Whenever you see schoolchildren marching against climate change, you will invariably see a sign saying, “you can’t eat oil”. Nothing demonstrates the ignorance with which we teach our children about the modern world than such signs.
As Howard Odum once commented that “industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy, now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.”
In 1789 the convict James Ruse planted the first “successful” wheat crop in Australia at Rose Hill (today Parramatta). James was a farm labourer in England and was transported to Australia for burglary. His planting grew less than 1 tonne of wheat per hectare.
Today, New South Wales farmers produce more than 2 tonnes of wheat per hectare. This doubling of productivity is almost all thanks to the use of coal, oil and gas since the industrial revolution.
The obvious use of fossil fuels includes the steel (made from coal) used in tractors and mills and the diesel (made from oil) to transport harvesters and other farm equipment.
Even more important, however, is the use of nitrogen-based fertilisers made from natural gas. Plants grow when sunlight (specifically the blue and red parts of the visible spectrum) activates the chlorophylls and carotenoids in plant cells. This is known as photosynthesis and hopefully the students are taught this at school.
But very few students would be taught that nitrogen is a key element in chlorophyll and the key to increasing productivity of photosynthesis is to increase the amount of nitrogen available.
Nitrogen is the most common element of the atmosphere, but it exists in a non-reactive state. To change that you must split the bond between the two nitrogen atoms.
At the turn of the 20th century a German chemist, Fritz Haber, discovered that under high temperatures, high pressures and using hydrogen you could split the nitrogen bond and create ammonia. The hydrogen was created from natural gas.
Ammonia could then be turned into fertilisers, the most widely used is urea. Nitrogen based fertilisers produce over half the world’s food. We do eat fossil fuels.
Until two years ago Australia produced urea at Incitec Pivot’s plant on Gibson Island in Brisbane. That plant shut because of high gas prices which made the production of urea here unviable. Australia now imports its urea from China and the Middle East.
For the first time since the early settlers, Australia can no longer feed itself. If our sea lanes are embargoed, we would struggle to maintain our farming production and our trucking fleet would be stranded because AdBlue is made from urea too.
Following the shutdown of the urea plant, Twiggy Forrest announced that he would look to restart urea production using “green” hydrogen instead of gas. In 2021, Twiggy said that “Green hydrogen gives Australia an opportunity to slash our emissions … It’s the practical, implementable solution to decarbonise and lower emissions, particularly in industries like fertiliser production.”
Unfortunately, like many of Twiggy’s hydrogen dreams it appears to all be hot air. Instead of progressing the green fertiliser plans, Incitec Pivot has announced they are selling the Gibson Island Plant to an Indonesian company. There has been no update on the green fertiliser plans for three years now.
The scariest thing about the whole net zero craziness is that it is pushed by people who have no idea how things are made. Modern life has become so comfortable that people just expect quinoa flakes to be always available in their local shop without any basic understanding of the enormous effort and technological know-how needed to get them there.
It was not that long ago that most of us would have had to farm the wheat not worry what type of grain was the most healthy to buy. Before the widespread use of fossil fuels, it took about 10 minutes of human labour to produce enough wheat for two loaves of bread. Most families had to work on farms just so they could eat.
Today it takes just two seconds of human labour to produce those two loaves of bread. Ironically, it is fossil fuels that give students the time to protest against fossil fuels. Maybe, they should rewrite their signs to say “Thanks fossil fuels for helping me protest against you.”
