To green the deserts, just add... seawater? - environment - 30 May 2013 -...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829182.100-to-green-the-desert...

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To green the deserts, just add... seawater?

30 May 2013 by Fred Pearce Magazine issue 2918. Subscribe and save For similar stories, visit the Food and Drink Topic Guide

Can desert be turned into fertile oases using nothing but seawater and sunshine? Yes, but at a price THE smell of ammonia wafts past me as I stand next to the world's largest urea and ammonia factory, clutching the gas mask I've been issued as a precaution. Gas flares glint through the desert haze. This is Mesaieed, a closed industrial city ringed by security cordons in the Gulf state of Qatar and the unlikely setting for a remarkable oasis. The heart of this oasis is a greenhouse full of cucumbers. But this is no ordinary greenhouse: it is delightfully cool inside, despite the desert heat. Surrounding it are a series of small garden plots growing desert plants, each walled in by what look like cardboard hedges. Their effect is startling. When I step downwind of a hedge, the air temperature instantly drops, as if I have set foot in front of a powerful air conditioner. And next to the plots is an array of mirrors for concentrating the power of the desert sun. The most remarkable thing about this little island of glass and greenery (see "A briny business: How to green the desert") is that there is no external supply of either water or electricity the plants are kept cool and watered using only sunlight and seawater. Some see this pilot project as the first step towards turning hundreds of square kilometres of parched coastal desert into fertile farms (See "When desert meets sea"). The head of the project, Norwegian biologist Joakim Hauge, has an even bigger dream. He wants to do nothing less than revegetate the desert. And the claim isn't as crazy as it might sound. The heart of this prototype is the greenhouse. Worldwide, greenhouses are an ever more popular way to grow high-value vegetables and flowers. In their controlled environment, it is possible to get much higher yields than outdoors, making up for the higher costs. But with their insatiable thirst for water and need for heating in winter, most greenhouses are not very green. This greenhouse is different. For starters, whereas greenhouses in temperate lands are mostly for keeping crops warm, here in Qatar the main task is keeping them cool. This, says Hauge as we tour the site, is done by evaporative cooling.

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To green the deserts, just add... seawater? - environment - 30 May 2013 -...

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At the front of the greenhouse, facing into the prevailing northwesterly wind, is a wall of honeycombed cardboard. It is kept constantly wet, cooling and moistening the air that enters the greenhouse. The clever part is that no precious fresh water is wasted on this task; instead, it is done with seawater. The owner of this industrial complex and one of the project's funders, the Qatar Fertiliser Company (QAFCO), has built a network of pipes to deliver seawater for cooling, and the greenhouse taps into that supply. Inside, in the cool created by the wet cardboard, I met Stephen Clarkson, who grew cucumbers in the UK for 40 years before heading to Qatar. "We plan to grow 1200 cucumbers per square metre per year in here," he says. So far it's going well Clarkson was about to harvest his second crop of baby cucumbers. Explore our interactive diagram: "A briny business: How to green the desert"

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The ultimate test has yet to come. During my visit, in March, temperatures outside were in the 30s, but in the low 20s in the greenhouse. In August, it can reach 50 C outside, but the greenhouse needs to stay below 30 C for crops to thrive. Hauge is confident that it will. As head of the rather grandly named Sahara Forest Project, the private Norwegian company that built and runs the prototype, he has a lot riding on its success. Keeping the greenhouse cool and humid reduces the plants' need for fresh water, but it still has to come from somewhere. The answer again is seawater. A concentrated solar power system provides the heat and electricity needed to desalinate seawater for irrigation, as well as power all the pumps, fans and other machinery. This is the purpose of the 300 square metres of parabolic mirrors, which track the sun and focus its rays onto a pipe containing oil. But the prototype is more than just a souped-up greenhouse. The aim is to use seawater to maximum effect, Virginia Corless, an astrophysicist recruited as the project's science manager, told me as we headed outside. "What we have is a cascade of uses for the seawater."

