Growing Biofuel in Saltwater: Making New Cropland

Carl Hodges is a 71 year old Atmospheric Physicist. He believes in solving problems, not whining about them. As shown in the photo above, Hodges is attempting to prove that Earth's humans can grow more biofuel than they had imagined--in saltwater! No need to use arable cropland, or for "stealing food out of hungry third world mouths" [according to some whiners].

Hodges' knack for making things grow in odd environments has been on display at the Land Pavilion in the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World in Florida and the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona.

Here in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, he's thinking much bigger....He wants to channel the ocean into man-made "rivers" to nourish commercial aquaculture operations, mangrove forests and crops that produce food and fuel. This greening of desert coastlines, he said, could add millions of acres of productive farmland ....Hodges has already built such a farm in Africa. Political upheaval there shut much of it down in 2003. That's why he's determined to construct a showcase project in North America to demonstrate what's possible....That's where salicornia comes in.

A so-called halophyte, or salt-loving plant, the briny succulent thrives in hellish heat and pitiful soil on little more than a regular dousing of ocean water. Several countries are experimenting with salicornia and other saltwater-tolerant species as sources of food. Known in some restaurants as sea asparagus, salicornia can be eaten fresh or steamed, squeezed into cooking oil or ground into high-protein meal.

Hodges, who now heads the nonprofit Seawater Foundation, plugged salicornia for years as the plant to help end world hunger. Do-gooders applauded. The private sector yawned....Then oil prices exploded. Hodges saw his shot to lift his fleshy, leafless shrub from obscurity.

That's because salicornia has another nifty quality: It can be converted into biofuel. And, unlike grain-based ethanol, it doesn't need rain or prime farmland, and it doesn't distort global food markets. NASA has estimated that halophytes planted over an area the size of the Sahara Desert could supply more than 90% of the world's energy needs. __More at LAT_via_CarlBrannen_via_GrahamHancock

Although it is not likely that sea levels will actually rise significantly in the next hundred years or so, it is quite true that industry cannot run without fuel. Given the tendency of the current US Congress to promote political peak oil energy shortages, it is important to pursue any source of useful liquid fuel possible.

Seawater can grow abundant single cell algae, or multi-cell seaweed, for conversion to biofuels. But if entire seawater plantations of land plants can also be grown, that opens up the process not only to coastal areas but to seasteads. Remember: the genetic engineering of plants is creating varieties of crops and trees that thrive in briny or salty water and soil.

You have to admire folks who single-mindedly pursue solutions to important problems. Quite unlike the whiners who populate most university department faculties--especially the social sciences and liberal arts.

More on Salicornia:

Salicornia provides value-added products: its seeds yield edible oil that is low in cholesterol and contains antioxidants; its succulent tips are used widely in Europe and USA in green salad dressings; the plant itself can be excellent fodder.

Research has revealed the potential of its biomass, too. The green biomass can be used as fodder for cattle. This fodder has increased milk yield by 15 per cent in addition to making it protein rich. The dry biomass is used to prepare particleboard (for use in furniture).

CO2 and Trees: City Trees vs. Country Trees

Photosynthetic plants tend to react a certain way toward CO2--the more CO2, the faster they grow. It sounds like a feedback, to me. Looking at the country/city tree cousins:

“In the country, the trees were about up to my waist. In the city, they were almost over my head — it's really dramatic,” said Jillian W. Gregg, the study's lead author.

“No matter what soil I grew them in they always grew twice as large in New York City,” said Gregg, who said she was initially perplexed by the unexpected results. ____Source___via _M4GW__H/T_TomNelson

Another look at trees grown in different concentrations of CO2:

In May of 1999, four oak (Quercus ellipsoidalis) acorns were planted in each of 24 plots in each of six experimental FACE rings, three of which were maintained at an elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration of 550 ppm and three of which were maintained at the air's ambient CO2 concentration of 360 ppm. Half of the plots in each ring were weeded during the first three summers of the experiment; and in the summer of 2000, half of the plots received regular watering while the other half received no water during a 3.5-week period.

...In the words of the six Minnesota researchers, "the results showed that under hot and dry conditions, elevated CO2 can act like a nurse plant for tree seedlings growing in bare and unshaded areas, increasing seedling survival and growth, and thereby expanding the establishment window for trees encroaching into a grassland environment." In the specific situation investigated in their experiment, for example, they concluded that "increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 may be able to kick-start oak establishment into Cedar Creek's old fields."___CO2 Science_via_M4GW

CO2 is the gaseous fuel that feeds the ecosystem. Doubling atmospheric CO2 is less of a threat to the planet than halving atmospheric CO2 would be. The Biosphere is expandable, as long as there is enough sunlight and CO2. What is the optimal CO2 for earth? It depends. How much life do you want?

