A new international report identifies Fossil Fuel fertilisers as an important growth area for coal and gas sectors as part of the petrochemical industry. Plastics and Nitrogen fertilisers are both products of fossil fuels that continue to lock us in to systemic fossil fuel consumption.
Fossil fertilisers create greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of production to their use in industrial agriculture. They lock our food system productivity into continued greenhouse gas emissions.
Coal or Gas are major sources for nitrogen fertiliser, turning methane into Ammonia through steam reformation, and then into Urea and water.
Here in Victoria the recently published Victorian Greenhouse Gas emissions report to 2020 highlighted the increased Urea use, while this detail was buried very deeply in the report and few have commented on the massive expansion of Urea use in Victorian agriculture over the last thirty years. (See lead graph for Victoria Urea application.)
"The total area of crop cultivation almost doubled, from 1.8 to 3.5 million hectares between 1990 and 2020, while the application of fertilisers increased from just under 50,000 to 328,000 tonnes of nitrogen (an increase of 561%) over this period. This also contributed to a significant increase in urea application emissions which grew nearly seven-fold between 1990 and 2020 (Figure 40), with particularly strong growth in the last decade (DCCEEW 2022a)." said the Victoria report.
