Plans to bring water and vegetation to deserts through vortex towers and biochar
Vortex towers are typically seen as ways to produce electricity. They could also help to vegetate deserts, in a number of ways.
The vortex towers that I envisage would be a cross between the VortexEngine.ca and the Solar Tower by enviromission.com.au. Making a spiral groove inside the surface of the tower could enhance the vortex updraft effect. This has all been discussed for years, e.g. in the Economist Sept. 29, 2005.
Vortex towers can produce huge amounts of electricity, that can be used for purposes such as:
- Desalination of sea water and transport of the resulting fresh water into the desert
- Capturing CO2 from ambient atmosphere and capturing CO2 produced in the process of making biochar. The CO2 could be used for cloud seeding, carbon building material and char (see below).
- Surplus water could also be sprayed into the sky, using the vortex tower's updraft, to further induce cloud formation to create both albedo change and rain.
- Split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, by means of electrolysis. The hydrogen could then be used as fuel, or to produce ammonia by drawing nitrogen from the air. The ammonia could then be used to produce fertilizer.
- Carbon that is captured from the atmosphere could be turned into char, similar to biochar, with its benefits as a soil improver and as a safe way to store carbon. This char could be applied to the soil simultaneously with olivine dust and fertilizer as produced in the way described above. Application of such fertilizer together with char could not only reduce the need for fossil fuel-based fertilizers, it can also reduce runoffs that cause N2O emissions and dead zones in the sea, since the char will improve retention of fertilizer in the soil. The carbon could even be combined with ammonia to produce urea, and all this fertilization would benefit vegetation growth.
Apart from producing electricity, a vortex tower could also push dry, hot air high up into the sky. Some of that heat would escape into space, while the updraft could also establish an air circulation pattern in which hot air would move, high up in the sky, towards the ocean. Simultaneously, as part of this air circulation pattern, air from above the ocean would be drawn - closer to the ground - towards the vortex tower. This air circulation could bring cold and moist wind into the desert, which would benefit vegetation growth.
The benefits of vegetating desert are many; it would take CO2 out of the atmosphere, it could produce food and vast areas could be made suitable for many plants, animals and people. By selling land for settlement, projects to vegetate the deserts could pay for themselves, as part of the Biochar Economy.
Projects that involve afforestation, water desalination, biochar production, olivine grinding and building of vortex towers don't require access to high-tech equipment or scarce resources. This means they can be started at many places around the world, with many global benefits.
Forests have many benefits. Trees take carbon out of the atmosphere to grow. Trees can provide food and building material. Forest waste can be turned into biochar. Forests can have a cooling effect by shading the soil, thus preserving moisture. Furthermore, forests release volatile organic compounds that can have beneficial effects, as follows:
When you're walking through a forest you can smell a kind of piny odour and that's because of these other compounds, volatile organic compounds. And they're things like isoprene, monoterpenes.
When they're released into the atmosphere they undergo reactions with a class of compounds called oxidants and that's things like ozone. Following those reactions they're able to form tiny particles in the atmosphere.
While they're present in the atmosphere they can kind of interact with incoming solar radiation - the energy from the sun essentially and kind of perturb its path so that it doesn't make it to the earth's surface and scatters it.
Additional to this is the role that these particles play in brightening the clouds that are above the forests. And they do this because when they're in the atmosphere they grow and they get to a certain size where they're able to form cloud droplets. And the more of these droplets that there are in a cloud the whiter and brighter that it becomes. And that means that it will reflect away more of the incoming solar radiation that's falling on that particular part of the earth's surface.
[italics part edited from National Environment Research Council, May 18, 2011, podcast and transcript]
Read more at:
Afforestation - bringing life into the deserts
Earlier posted at knol (meanwhile discontinued by Google) by Sam Carana, October 12, 2011.
Earlier posted at knol (meanwhile discontinued by Google) by Sam Carana, October 12, 2011.
2 comments:
Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva argue that forests drive winds through 'persistent condensation' bringing in rain from the oceans. "During condensation water vapor disappears from the gas phase. Air pressure depends on the number of air molecules and is reduced by condensation. Areas with persistent condensation become zones of low pressure that suck in the air from the surrounding regions. Forests ensure both a store and a flux of moisture on land and thus create such persistent low pressure zones on land. This causes moist winds to blow from the ocean to land."
Read more about the biotic pump. Paper: Where do winds come from? A new theory on how water vapor condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics
Adding biochar to the soil is an excellent way to improve the soil's capability to retain moisture and nutrients, thus improving forest health and facilitating further vegetation growth, afforestation and reforestation.
Trees take carbon out of the atmosphere to grow, and forests can remove huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Trees can provide fruit and shelter, while forest waste can provide building material and it can be turned into biochar, thus avoiding carbon dioxide to get released into the atmosphere.
In a forest, water evaporates from the stems, leaves and flowers. A forest will preserve this moisture under its canopy during the warmest hours of the day, while the canopy also has a cooling effect by shading, thus also reducing evaporation of moisture from the soil. When it gets cooler, later in the day, winds will get stronger that will blow more moisture into the air, contributing to the formation of rain clouds. Rainfall further gets stimulated by volatile organic compounds that are released into the atmosphere from forests. The rain will then return the moisture back to the soil, and rainwater can run down deep into the soil alongside the roots of trees to replenish groundwater.
Forests thus stabilize soil and reduce erosion, they can avoid that soils get hit by temperature peaks, they regulate water flow to mitigate floods and droughts, and they purify water.
Here's a link to a recent post by the World Resources Institute
Furthermore, here's a recent study looking at links between soil moisture and rainfall. When Earth Speaks to Sky
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