Reythia
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Irrigating with sea water
This was pretty interesting, I thought:
CNN: Sowing the Seas
I'm still not a big fan of biofuels (it seems to me that they'll just extend an already existing problem), but the idea of irrigating dry regions with sea water is an intriguing one.
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10/9/2008, 4:15 pm
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QS2
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Re: Irrigating with sea water
Well the only good biofuels, are the ones that don't significantly affect our other agricultural practices. Otherwise we'll obviously just be shooting ourselves in the foot. having said all that, biofuel is just another kind of solar power really.
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10/10/2008, 1:26 pm
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Loud G
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Re: Irrigating with sea water
They are going to irrigate already alkyline saturated soils with...salt water? The soil is going to be white and shiny.
Now I don't doubt that they know what they are doing, but on the surface at least it sounds a little odd. There is a reason that throughout our rich long agricultural history we have not used seawater for irrigation.
Granted, I know he is using plants that are used to the high salinity, I just don't know if the project has the long term sustainability and benefits he says it has.
Also, I'm not really awake, and I've spent about 30 seconds thinking about this, SO...I could be just blubbering. 
--- Reading: Mistborn
Writing: Eriadhin
"Life is like a book, except it takes longer to get to the climax."
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10/10/2008, 1:34 pm
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QS2
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Re: Irrigating with sea water
I think they might be borrowing stuff from the mangrove forests, or some other similar kind of territory? Through our long farming history, I do not think we ever really found a food crop there, thought I could be wrong. But seemingly they did manage to find an oil crop in one of those habitats.
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10/10/2008, 6:42 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Irrigating with sea water
I got the feeling that the goal was less to grow food and more to grow odder crops, including that oil plant. Also, even if all you could grow was some sort of strange grass, think how much that would help prevent issues like soil run-off. Preventing run-off could help stabilize or strengthen plant species (and crops) already growing in the region.
quote:
QS2 wrote:
Well the only good biofuels, are the ones that don't significantly affect our other agricultural practices. Otherwise we'll obviously just be shooting ourselves in the foot. having said all that, biofuel is just another kind of solar power really.
I agree wholeheartedly that growing this oil plant for fuel would be better than growing, say, corn for fuel. Absolutely! But what I meant about "extending an existing problem" isn't a matter of the source of the fuel, but rather the side-effects of the fuel. Biofuels still produce CO2 and thus do not help with climate change at all. In fact, the belief that biofuels are "cleaner" and more "eco-friendly" than, say, natural gas, may actually lead to us producing MORE CO2 and destroying our planet worse. After all, if there's no feeling of environmental guilt associated with using biofuels, then people will tend to use more of them, which means more long-term climate change.
So while I'm not 100% against biofuels, I'm very much in favor of only using them as a stop-gap measure, until we can find a non-carbon-based substitute for most of our power needs.
--- -- YAR! |
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10/10/2008, 8:12 pm
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QS2
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Re: Irrigating with sea water
I assume you do know that biofuels also pull all the CO2 out of the atmosphere as well, right? Admittedly due to extra complexities, like with corn, where you'd need to clear away forests to get more corn growing area, you would end up with a net positive for many years still. However, I do not think that irrigating desert like areas need suffer from such problems and it might even be possible to induce some CO2 uptake by letting plant material work in to the soil. (This is a suggestion on removing some CO2 from the atmosphere with normal crop lands as well and can work because at the moment many of our soils are carbon poorer then they have historically)
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10/11/2008, 8:14 am
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Firlefanz
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Re: Irrigating with sea water
Bio-fuels can play an important role in technological change, even though I agree we need a better transport system than the current internal combustion engine, which is woefully inefficient.
However, they can be burned in stationary systems, creating heat plus electricity at the same time. They could probably also act as lubricants or replace other uses of petroleum. If they serve to create habitat plus some CO2 sequestration through the formation of humous, I'm all in favor of that, as well.
I have to admit I like the way this person has tested his ideas and found a way to improve the environment plus finding a useful oil-plant that was unknown until then.
--- - Firlefanz
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10/11/2008, 12:14 pm
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