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Some goes straight into ponds for growing marine algae. Algae farms are in their infancy, says Patrick Brading, a marine biologist fresh from the University of Essex in the UK, who was preparing a batch of algae for release into a pond. "A lot of basic things are still unknown. I am trying to answer those questions, and it is brilliant to work here with a constant supply of brine to do open-air experiments." In theory, the algal ponds could provide anything from feedstock for pharmaceuticals and food supplements to food for livestock and farmed fish, Brading says. There are also plans to use seawater to grow a range of native salt-tolerant plants, which could be used for a similar range of purposes. The leftover brine from all these processes with a salt content of 10 to 15 per cent is used to wet the cardboard honeycombs around the small garden plots. "We call them evaporative hedges," Corless says. Their cooling effect allows desert plants and a few tough herbs and crops to grow where none would grow before. The plots are planted with a variety of grasses, as well as barley, rocket and medicinal plants such as aloe vera. The aim is ecosystem rehabilitation, not just desert farming. The long-term plan, she says, is to grow trees as well, which should eventually take over the cooling role of the cardboard hedges. Brine from the hedges, now with a salinity of around 30 per cent, is pumped to evaporation ponds to produce salt. This can be sold, and also avoids the need to dump extremely salty waste water back in the sea, which can harm marine life. None of these technologies is new, says Corless, but they have never been put together before. Well, not quite like this. The seawater greenhouse was actually devised two decades ago by British inventor Charlie Paton, who set aside a successful career devising special lighting effects for films and theatres to pursue a vision of growing crops in deserts. I have written about his work before, and before I left for Qatar I visited him at his lab-cum-home in east London. Paton has built several pilot greenhouses to test his ideas. They have won architectural and environmental prizes, but so far they have failed to catch on. Two including the first ever seawater greenhouse, built on Tenerife in 1992 have since been abandoned. Only one, built in Oman in 2004 on land vacated by farmers for want of fresh water, still produces crops and occasional research papers.

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To green the deserts, just add... seawater? - environment - 30 May 2013 -...

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Most recently, Paton's company helped design the Qatar project and was also involved in building a separate project, a trial seawater greenhouse in South Australia that is now selling tomatoes to supermarkets in Adelaide. But he disagreed with some of the changes made by his partners and severed his links with both projects last year. One change in particular concerned him. Paton came up with his idea during a holiday in the Moroccan desert, when the windows inside his bus steamed up during a rainstorm and left a towel he was using as a pillow soaking wet. His greenhouse design exploits this effect for desalination: cool seawater is pumped through a maze of pipes in a roof cavity, and fresh water condenses out of the air made humid by the seawater evaporators onto the outside of the pipes. The system can produce up to 20 litres of water a day per square metre of greenhouse more, says Paton proudly, than falls in a rainforest. But this elegant scheme failed to impress his partners. The Australians say that the condenser pipes were a nightmare because they sprang leaks. Both projects ditched them in favour of desalination using concentrated solar power, though the Qatar greenhouse does also collect moisture that condenses on the inside of the roof at night. Solar desalination is simply more efficient, Hauge told me as we watched the sun beat down on the mirrors.

