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Around the world there is a lot of desert land that could be viable for agriculture but where there is inadequate water available to support the plant growth. In many countries the difference between perpetual poverty is the ability to grow sustenance and a little extra food on their own land.
In the extremely arid countries lack of water has made agriculture such a high risk that many families have given up agriculture traditions spanning generations and moved to the cities where lack of jobs and lack of modern skills have combined to trap many of them in the lowest levels of poverty.
In this paper we explore the viability of using A2WH technology to reclaim desert land that is sitting fallow now. In particular we are looking to see if it is possible for government grants of this unusable land to be used to in a way that the improvement of the land can increase it's value sufficiently that the hard working farmer can pay off his piece by improving more than he needs.
If this can be made to work we see it as a way to give millions of families world wide a new start and new chance while at the same time as it relieves populations pressures in the cities and gives them a chance to catch up. The most important impact is that it will diversify the world wide food supply in a way that is drought proof in an era when more extreme droughts may be caused by global climatic changes.
The A2WH technology may help allow agriculture in areas where there is no surface water or ground water available. We are in the process of quantifying how much of the available land could be farmed if we could solve the water problem and if the economic results would justify the investment.
We are actively soliciting feedback and input on this process and how to best organize such an effort to maximize success. We would greatly appreciate referrals to those who can authorize test projects in USA, Africa and Asia. Our A2WH technology is environmentally benign and It can pretty much eliminate all world wide water shortages and mitigate the impact of droughts.
A2WH Our technology uses solar thermal heat to harvest water from air. It will work in very dry desert air and even better in areas of higher humidity..
Our primary interest is enabling family scale agriculture in areas with extreme water scarcity. Ethiopia's remote, drought-stricken Somali region would be an ideal kind of deployment. The Ethiopian people are impacted by drought induced famine every few years.
The XDOBS unit can reduce the impact of their famine by providing a number of local farmers with a sufficient number of A2WH units that they can keep a few acres each under production even during the worst drought. These would be combined with a set of desert hardy edible plants similar to those used by the "Eden project in Nigeria" so that we can stretch the available water to produce more edible food.
A combination of desert hardy plants combined with either hand label watering or drip irrigation should allow local farmers to keep 1 full acre productive with about 1 acre foot of water where less efficient approaches may require 4 or more acre foot per year.
With the average production rates the XDOBS units from one full acre will produce a little more than 4 acre foot per year so one acre of units will provide enough water to keep 4 acres in productive use.
The water so clean it almost reaches lab quality so it will also eliminate water related illness if a portion is set aside for the local children. This solution would also require training in water wise gardening and fast growing highly nutritious plants but these people are already experts in desert survival. If we can find a way to make it work financially then it would give the famine victims a food security that has been lacking for decades and it would eliminate the need for Unicef and the red cross to return every few years to help the same set of people.
XDOBS always look for ways to eliminate core problems so they don't come back rather than using short term band aid solutions and our Water from air extraction units would be good permanent fix. We have added one more option to prevent the loss and life of economic disaster so common with drought induced famine. Around the world countries are recognizing the dangers over drawing ground water. In fact in many areas they are pumping water back in to replace the water they previously replaced.
This means that it is important during drought to limit water use of the aqua quiver which in turns limits using water for agriculture. The recharge rate of the aqua quiver in extremely dry areas is normally low so they can rapidly deplete the local aqua quiver to the point where the wells are worthless.
This means that the well drilling projects so common in the current relieve community are fairly likely to fail when needed most and at the very least to not provide enough water to prevent the drought related famine. There are a number of cases ground water failures has occurred in rural India and Darfar is at risk of corruption due excess draw even now. The question becomes how do you support agriculture during a drought when there is no surface water and no ground water available.
The solution we developed was our A2WH (Air to Water Harvest) technology. Our current costs make our produced water more expensive than most of the easy solutions such as drilling more wells, long pipelines, recycling, etc so we are looking for those problems where there is simply no viable water available.
We want to find those places where the ground water is either not available at all or is extremely contaminated. Our technology uses solar thermal heat to extract water from air. It works best in humid areas with lots of sun and will also work in very dry desert air. Our primary interest is enabling family scale agriculture in areas with extreme water scarcity. " How much would an average acre of dry desert land which is too dry to support agriculture and which has no water irrigation or ground water available cost in current market? " If sufficient water is added to that land to allow high value crops to be drip or hand irrigated (400,000 gallons per year per acre) could this land support a viable crop? If so then what would highest value crops be?
For each area identified above. If irrigation water is available at all what is the cost per acre foot for that water and what is the major obstacle to supplying more water at that price. Our solution can be installed acre by acre so it allows an incremental growth strategy that is impossible for the coastal desalination plants while it also eliminates the need for long pipelines and pumps. Our technology only applies in areas where there ground water is either unavailable or over allocated and where it would be infeasible to build pipelines to carry water from the coastal desalination plants. Incidentally if countries in the middle East like Saudi Arabia have cheap natural gas available we can produce units that multiply water production per hour by 600%.
We do this by using the natural gas to supplement the solar thermal heat. see: http://xdobs.com/energy I really enjoyed your article "Combating Desertification with Plants
We tackled the problem from the opposite direction of providing limited water to sustain family sized gardens in desertification areas. I think if we combined your approach with our approach of edible drought tolerant plants it could yield even better results. In particular your approach would allow us to stretch 30 gallons a day worth of agriculture further. We have invented a technology the allows us to use solar thermal heat to extract water from air.
It is intended to allow small scale agriculture in areas where there is no water available either from ground water or surface water. The Sudan area in Ethiopia is a good example of such an area.
The system was originally invented to provide survival drinking water for troops but we are hoping that we can find a way to allow it to benefit people in extremely arid areas. Let me know if you think this would be of benefit in your area. We have little experience in international field deployment and would need people like those who operated the Eden outpost in Niger to take care of that and local training.
The units start small enough to carry while only producing a few gallons a day and scale up to major infrastructure capable of a billion gallons per year.
We are most interested in a family sized unit that would produce about 50 gallons a day in the hopes that it would allow families in the worst drought induced famines to grow enough greens and other fast growing plants to survive.
If you have advice on specific edible desert hardy plants especially those tolerant of high salinity and sand then I would love to include a link or the entire list in our operators guide.
Good pictures will help as would any recipes.
Call 800-658-8745. or Send our sales department an email.
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- Oct 2005 - All rights Reserved |
This discussion contains forward looking statements which are based on current expectations and differences can be expected. All statements and expressions are the opinion of management of XDOBS and are not meant to be either investment advice or a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold securities. Many of these statements are based on sound economic reasoning, however actual response of the economy is heavily influenced by politics and large business and so the outcome could end up substantially different.