Teaching Plants to Grow For Energy, Food, Drugs, and More

Humans domesticated many plants thousands of years ago, during the first agricultural revolution. Now humans are using genetic engineering, and other techniques to coax plants to grow in ways that humans want.

"This is a major step in understanding auxin transport, which is vital to every aspect of plant growth and development," said Angus Murphy, the professor of horticulture and landscape architecture at Purdue University who led the team.

Murphy said results of the study, published last month in The Plant Cell, have already been applied and have been used to create plants with larger root structures.

"This study gives us another important tool in our toolbox," he said. "Before, we would modify plants one gene at a time, but now we realize why this approach has not worked very well. We now see that there are two elements of control to keep in mind, just as amplified sound is best controlled by modulating gain from the microphone and amplifier output to the speakers."

....The research also should have important implications in horticulture. For example, the team's findings might be used to produce ornamentals that do not need pruning or that have larger root systems to support more vegetation, he said. Such plants would require less labor, energy and - with larger roots - less fertilizer, Murphy said.

The team's findings could have applications in food crops, but Murphy said he hasn't pursued such work due to some concerns over eating genetically modified foods.

"We're focusing on biofuels and ornamentals because everybody loves to drive their car, and people don't eat their flowers," he said.

Source

Scientists are learning how plants adjust to salt, drought, and other stresses. And although advances in plant science does not receive the news coverage that stem cells and human gene therapy receive, in the long run what we can coax plants to do may determine what we can accomplish on Earth, and how far we can expand into the solar system and beyond.

Global Warming Being Berry Gude to Me, Say da Forest to da Tree

The earth has been getting greener over the past twenty years, with forests growing larger and thicker over most of the globe. A joint Nasa-DOE study concludes that the past twenty years have been good for a greening earth. The illustration above from the report shows greening areas in green, and the few browning areas in brown.

The globally comprehensive, multi-discipline study appears in this week's Science magazine. The article states climate changes have provided extra doses of water, heat and sunlight in areas where one or more of those ingredients may have been lacking. Plants flourished in places where climatic conditions previously limited growth.

"Our study proposes climatic changes as the leading cause for the increases in plant growth over the last two decades, with lesser contribution from carbon dioxide fertilization and forest re-growth," said Ramakrishna Nemani, the study's lead author from the University of Montana, Missoula, Mont.

From 1980 to 2000, changes to the global environment have included two of the warmest decades in the instrumental record; three intense El Niño events in 1982-83, 1987-88 and 1997-98; changes in tropical cloudiness and monsoon dynamics; and a 9.3 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), which in turn affects man-made influences on climate. All these changes impact plant growth.

Earlier studies by Ranga Myneni, Boston University (BU), and Compton Tucker, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Md., also co-authors of the study, reported increased growing seasons and woody biomass in northern high-latitude forests.

....Nemani and colleagues constructed a global map of the Net Primary Production (NPP) of plants from climate and satellite data of vegetation greenness and solar radiation absorption. NPP is the difference between the CO2 absorbed by plants during photosynthesis, and CO2 lost by plants during respiration. NPP is the foundation for food, fiber and fuel derived from plants, without which life on Earth could not exist. Humans appropriate approximately 50 percent of global NPP.

NPP globally increased on average by six percent from 1982 to 1999. Ecosystems in tropical zones and in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere accounted for 80 percent of the increase. NPP increased significantly over 25 percent of the global vegetated area, but decreased over seven percent of the area; illustrating how plants respond differently depending on regional climatic conditions.
Climatic changes, over approximately the past 20 years, tended to be in the direction of easing climatic limits to plant growth. In general, in areas where temperatures restricted plant growth, it became warmer; where sunlight was needed, clouds dissipated; and where it was too dry, it rained more. In the Amazon, plant growth was limited by sun blocking cloud cover, but the skies have become less cloudy. In India, where a billion people depend on rain, the monsoon was more dependable in the 1990s than in the 1980s.

Go to the source for more fascinating illustrations, and some great animations. The illustration just above the previous paragraph illustrates percent yearly change in vegetation production, by the color code provided. Hat tip to Fat Knowledge blog.

Charles Keeling, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif., cautions no one knows whether these positive impacts are due to short-term climate cycles, or longer-term global climate changes. Actually, no one really knows much of anything about the climate, since the type of sophisticated instrumentation by satellite utilised in this study has only been available for a very few decades.

The less than careful use of proxies by "climatologists" in looking back thousands of years, is too imprecise to definitively determine long-term global climate changes--although plenty of people swimming in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of grant money continue to claim the ability to do so, in order to keep the funding spigots wide open.

In the meantime, the forests and the trees, by and large, are being berry happe!