{addthis off}The middle of a desert might be the last place on earth you'd expect to find a large-scale freshwater, renewable energy, and sustainable food production facility—but just wait and see. That's precisely where The Sahara Forest Project (SFP) plans to begin work on its pilot restorative growth facility sometime later this year.
The facility, dubbed the 'Demonstration Center', aims to provide a platform for international cooperation on innovation and development of the latest in renewable green technologies. The Demonstration Center will also finally provide researchers with the hands-on experience necessary to assess the efficacy of these technologies in extreme desert conditions.
The Sahara Forest Project is spearheaded by four contributing partners—Seawater Greenhouse Ltd., Exploration Architecture, Max Fordham Consulting Engineers, and The Bellona Foundation—each of which brings to the table a wealth of solution-oriented experience and knowledge concerning a wide variety of environmentally-challenging issues.
According to Frederic Hauge, founder and president of The Bellona Foundation, "The Sahara Forest Project is a holistic approach for creation of local jobs, food, water, and energy, utilizing relatively simple solutions mimicking design and principles from nature." Hauge's impressive résumé includes 20 years of expertise in providing technology-based sustainable solutions to ecological problems including climate change and the impact of fossil fuel consumption on the environment.
Confronting Major Challenges
The Sahara Forest Project recognizes a series of major environmental challenges that pose a serious threat to the natural world on both a short and long terms basis. These challenges include rising greenhouse gas emissions and subsequent increasing global temperatures; a massive shortage of freshwater for human consumption and for food and biomass production; a prolonged dependency on fossil fuels; a lack of sustainable food production to meet the demands of growing global populations; and an absence of renewable forms of biomass energy.
Although the list of challenges is daunting, SFP's partners are optimistic they can be effectively addressed. "The beauty of the Sahara Forest Project is that you can employ principles from nature, to reverse damage inflicted by unsustainable human usage and turn barren land into biologically productive land", says Michael Pawlyn, head of Exploration Architecture. Pawlyn's firm specializes in environmentally sustainable projects that draw inspiration from designs in nature.
Looking to Nature for the Answer
As Pawlyn notes, the galvanizing principle behind SFP is that the solutions to these challenges are to be found in nature itself. The idea is actually quite simple: a basic input-output formula that harnesses the power of abundant renewable energy sources such as seawater, biomass, carbon dioxide, and solar to produce a remunerative production of sustainable food, freshwater, biofuels, and electricity. The end result is a self-sufficient restorative growth system that offers environmentally-sound living conditions for generations to come.
One of the CO2-free technologies central to the realization of SFP's upcoming project is concentrated solar power (CSP). This cutting-edge renewable energy system utilizes a network of mirrors and tracking systems to focus concentrated amounts of sunlight onto water pipes, creating massive quantities of superheated steam to operate conventional energy producing devices such as steam turbines.
A number of already-existing power stations have demonstrated the capability of CSP technologies. The PS20 solar power tower in Spain is a 531-foot tall structure made up of over 1200 heliostats, or sunlight collectors, and is capable of generating 20 megawatts of electricity. That is enough energy to power 10,000 homes and prevents the equivalent of approximately 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere.
Seawater greenhouses are also of major importance to the program as they are a simple, relatively inexpensive method of generating a vital source of freshwater amid some the planet's most arid regions. Thanks to the expertise of Charles Paton, founder of Seawater Greenhouse Ltd., this technology has already been successfully employed in projects around the globe, including Oman, Abu Dhabi, and Tenerife.
These greenhouses mirror nature's perpetual precipitation-evaporation-condensation cycle that has been a means of freshwater production for billions of years. Under controlled conditions, hot desert air is initially sucked through a seawater filter, which removes environmental impurities such as dust, pollen, and insects. In this stage of the process, the air is also cooled and humidified, thus creating optimal growing conditions for the crops inside the greenhouse.
The dampened air then passes to a section of the greenhouse where it comes into contact with pipes filled with high temperature seawater. The pipes have been naturally heated using the facilities CSP technologies. As the air's temperature increases, it reaches its saturation point and is then cooled using cold seawater. The drastic contrast in temperatures causes condensation and subsequent desalinization, producing freshwater, which is then collected and made available for a variety of essential uses.
Biomass production is a third major technology that provides an abundant source of renewable energy for SFP's research facility. Biomass energy is typically derived from wood, waste, or alcohol-based fuels. SFP, however, relies on different species of algae can be grown in shallow seawater pools known as photobioreactors. The lipid-rich algae can be harvested on the spot and converted into a inavaluable resource to meet the facilities energy needs.
In fact, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory has shown that comparison to standard biomass energy sources, algae can generate up to 30 times more oil per acre, significantly reducing dependency of fossil fuels to meet rising energy needs.
Engaging the Local Community
The Sahara Forest Project is currently surveying desert regions in Australia, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa as possible sites for its much anticipated testing facility. If the Demonstration Center proves to be effective, it could pave the way for a series of large-scale projects around the globe that could revolutionize the global perception of the importance of sustainable living. Such projects would create thousands of green collar job opportunities and would require the intimate collaboration of local communities.
Bellona's Hauge recognizes the project's potential for assisting some of the world's most impoverished communities. "Through the Sahara Forest Project, poor countries in the south can produce, and in time perhaps export, their own clean energy rather than importing dirty fossil-fuel energy", says Hauge.
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