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Costly cucumbers
But this high-tech approach does add to the considerable price tag. Back in Doha after our day in the desert, I went through some back-of-the-envelope sums with Hauge. The Qatari greenhouse cost $6 million to build, with the money coming from QAFCO and the Norwegian agrochemicals company Yara. Given the anticipated annual harvest of 720,000 cucumbers for 10 years, that would work out at a capital cost of almost a dollar per cucumber, even without overheads. That is spectacularly expensive: cucumbers were on sale in the Doha souks for a fifth of the price. Together with the fact that the pilot project was hurriedly constructed to showcase at the UN climate conference in Qatar last December, some might wonder if the project is just an expensive publicity exercise, I suggested to Hauge. No, he insisted. His partners were serious. Of course the cucumbers from the prototype are expensive, but it was built to carry out research, not to make money. "Economically, this kind of farming is only feasible at a large scale." And there are plans to go large in Jordan, which is one of the most waterstressed countries in the world and increasingly reliant on food imports. Later this year, the Sahara Forest Project hopes to start building a facility near the Red Sea 20 times larger than the Qatar pilot. If all goes well, the idea is to expand to 200 hectares, and eventually to 3000. In such a billion-dollar megaproject, the vision is that up to half of the area would be devoted to vegetating the desert (see diagram)with everything from dune grasses to native trees, such as the nitrogen-fixing thorn acacia (Acacia tortilis). Over time, as trees grow and the soil improves, these plots will need less assistance, allowing resources to be switched to other areas. "This is not just about sustainable agriculture. It is about restorative ecology," says Hauge. There is no doubt that it is possible to green desert plots that are actively cooled and irrigated, and that planting trees can have all kinds of benefits for the immediate vicinity, from preventing erosion to providing shelter from the sun and wind. What isn't clear is what will happen to the untouched land a little further away. Simple modelling done for the Sahara Forest Project in 2009 suggests such greening will not produce significantly more clouds or rainfall in the vicinity. However, downwind areas will be cooler and more humid, and the hope is that this altered microclimate will encourage more vegetation to grow naturally, with the effect spreading as positive feedbacks kick in. This is plausible, says Paul Valdes of the University of Bristol in the UK, a climate modeller who has studied why the Sahara abruptly flipped from a green state into desert around 8000 years ago. "But there is probably a threshold before the effect really starts having an impact," he says, and this threshold will vary from place to place. "This would not happen in all deserts." In other words, in some places greening a relatively small area might greatly boost natural vegetation in the surroundings, but in other places even greening a very large area would make no difference.

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Finding out what the threshold might be will require both fieldwork and detailed modelling. Complicating matters further is global warming, which is expected to make dry areas even drier. There are cheaper ways to revive desert ecosystems and turn back advancing deserts. In Niger, on the edge of the Sahara, simple measures such as protecting trees and digging ditches to catch rainwater have had a dramatic effect. Then again, these approaches won't work in drier regions, or deliver cash crops. In 20 years, Hauge thinks, seawater greenhouses could be sprouting everywhere from the Atacama desert of northern Chile to California and North Africa, where some coastal aquifers have already been pumped dry. In the Egyptian desert, the 19,000-square-kilometre Qattara depression could be exploited. It is around 100 kilometres from the coast, but could receive seawater by gravity as it is below sea level. Paton has a similar vision. He says the technology could save 20,000 hectares of greenhouses in Almeria in southern Spain, which supply fruit and vegetables to much of Europe but are now running out of underground fresh water. (Another possible solution is setting up closed greenhouses which recycle most of their water). And seawater greenhouses could link up with Desertec, the European plan to harvest solar energy in the Sahara desert. A small fraction of that energy could be kept in Africa to desalinate seawater for growing crops. Placing solar plants near greenhouses could have several advantages, such as helping protect them from wind and dust this is one of the aspects being investigated in Qatar. But will investors stump up the vast amounts needed to realise these dreams? Perhaps. The financial crisis has dented enthusiasm for grand projects, yet the bottom line has changed since Paton first came up with his idea. Food prices are soaring, world demand for greenhouse-grown fruit and vegetables is rising by 10 per cent a year, and more and more countries are running short of fresh water. The owner of the trial project in Australia, Sundrop Farms, this year got approval to build a 16-hectare, commercial-scale seawater greenhouse, with construction due to start in August. If it can turn a profit, heads will turn. Sundrop, though, is focusing on growing cash crops its facility has no desert plots or algae ponds. And perhaps that's telling. My trip left me unconvinced that I will ever see vast areas of the Sahara turn green as massed ranks of cardboard hedges advance across the sands. On the other hand, people have talked for decades about how desalination could be the solution to producing more crops at a time of growing water shortages. With the seawater greenhouse, there might at last be a practical way to do so. Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist based in London

From issue 2918 of New Scientist magazine, page 44-47. As a subscriber, you have unlimited access to our online archive. Why not browse past issues of New Scientist magazine?

