Today, drylands cover more than 46% of the global land area where three billion people live. Nearly 30% of humans today have no indoor drinking water. The risk of desertification is growing. Farmland is under threat. Adaptation to climate change is the priority with climate change mitigation taking a back step.
In areas that have always been challenged by aridity and heat, collective wisdom and shared experiences are leading to advancements in technology and technique to ensure farms continue to produce enough to meet demand. Not all efforts to live in our hotter and more water-stressed world are producing equal results.
For example, take Australia. Second to Antarctica, it is the driest continent on the planet. But unlike Antarctica, people live there.
Almost all Australian agriculture today is dryland without irrigation. The vast majority is designated for grazing. Farm sizes have been doubling for several decades. Where staple crops are grown, most are designated for export.
Australian farms, today, are highly mechanized. In the 1980s, the Landcare movement started to tackle the known problems of degraded soils, and the loss of native vegetation well adapted to the continent’s dry climate. Despite the wide adoption of Landcare methods, the soils of Australia continue to degrade, and since 2020, staple crop dryland farm yields have plateaued.
Meanwhile, Australia is getting warmer with the country having recently added a new isotherm and colours to its weather maps as more places see daytime temperatures above 50+ Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). As the warming increases the interior of the country is getting drier. The few rivers it has often run dry. The soils are bone dry. When it rains (precipitation levels have been dropping throughout the last half century), the soil cannot absorb the water leading to flash floods that wash away more topsoil.
Implemented conservation approaches include zero tillage where crops are planted. Vast amounts of farmland lie fallow to try and restore soil moisture. Finally, Australian farmers are altering their growing seasons to try and match changes in precipitation patterns as they look for ideal periods of low evaporation for planting and dry spells for harvesting.
The Australian farm story is not a success, but rather, a growing challenge.
Other places on the planet are getting it right. One is eastern Oregon where dry farming strategies developed at Oregon State University have been adopted. Eastern Oregon is uber-dry and more often associated with cattle grazing. Using novel techniques, however, that encourage deep-root development has farmers growing melons, tomatoes and squash without adding a drop of irrigation water.
The methodology uses compressed soil when seeding or putting in transplants. The topsoil is fluffed to act like a mulch which helps to ensure soil water retention. The plants quickly develop large and deep root systems to tap into underground moisture.
Israel’s Negev is its desert south. It is dry and hot and covers 55% of the country. Yet more than 40% of Israel’s crops are grown in the Negev. Today, the country is the largest producer of dairy milk in terms of per-cow yield. It grows 300 tons of tomatoes per hectare compared to the global average of 50. It produces 262 tons of citrus per hectare compared to 243 and 211 tons in the United States and Europe respectively.
Water management has made the above numbers possible. Desalination of seawater serves the majority of domestic and industrial water needs. Israel recycles 90% of its wastewater compared to the U.S. at 10%.
Drip irrigation technology directly feeds individual plants rather than surrounding soil. Greenhouses extend the growing season year-round without adding to water demand.
Israel’s techniques and technology are shared with neighbouring countries in the Middle East and North Africa or MENA where the Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution was born.
MENA is the home for four of Earth’s five most water-stressed countries. It is also the place from which domesticated animals and plants sprung. This is an area that was named the Fertile Crescent by those studying ancient history. It spans from the Tigris-Euphrates to the Mediterranean and beyond to the Nile River.
The Middle East is the home of the first farms, the first towns, the first cities and the first kingdoms. It is where writing originated, where copper, bronze and iron were smelted and turned into hoes and ploughs. It is referred to as the Cradle of Western Civilization.
Now it is becoming the new cradle of wisdom to sustain humanity in a warming and drier world of the future. No place better serves our needs than the countries of MENA when it comes to agricultural innovation in the face of climate change. Here, temperatures are on the rise. Its deserts are spreading. It suffers from freshwater scarcity.
Yet, human ingenuity is allowing the people of MENA to tackle these challenges by studying the resilient plant and animal species undergoing rapid evolutionary change in their part of the world as they adapt to climate change.
Where domesticated plants breed true, their wild-related species that have been around for ten thousand years are still adapting to environmental changes. These are plants and animals that survive in the increased heat, grow even in deteriorating soil conditions as desertification spreads, and find where the water is when needed.
These are plants with genetic traits we can copy through genetic engineering and selective breeding to insert into the DNA of wheat, barley, and other grains.
In Morocco, the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) has created a crop gene bank that has led to the release of 880 new crop varieties in the last 40 years. These include 120 climate-resilient cereal and legume crops that today are being grown in more than 20 countries.
MENA countries have created a drought index to monitor the extent and severity of water-stressed areas. They are working with the United States and other countries on the Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate (AIM4C), a project initially focused on food production in the Arabian Peninsula. The goal is to produce successes to be shared across the rest of MENA countries and other global dryland nations. These new dryland innovations are being introduced and scaled to provide:
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The second is a follow-up to an ongoing story that involves the Canadian company, Carbon Engineering. Last year, I wrote about this company entering into a contract with Occidental Petroleum to deploy between 70 and 135 of the former’s CO2 Direct Air Capture (DAC) plants. Well, it appears that the relationship has turned into an acquisition. But more about that later. First, let’s look at what Oregon State researchers have discovered.
Findings from Oregon State University have been published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science revealing a novel nanomaterial that can filter CO2 from industrial pollutants.
