To green the deserts, just add... seawater?

THE smell of ammonia wafts past me as I stand next to the

world's largest urea and ammonia factory, clutching the gas mask
I've been issued as a precaution. Gas flares glint through the
desert haze. This is Mesaieed, a closed industrial city ringed by
security cordons in the Gulf state of Qatar and the unlikely
setting for a remarkable oasis.
The heart of this oasis is a greenhouse full of cucumbers. But this
is no ordinary greenhouse: it is delightfully cool inside, despite the
desert heat. Surrounding it are a series of small garden plots
growing desert plants, each walled in by what look like cardboard
hedges. Their effect is startling. When I step downwind of a
hedge, the air temperature instantly drops, as if I have set foot in
front of a powerful air conditioner. And next to the plots is an
array of mirrors for concentrating the power of the desert sun.
The most remarkable thing about this little island of glass and
greenery (see "A briny business: How to green the desert") is that
there is no external supply of either water or electricity the
plants are kept cool and watered using only sunlight and
seawater.
Some see this pilot project as the first step towards turning
hundreds of square kilometres of parched coastal desert into
fertile farms (See "When desert meets sea"). The head of the
project, Norwegian biologist Joakim Hauge, has an even bigger
dream. He wants to do nothing less than revegetate the desert.
And the claim isn't as crazy as it might sound.
The heart of this prototype is the greenhouse. Worldwide,
greenhouses are an ever more popular way to grow high-value
vegetables and flowers. In their controlled environment, it is
possible to get much higher yields than outdoors, making up for

the higher costs. But with their insatiable thirst for water and
need for heating in winter, most greenhouses are not very green.
This greenhouse is different. For starters, whereas greenhouses in
temperate lands are mostly for keeping crops warm, here in Qatar
the main task is keeping them cool. This, says Hauge as we tour
the site, is done by evaporative cooling.
At the front of the greenhouse, facing into the prevailing
northwesterly wind, is a wall of honeycombed cardboard. It is kept
constantly wet, cooling and moistening the air that enters the
greenhouse. The clever part is that no precious fresh water is
wasted on this task; instead, it is done with seawater. The owner
of this industrial complex and one of the project's funders, the
Qatar Fertiliser Company (QAFCO), has built a network of pipes to
deliver seawater for cooling, and the greenhouse taps into that
supply.
Inside, in the cool created by the wet cardboard, I met Stephen
Clarkson, who grew cucumbers in the UK for 40 years before
heading to Qatar. "We plan to grow 1200 cucumbers per square
metre per year in here," he says. So far it's going well Clarkson
was about to harvest his second crop of baby cucumbers.
Explore our interactive diagram: "A briny business: How to green
the desert"
The ultimate test has yet to come. During my visit, in March,
temperatures outside were in the 30s, but in the low 20s in the
greenhouse. In August, it can reach 50 C outside, but the
greenhouse needs to stay below 30 C for crops to thrive. Hauge
is confident that it will. As head of the rather grandly
named Sahara Forest Project, the private Norwegian company
that built and runs the prototype, he has a lot riding on its
success.

Keeping the greenhouse cool and humid reduces the plants' need
for fresh water, but it still has to come from somewhere. The
answer again is seawater. A concentrated solar power system
provides the heat and electricity needed to desalinate seawater
for irrigation, as well as power all the pumps, fans and other
machinery. This is the purpose of the 300 square metres of
parabolic mirrors, which track the sun and focus its rays onto a
pipe containing oil.
But the prototype is more than just a souped-up greenhouse. The
aim is to use seawater to maximum effect, Virginia Corless, an
astrophysicist recruited as the project's science manager, told me
as we headed outside. "What we have is a cascade of uses for the
seawater."
Some goes straight into ponds for growing marine algae. Algae
farms are in their infancy, says Patrick Brading, a marine biologist
fresh from the University of Essex in the UK, who was preparing a
batch of algae for release into a pond. "A lot of basic things are
still unknown. I am trying to answer those questions, and it is
brilliant to work here with a constant supply of brine to do openair experiments."
In theory, the algal ponds could provide anything from feedstock
for pharmaceuticals and food supplements to food for livestock
and farmed fish, Brading says. There are also plans to use
seawater to grow a range of native salt-tolerant plants, which
could be used for a similar range of purposes.
The leftover brine from all these processes with a salt content of
10 to 15 per cent is used to wet the cardboard honeycombs
around the small garden plots. "We call them evaporative
hedges," Corless says. Their cooling effect allows desert plants
and a few tough herbs and crops to grow where none would grow
before. The plots are planted with a variety of grasses, as well as
barley, rocket and medicinal plants such as aloe vera. The aim is

