We all know, some resources once consumed are gone forever.  This applies most famously to fossil fuels, especially oil (coal is more abundant).   Mined metals are not quite in the same category as with some effort, they can be recycled, once the price gets high enough.

I will lead off with a story about phosphorus, essential for fertilizers.  The Times (London).

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/naturalresources/artic...

Standing between the world and starvation

Output of agricultural mineral may peak soon

By first light, a dirty haze has settled stubbornly in the mountain bowl of Jinzhong in northeast China, fed by endlessly roaring chemical plants. From below comes the incessant growl of heavy lorries, straining to race their precious loads out of the valley.

In all its toxic, grimy glory, this valley is what stands between 1.3 billion people and starvation, say the exhausted workers emerging from another shift in the country’s largest phosphorus mine.

It is also an asset in what some believe could become one of the greatest natural resource clashes of the century: the struggle to claim and husband the world’s phosphorus supplies as the human population approaches the 8 billion mark, expected in about 2025.

As matters stand, directors of the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative told The Times, this irreplaceable ingredient of all food is inefficiently used and recklessly wasted. Even in a good scenario, prices of the mineral, which have surged 30 per cent this year, could still be expected to keep rising sharply and place huge pressures on countries, such as India, that are almost 100 per cent reliant on phosphorus imports.

There is heated geological debate over when (and just how alarmingly) it might happen, but the spectre of “peak phosphorus” has been raised in academic research. Stuart White, of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the Sydney University of Technology, suggests that the heavy geographic concentration of global reserves — in Morocco and China — has generated a challenge that few are taking seriously enough.

This list does not include China itself. The Mao-era slogans and crumbling viaducts in the valley attest to Jinzhong’s history at the heart of China’s food policy planning. Along with many similar mines and processing plants in Guizhou, Jinzhong churns out the fertiliser ingredient without which China, and the world, would be in dire trouble.

But on top of the old infrastructure, a new sense of urgency dominates. China has realised that it can no longer afford to let more of this resource leave its shores and has gone a long way to ensuring that with 135 per cent export tariffs. The phosphate factory has been massively expanded, the mines run around the clock, tens of thousands of workers choke the village streets.

Behind that burst of energy is real anxiety in Beijing. As China’s economy grows, more demand for meat, dairy and cooking oil calls for even more fertiliser. And while China is thought to have total phosphorite reserves of 18 billion tonnes, the authorities admit that, after years of over-consumption, only about a tenth of those ores are of a high enough grade to be used directly. The element appeared in a recent report by the Ministry of Land and Resources on a list of “20 minerals that cannot meet the demand of Chinese economic development in 20 years to come”.

This has been used to justify a state-ordered consolidation. Mines with less capacity than 150,000 tonnes a year will be closed and the China Chemical Mining Association has proposed establishing a reserve mechanism to further constrain how what’s left is used.

In the meantime, there appears to be no let-up in the pace of activity in Jinzhong. An elderly woman, employed to sweep away any rock debris that falls from the trucks, says her job has become impossible. There used to be five-minute gaps between lorries; nowadays, they never stop.