Liebig’s Law of the Minimum originally applied to plants, which require 21 nutrients — if any of them are missing the plant won’t grow to it’s full potential, or not be able to grow at all.  It’s similar to the old aphorism “for want of a nail a kingdom was lost”.  World-wide, agriculture depends on natural gas based fertilizers 5.5 billion people are alive now because they’ve quintupled agricultural production.

Yet in most of the world, we’re running on empty with natural gas, despite the much touted shale gas revolution.

Shale gas production is down due to drought, because producing natural gas this way requires enormous amounts of water, 45 to 50 million sof gallons per site to crack open the shale and release the trapped natural gas.  Since the shale industry is so secretive, it could be even more than that amount of water.