ecosystem rehabilitation, not just desert farming. The long-term

plan, she says, is to grow trees as well, which should eventually
take over the cooling role of the cardboard hedges.
Brine from the hedges, now with a salinity of around 30 per cent,
is pumped to evaporation ponds to produce salt. This can be sold,
and also avoids the need to dump extremely salty waste water
back in the sea, which can harm marine life.
None of these technologies is new, says Corless, but they have
never been put together before. Well, not quite like this. The
seawater greenhouse was actually devised two decades ago by
British inventor Charlie Paton, who set aside a successful career
devising special lighting effects for films and theatres to pursue a
vision of growing crops in deserts. I have written about his work
before, and before I left for Qatar I visited him at his lab-cumhome in east London.
Paton has built several pilot greenhouses to test his ideas. They
have won architectural and environmental prizes, but so far they
have failed to catch on. Two including the first ever seawater
greenhouse, built on Tenerife in 1992 have since been
abandoned. Only one, built in Oman in 2004 on land vacated by
farmers for want of fresh water, still produces crops and
occasional research papers.
Most recently, Paton's company helped design the Qatar project
and was also involved in building a separate project, a trial
seawater greenhouse in South Australia that is now selling
tomatoes to supermarkets in Adelaide. But he disagreed with
some of the changes made by his partners and severed his links
with both projects last year.
One change in particular concerned him. Paton came up with his
idea during a holiday in the Moroccan desert, when the windows
inside his bus steamed up during a rainstorm and left a towel he
was using as a pillow soaking wet. His greenhouse design exploits

this effect for desalination: cool seawater is pumped through a

maze of pipes in a roof cavity, and fresh water condenses out of
the air made humid by the seawater evaporators onto the
outside of the pipes. The system can produce up to 20 litres of
water a day per square metre of greenhouse more, says Paton
proudly, than falls in a rainforest.
But this elegant scheme failed to impress his partners. The
Australians say that the condenser pipes were a nightmare
because they sprang leaks. Both projects ditched them in favour
of desalination using concentrated solar power, though the Qatar
greenhouse does also collect moisture that condenses on the
inside of the roof at night. Solar desalination is simply more
efficient, Hauge told me as we watched the sun beat down on the
mirrors.
Costly cucumbers
But this high-tech approach does add to the considerable price
tag. Back in Doha after our day in the desert, I went through some
back-of-the-envelope sums with Hauge. The Qatari greenhouse
cost $6 million to build, with the money coming from QAFCO and
the Norwegian agrochemicals company Yara. Given the
anticipated annual harvest of 720,000 cucumbers for 10 years,
that would work out at a capital cost of almost a dollar per
cucumber, even without overheads. That is spectacularly
expensive: cucumbers were on sale in the Doha souks for a fifth
of the price.
Together with the fact that the pilot project was hurriedly
constructed to showcase at the UN climate conference in Qatar
last December, some might wonder if the project is just an
expensive publicity exercise, I suggested to Hauge. No, he
insisted. His partners were serious. Of course the cucumbers from
the prototype are expensive, but it was built to carry out research,

