Fertiliser discussion enriches mining conference
- 23 December 2024
“Food security is global security,” the Resourcing Tomorrow 2024 conference in London heard. Meaning certain commodities should get top billing on government critical minerals lists and at most mining conferences.
But they generally don’t.
“In the mining industry phosphate and potash often go unnoticed … [but] mineral fertilisers have enabled billions of people to live on this planet,” founder and head of Washington, DC-based The Jupe Group, Rita Jupe, said at the conference.
Resourcing Tomorrow 2024 aimed to get more diverse voices under one roof to probe crucial issues and trends affecting the future of the global mining industry. A fertiliser-mineral sector panel addressing the impact of geopolitical and technological developments on the US$200 billion-a-year market got a big tick from representatives of the sector.
“I do want to thank [the organiser] for bringing this topic to the conference because [we’ve heard a lot about] the energy transition and the critical mineral impact on making that transition and food security is the other crisis in the world,” said Nutrien senior executive Noralee Bradley, a corporate lawyer who spent most of her 30-year career with legal firms working for Canadian energy companies.
International Fertilizer Association CEO Alzbeta Klein echoed the words of Microsoft founder Bill Gates when she said a world without any kind of mineral fertiliser was “a world of hunger”.
The chemicals boost crop yields while maintaining soil productivity, theoretically at least reducing the land area needed for grain and oil seed farming.
Mining the minerals responsibly and working towards “circularity and other aspects of sustainability is absolutely critical for the future of the world”, Klein said.
Sarah Fedorchuk, VP government and public affairs at The Mosaic Company, and Dr Jana Plananska, advisor to Norway’s Norge Mining, rounded out the Resourcing Tomorrow panel.
US potash and phosphate heavyweight Mosaic and the much bigger Nutrien are investing heavily in technology to improve mining efficiency and safety, and on the customer side of the fence to advance precision agriculture.
Norge Mining is a minnow looking for funding to develop a large magmatic rock deposit which could yield significant quantities of phosphate, vanadium and titanium. It wants to build an autonomous, low-carbon mine from day one, while its major North American peers are moving towards these goals.
“By 2050 it's estimated that there’ll be about 10 billion of us. That’s about 30 or 40% increase, depending on how you look at it,” Klein said.
“To feed the world we have to grow food.
“You can do it more intensively. You can get more food out of the same acre. Or you can do it more expansively. You can convert more land into production.
“Many of you know that, given the constraints of land available for agriculture and given the need for biodiversity, we cannot really convert that much more land into agricultural production.
“So what is the opportunity? The opportunity is to take the acre of land that we already have and produce more on that acre than you produce today.”
Klein said two other global security “levers” were waste reduction – the world wasted about 30% of food produced – and diet.
“If we eat plants we have a very different footprint on land than if we eat animals, because the ratio for beef to plant is about seven to one. So for every pound or kilogram of beef you need about seven pounds or kilos of grains,” she said.
“For chicken it's about three; for fish it’s about two.
“So depending on the diet we need more or less grains and oil seeds in the world.
“We have today between seven and 800 million people who are acutely short on food. This is not talking about quality of calories and what they eat. This is just people not having enough to eat.
“And you know what happens when people don't have enough to eat? They move, they protest, they do all kinds of things that the governments in western Europe, North America and elsewhere do not want them to do.
“Food security is global security and that’s why this is such an important topic for all of us to consider.”
Klein said fertiliser supply chains had shown remarkable resilience in the past few years of conflicts and trade restrictions, though significant price volatility had been evident and the period highlighted the world’s dependence on limited fertiliser supply channels. Wild price fluctuations could become more problematic.
“Despite all the disruptions we have seen the trade flow readjusted,” she said.
“That gives me hope that we have, fundamentally, an industry that knows how to adjust to whatever comes their way.
“When I look at what's coming [including potential US tariffs] I do have hope that we will rearrange [supply]. But it will not be without an impact on pricing.
“The way the world is arranged, geopolitics plays a huge role.
“All of us eat based on production of agri-commodities out of six countries in the world. Six countries produce most of the calories we eat … Argentina, Brazil, United States, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, more or less ... A little bit of Australia.
“Unfortunately the fertiliser is not where we grow food. The fertiliser happens to be in Russia and Belarus, about 25% of global fertilisers, but not in Brazil or Argentina. That’s why you have this huge trade flow that we have to cater to and that's why geopolitics is so essential, because the food is not grown where we have nutrients for it.”
The conference heard new supply was emerging in countries such as Laos, Brazil and, maybe soon, Norway.
What will the fertiliser mineral industry look like in a decade?
The panel suggested the view ahead was, literally, a moving feast.
“We have really accelerated our capabilities in autonomous mining and we just crossed a threshold in November [2024] of 25 million tonnes mined autonomously,” said Bradley.
“A digital mine landscape helps us develop more efficient ways of getting more out of the ore, faster, more efficiently, safer, because we don't have humans in the most dangerous part of the mine.
“We’re going to be at 50% of autonomous mining of our potash by 2026.”
Fedorchuk said: “We’re now in the biological space … where we’re pairing our traditional fertilisers with biologicals and selling those to farmers and it’s making the plants much more efficient in their fertiliser use.
“I think focusing on complete soil health rather just than just the fertilisers that we produce is a really interesting place where we’re going.
“And [also] using all of our byproducts from mining. In potash there’s opportunities to extract magnesium during the potash production process. And then for phosphate, in Brazil, we actually sell every tonne of phosphogypsum that we create in our process. In the United States we're not able to do that yet because of old regulations so we're looking at different research and pilot projects to be able to reuse our phosphogypsum because for every tonne of phosphate we use we create six tonnes of phosphogypsum … [which] is something that’s expensive and inefficient to manage.
“So long term I think that's where the industry is going.”
Klein said the IFA was advocating for universal re-use of phosphogypsum under a broader sustainability banner.
“In my view the future of fertiliser is going to be [around its use as] a service,” she said.
“It’s going to be a service which is precisely tailored to the soil a farmer has, with a precise nutritional content that they have in a soil, and with a precise recipe of what needs to go into that soil.
“And this is not too far-fetched.
“Precision agriculture is already well developed in many parts of the world and I think using these very precious commodities wisely and well is going to be the new world order.”