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Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Subscribe now to comment, or link your account to an existing subscription. read all 14 comments Comments 1 | 2

Fri May 24 17:36:02 BST 2013 by Eric Kvaalen

"Simple modelling done for the Sahara Forest Project in 2009 suggests such greening will not produce significantly more clouds or rainfall in the vicinity. However, downwind areas will be cooler and more humid, and the hope is that this altered microclimate will encourage more vegetation to grow naturally, with the effect spreading as positive feedbacks kick in." But how can the vegetation grow when there is very little rain? In the experimental setup in Qatar they are irrigating the plants.

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Thu May 30 18:03:50 BST 2013 by Andrew Swallow

The real problem with the desalination system was using sea water as the coolant. Salt water is very corrosive. Use recycled fresh water for the cooling. A heat exchanger to cool the cooling water will be needed.

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Thu May 30 20:31:20 BST 2013 by Eric Kvaalen

But how would you cool the heat exchanger? You would need a cool fluid to do that. The air is not cool. You don't have cool water unless you produce it. So you're back to square one.

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Thu May 30 23:39:54 BST 2013 by David R Allen

Hasn't this design overcome the corrosive nature of sea water by using cardboard evaporators. They don't corrode. They're probably (or should be) made of recycle cardboard pulp. Cheap. Disposable. Where else in the fluid cycle is sea water used in a location where corrosion is an issue?

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Fri May 31 06:48:11 BST 2013 by Eric Kvaalen

David, Andrew was talking about the condenser for the desalination unit. That's not made of cardboard. There are alloys that can be used with seawater, so I suppose that's what they use.

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Fri May 31 04:05:45 BST 2013 by Dann

"But how can the vegetation grow when there is very little rain?"

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To green the deserts, just add... seawater? - environment - 30 May 2013 -...

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I assume they're talking about desert plants already adapted to arid environments. They can be more prone to damage by high temperatures than by lack of water. An increase in humidity might also encourage dew to form at certain times of the day. Many arid zone plants have structural adaptations that increase the likelihood of airborne moisture condensing on them.

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To Green The Deserts, Just Add. . . Seawater?

Mon May 27 16:48:12 BST 2013 by W G Treharne http://New Scientist

This is similar to the idea of using solar stills to desalinate seawater at the coast and then pumping the resulting water inland by using PV panels to drive pumps which I would advocate.

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Indoor Farming
Wed May 29 12:56:33 BST 2013 by Sandy Henderson

These developments seem to be inching towards what I have been advocating for years. Growth houses where the canopy is supported by a modest increase in internal atmospheric pressure can be built without any support framework ( unless it is required to support tall, fruit laden crops ). If the internal atmosphere is managed, with care diseases and pests can be excluded with obvious savings in pesticides. Key energy saving features would be use of heat stores both for cooling in the heat of the day and warmth at night. It should be possible, through use of multiple thin transparent layers mutually separated on the interior of the canopy to reduce the thermal conductivity without seriously reducing the transmission of those light frequencies required for plant growth. A managed internal atmosphere will not waste the water vapour produced by the plants, but collect that source of water using "coolness" stored in the heat stores beneath. Using hydroponic techniques and moveable modular plant pots, intercropping could maximise the annual output from these installations, and minimise the amount of water required to produce them. A further refinement might be thin photovoltaic cells embedded in the canopy and using light frequencies not useful to plants to provide an energy source and reduce the heat load of the system.

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Indoor Farming
Wed May 29 17:32:41 BST 2013 by Eric Kvaalen

That sounds like a good idea for Scotland, but in Qatar you need some sort of cooling, as they have done, in my opinion. I doubt that storing the coolness of the night would be enough.

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