This technology could be implemented in fossil-fuel-burning thermal power plants and industrial emitters like cement, steel and aluminum refiners, all significant contributors of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions responsible for global warming.
The material is a metal-organic framework (MOF) which can intercept CO2 molecules through adsorption when exposed to smokestack gasses. See an illustration of what MOFs look like below.
States Kyriakos Stylianou, Assistant Professor at Oregon State, and study lead, “MOFs have shown a lot of promise for carbon capture because of their porosity and their structural versatility, but synthesizing them often means using reagents that are costly both economically and environmentally.” He further notes that water in smokestacks complicates removal requiring the flue gasses to be dried before the CO2 can be captured. The solution was to invent a MOF to address current material limitations that include:
MOFs as seen in the above illustration are designed for porosity. They consist of crystalline, positively charged aluminum ions with “linker” molecules called ligands made of benzene-1,2,4, and 5-tetracarboxylic acid. The structure is a nanosized, spongelike cage that Stylianou’s MaD Lab has built to capture CO2.
Stylianou notes that it is “an outstanding candidate for wet post-combustion carbon capture applications” which makes it ideal for use in coal-fired thermal power plants that use water in their flue scrubbing process. The MOF, Stylaniou continues, is “cost-effective with exceptional separation performance and can be regenerated and reused at least three times with comparable uptake capacities.”
How many coal-fired thermal power plants are operational today around the globe?
How many cement plants are there?
And how many steel and aluminum plants?
If a good percentage of these were to adopt this MOF technology, it could impact our fight to mitigate climate change significantly.
Carbon Engineering and Occidental Petroleum, through its subsidiary 1PointFive, entered into a partnership in 2022 to deploy between 70 and 135 Direct Air Capture (DAC) plants like the one seen in the illustration below, each with the capacity to remove and store a megaton of CO2 annually.
It would seem that the partnership is going well with Occidental agreeing to acquire Carbon Engineering outright for the sum of US $1.1 billion. The money will be used to accelerate scaling the technology to meet global demand. With the acquisition announcement, the company announced a revised number of DAC plants that will capture CO2 directly from ambient air and either bury it underground or use it to make new products such as concrete and aviation fuel.
Why is this acquisition significant?
Occidental has a market value of $58.04 Billion and is a major oil producer in Texas where 30 of the proposed DAC plants will be located. The company rivals Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP in terms of fossil fuel production.
Why DAC as opposed to in-situ carbon capture at production and refining sites? DAC technology can be placed anywhere there is access to renewable energy and underground storage. It is, therefore, not tied to any existing energy-generating infrastructure which provides great flexibility.
But 100 DAC plants, each capturing a megaton of CO2 annually represent 100 megatons or 0.1 gigatons. Climate researchers estimate that we need to draw down CO2 emissions by 10 gigatons annually from the atmosphere and oceans to keep global warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) degrees. So that means we need 10,000 DAC plants of the size Occidental is intending to deploy to get to reverse the upward climb of global atmospheric and ocean temperatures. Occidental alone will not get us to that goal. The rest of the big fossil fuel players who still wish to be in the oil business, therefore, need to pony up.
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Cassie, however, is not designed to emulate the ferocious characteristics of its distant dinosaur cousin. The Oregon State team that built it, and have created a spinoff company, Agility Robotics, intend to license the technology for use by companies seeking couriers to ship and deliver packages to places where wheels cannot go.
States Jonathan Hurst, Associate Professor, Oregon State, and Chief Technology Officer at Agility, “robots with legs can go a lot of places that wheels cannot. This will be the key to deliveries that can be made 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by a fleet of autonomous vans that pull up to your curb, and an on-board robot that delivers to your doorstep….It effectively brings efficient automated logistics from state-of-the-art warehouses out and into the rest of the world.”
Currently Cassie is being made available to universities and companies interested in researching and developing the technology further. Future applications beyond delivery and courier services include:
So how does Cassie work?
A combination of software controllers, springs, and servomotors, combined with steering, and flexible feet, all combined in a sealed system capable of working outdoors in rain or snow, Cassie can stand, balance, fall and get up, and stride just like an ostrich or the ancient Velociraptor. States Hurst, “We weren’t trying to duplicate the appearance of an animal, just the techniques it uses to be agile, efficient and robust.” He further comments, “We didn’t care what it looked like….But even though we weren’t trying to mimic the form, what came out on the other end….looked remarkably like an animal leg.”
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So there is nothing new about potassium other than the fact that the Oregon State researchers have put an old scientific bugbear to bed, that potassium could not be combined with graphite. Xiulei Ji, the lead researcher in the Chemistry Department at Oregon State remarks, “for decades, people have assumed that potassium couldn’t work with graphite or other bulk carbon anodes in a battery….That assumption is incorrect. It’s really shocking that no one ever reported on this issue for 83 years.” The 83 year reference goes back to earlier research in the 1930s that was abandoned.
The implications of a commercial potassium-ion battery are enormous. The abundance of the material makes it a much better candidate for the mass production of rechargeable batteries than lithium. It can approximate the energy density of the latter. It can match the charge and discharge cycles. And it should be a lot cheaper to make.
The university is seeking commercial partners to help turn their laboratory prototype into a finished product. This could prove to be a battery game breaker with implications for mobile devices, automobiles, and residential and commercial utility storage.
