go before we can claim it's enviromentally friendly or sustainable, in Brasil biodisel is a plague, adding to GM monocropping and deforestation of the natural habitat, the worst of all....it mostly gets exported, over there the price for it is the same as diesel, therefore no real save, they sell most of it to US and SCANDINAVIA, where there is a high demand and they get more bucks for it.

WERDNA ++1

I think some regrettably very clever people realised that to subsidise energy use, is to leverage their countries'* potential.

The more the developed countries get ahead in this period of exploiting nature, the better (from a limited point of view).

There's only so much nature to go 'round, so if digging it up, cutting it down, or burning it gets you ahead, you'd be crazy not to take advantage if somebody else is going to in your stead.

One of the things I cant see an end to, is the problem that as an individual, we can see the advantage of being green, but as a person representing us in government, the imperative is always going to be keeping the nations head, not above water, but above their neighbour.

Defence means we cannot leave a natural resource un-exploited, where our neighbour has cut their's down.





*I'm not sure if that's the correct way to write that, but I mean the possesive 's of the plural countries. ie there are many countries I'm talking about

You joke but it is a pretty major concern with fracing. The fracing companies need water to make fracing work, and they mostly get it from the aquafer. In North Dakota this worries a lot of farmers because that is where they get the majority of their water from, and they work pretty diligently to conserve that resource. most people outside the industry tend to worry about aquafer contamination, and while it is a risk, the water use is a larger threat to the aquafers.



I don't, our modern lives are built around oil... It is an extremely good resource to use and necessary for many of our modern necessities.

Oil is necessary for fertilizer because there are 7+ billion people on this planet. The Green revolution happened in part because of oil based fertilizers. Without them we simply cannot grow enough food cheaply enough to feed everyone.

It's a finite resource, it's gunna run out... Or more correctly, it will become too expensive to be viable as a fuel/fertiliser source..

The green revolution was fine when fossil fuel was cheap, but it relies 100% on those cheap fossil fuel, and they just aint gunna be around... Still times change perhaps we'll go back to looking more at nature to help out...

Oh but food supplies? We grow more than enough food to feed the entire population, if it was distributed well and not wasted by discarding it or turning it into biofuels..

Number one crop in US is lawn... We grow so much food we waste most of our ag resources on landscaping.

It's pretty well distributed, the biggest problem is that it just isn't affordable to the lowest income people. Which is a bit ironic, as when it was more expensive many of the poorer countries were able to feed themselves. One example of this is Haiti, it used to be able to feed itself. Now cheap food imports from the US make farming there untenable, even for subsistence farming.

As for looking more to nature, we are already doing that. There is a guy in Australia who has introduced Management Intesive Rotational Grazing (MIRG), which somewhat emulates natural systems of grazing. In nature there is a balance of what gets eaten, so that types of plants aren't over foraged. MIRG emulates this to some extent by forcing the animals to graze on all available plant matter. This produces a beneficial assortment of grasses, an even distribution of manure (which fertilizes the grasses), and increases soil health. Similarily for planted crops farmers are moving to rotational planting again, and even intercropping which reduces weeds and pests, and improves soil health. There are even people who do both, and have been having extremely good results as indicated by the amount of topsoil they have created on their farms.

I doubt fertilizer will ever get too expensive to use, correct application of the correct fertilizer just increases yeilds too much to not use, even at multiples of today's fertilizer prices.

Cheap imports have nothing to do with subsistence farming, I don't really get you there. subsistence farmers farm to feed themselves and their family, if they can't afford imported grain then subsistence farming is the only thing they can do...

I have no doubt that our current fertiliser sources will be far too expensive to use, like I said, when they rely on a finite resource, you can't keep using them indefinitely, it's just impossible.. 100 years ago we used other things, we had different ways of growing. 100 years from now we will be doing things totally differently again.