not to make money. "Economically, this kind of farming is only

feasible at a large scale."
And there are plans to go large in Jordan, which is one of the most
water-stressed countries in the world and increasingly reliant on
food imports. Later this year, the Sahara Forest Project hopes to
start building a facility near the Red Sea 20 times larger than the
Qatar pilot. If all goes well, the idea is to expand to 200 hectares,
and eventually to 3000.
In such a billion-dollar megaproject, the vision is that up to half of
the area would be devoted to vegetating the desert (see
diagram)with everything from dune grasses to native trees, such
as the nitrogen-fixing thorn acacia (Acacia tortilis). Over time, as
trees grow and the soil improves, these plots will need less
assistance, allowing resources to be switched to other areas. "This
is not just about sustainable agriculture. It is about restorative
ecology," says Hauge.
There is no doubt that it is possible to green desert plots that are
actively cooled and irrigated, and that planting trees can have all
kinds of benefits for the immediate vicinity, from preventing
erosion to providing shelter from the sun and wind. What isn't
clear is what will happen to the untouched land a little further
away. Simple modelling done for the Sahara Forest Project in 2009
suggests such greening will not produce significantly more clouds
or rainfall in the vicinity. However, downwind areas will be cooler
and more humid, and the hope is that this altered microclimate
will encourage more vegetation to grow naturally, with the effect
spreading as positive feedbacks kick in.
This is plausible, says Paul Valdes of the University of Bristol in the
UK, a climate modeller who has studied why the Sahara abruptly
flipped from a green state into desert around 8000 years ago.
"But there is probably a threshold before the effect really starts
having an impact," he says, and this threshold will vary from

place to place. "This would not happen in all deserts." In other

words, in some places greening a relatively small area might
greatly boost natural vegetation in the surroundings, but in other
places even greening a very large area would make no difference.
Finding out what the threshold might be will require both
fieldwork and detailed modelling. Complicating matters further is
global warming, which is expected to make dry areas even drier.
There are cheaper ways to revive desert ecosystems and turn
back advancing deserts. In Niger, on the edge of the Sahara,
simple measures such as protecting trees and digging ditches to
catch rainwater have had a dramatic effect. Then again, these
approaches won't work in drier regions, or deliver cash crops.
In 20 years, Hauge thinks, seawater greenhouses could be
sprouting everywhere from the Atacama desert of northern Chile
to California and North Africa, where some coastal aquifers have
already been pumped dry. In the Egyptian desert, the 19,000square-kilometre Qattara depression could be exploited. It is
around 100 kilometres from the coast, but could receive seawater
by gravity as it is below sea level.
Paton has a similar vision. He says the technology could save
20,000 hectares of greenhouses in Almeria in southern Spain,
which supply fruit and vegetables to much of Europe but are now
running out of underground fresh water. (Another possible
solution is setting up closed greenhouses which recycle most of
their water).
And seawater greenhouses could link up with Desertec, the
European plan to harvest solar energy in the Sahara desert. A
small fraction of that energy could be kept in Africa to desalinate
seawater for growing crops. Placing solar plants near greenhouses
could have several advantages, such as helping protect them
from wind and dust this is one of the aspects being investigated
in Qatar.

But will investors stump up the vast amounts needed to realise

these dreams? Perhaps. The financial crisis has dented
enthusiasm for grand projects, yet the bottom line has changed
since Paton first came up with his idea. Food prices are soaring,
world demand for greenhouse-grown fruit and vegetables is rising
by 10 per cent a year, and more and more countries are running
short of fresh water. The owner of the trial project in
Australia, Sundrop Farms, this year got approval to build a 16hectare, commercial-scale seawater greenhouse, with
construction due to start in August. If it can turn a profit, heads
will turn.
Sundrop, though, is focusing on growing cash crops its facility
has no desert plots or algae ponds. And perhaps that's telling. My
trip left me unconvinced that I will ever see vast areas of the
Sahara turn green as massed ranks of cardboard hedges advance
across the sands. On the other hand, people have talked for
decades about how desalination could be the solution to
producing more crops at a time of growing water shortages. With
the seawater greenhouse, there might at last be a practical way
to do so.