Because even subsistence farmers have equipment cost that they have to offset, taxes, education cost for their children, etc... I'm not saying there are no farmers in Haiti, because there are still a lot of farmers there, but when your income for a good year might be $1000 (USD) it is not an economically viable occupation. I Know of a small school there, which is owned by a math teacher here (he's a Hatian who used to be a civil engineer there). His students are mostly farmers kids, he used to feed them breakfast and lunch. For almost all of those kids that was the only meals they got. He had to cut out meals this year due to lack of funding... This article probably explains the problems haitian farmers face in regards to food prices a lot better than I can: http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/01/ ... d-food-aid

And I have no doubt that current Fertilizer sources won't be too expensive to use, even 100 years from now. This is for a few reasons... In the US (and many parts of the world) Fertilizer use rates are dropping, though the rate of change is slowing as we approach "optimal." Secondly in the US and Russia (as well as quite a few other places) there is plenty of oil/natural gas (something like 100 years worth at todays energy consumption rates, for US supply and consumption), and really natural gas is the main source of nitrogen fertilizer, the others tend to come from salt lakes or mines. And that is not counting the 50% of electricity generated by coal, or the increasing generation from renewables, or increasing efficiency (both in production and usage). Thirdly Irrigation, fuel, equipment, and labor cost are a much larger percentage of the cost associated with farming than fertilizer usage is (though I admit I could be off on the equipment costs, it is more expensive for me but I don't have large equipment or large acerage). This is borne out by the reasons farmers have switched to no till farming in the US. Those reasons were not due to reducing their fertilizer use rates, but to reduce their energy use and irrigation costs. It's a lot cheaper to cut the ground cover than it is to till it up.

Lastly Oil is not a finite resource, new oil is being made all the time. Yes we are probably using it quicker than its production (I base that on the CO2 rise in the atmosphere), but if we use it all up we only have to wait like 500 million years and the we'll be able to find some more.

The Haiti thing? Yes as with many countries, perhaps the US needs to step back a little and let them pick themselves up to a greater extent. Sending subsidised foods as aid doesn't help in the long term, that old give a man a fish...... teach a man to fish...... saying..

Phosphorous and potassium can't be manufactured or produced, perhaps small amounts can be reclaimed and recycled at the moment. Current estimates for phosphorous are that it will be in serious trouble in 30-100 years, there are some other estimates saying that rock phosphates may last up to 200 years, take the average of those and you are looking at 100 years.

Yes of course markets will cause usage to drop, it has to because it becomes less viable, but this means that more marginal land like many areas farmed here in Australia become uneconomical to grow crops.. Most of Australia's grain production relies heavily on phosphates as our soils have naturally very low levels, then we export all of that elsewhere in the world..

As guess as with those discussions about crazy aquaponic contraptions that have never been built, we'll just have to wait and see what happens... Though I don;t know if I'm ready to wait 500 million years for some more oil....

I read an article many years ago about a Big Petrochemical company buying up the rights to "alternative energy technologies" as they became available, as well as "investing" in fledgling companies that were developing such technologies, but didn't have the funds to see their research through to fruition or expand on their ideas... Guess where the rights to all those technologies are today?... in a filing cabinet somewhere gathering dust... until the black gold runs out... so I'm not holding my breath on game changing new technologies being developed well before it does run out.

Over the years I've seen numerous tv reports about "ground breaking" new technologies that have been developed... and governments not wanting to know about them, or fund further research that would enable them to become "mainstream" or affordable to the general public... why is that do you think?

Firstly, there's the billions in royalties and taxes governments draw from the extraction/sale of fossil fuels... constant, reliable revenue streams... governments (smart ones at least) don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Secondly, a cynical person might also draw the conclusion that by looking after the best interests of these "golden egg laying" companies, poorly remunerated (compared to their corporate counterparts) politicians were not just keeping their governments books looking good, but may also be "feathering their own nests" (probably using shredded brown envelopes), or lining themselves up cushy corporate jobs when they leave politics... or am I being too cynical?