Project Pressure has created the first open source glacier archive, recording the environmental impact of climate change by documenting the world’s changing glaciers. Danish photographer Klaus Thymann launched this not-for-profit in 2008, garnering impressive street-cred with official links to the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). What’s this got to do with the Middle East? Some of the most endangered glaciers on the planet are in Iran.
Project Pressure captures Iran’s melting glaciers (PHOTOS)
Egloo heats your room for a dime a day!
An Italian design student dreamed up a gizmo that he claims can heat a room for 10 cents a day. I just paid $700 to half-fill an oil tank that, if I’m Scrooge-like with that “on” switch, will heat my 3-bedroom Amman flat for maybe 6 weeks. Could Marco Zagaria’s Egloo heater really work? As I read the data on his fundraising site, the radio started playing an old Doors tune, Come on baby, light my fire!, and I choked on my tea.
Jordan regal residence fully powered by sun!
The most powerful family in Jordan is tapping into the most powerful energy source in the Universe to electrify their private residence. Prince Muhammad bin Talal, brother of Jordan’s King Hussein I, has installed what is the largest, self-use photovoltaic (PV) array in the Middle East.
Prince bin Talal is an active pursuer of environmental solutions. Below see him with Green Prophet’s Karin at a Swiss event for water cooperation in the Middle East.
Covering a sun-facing hillside on his vast Amman estate, this royal installation represents a powerful endorsement of renewable energy.
Powered for a prince!
Jordan’s Al Manal Palace is now powered by over 160 kW solar power!
Global Renewable Energy Systems LLC, a leading PV installation company from Germany, designed a solar system that would give long-term, reliable energy output in Jordan’s desert climate.
A total of 540 poly crystalline modules manufactured by Chinese manufacturer Realforce Power and three German-produced KACO Powador 60.0 TL3 inverters provide 162 kW of installed generating capacity. KACO new energy is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of solar inverters and the first to achieve fully carbon-neutral production.
Zouhair Kefi, Managing Director of KACO new energy Dubai, praised the good example of the Royal Family in a press release, “Precisely in a region where oil wealth did not bring good fortune, the PV array on the Al Manal Palace is serving as an example to show that a prosperous future can be attained just as well with renewable energy.”
bin Talal is a longtime proponent of solar power. Solar is environmentally suited to Jordan’s location. It is endlessly renewable, politically stable, and secure in that it lessens dependence on imports. According to World Bank data, Jordan currently imports 98% of its oil and gas, yet renewables contribute less than 1% of Jordan’s energy despite the Kingdom boasting one of the highest annual daily averages of solar irradiance in the world.
In April 1012, Jordan’s Parliament adopted the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Law (REEL) aimed at inciting private-sector investment in the kingdom’s commercial renewable energy sector. Earlier this year, development was approved for the 52.2 MW Shams solar energy plant, slated to be the largest solar PV installation in the Middle East.
REEL targets homeowners and small businesses too, but domestic installations have not been strong – in part due to relatively high first investment, and the current dip in heating fuel costs is also a deterrent.
The royal solar system went live in August and it’s a puzzle why no one has called Guinness World Records. Loudly broadcasting the Middle East’s largest personal-use PV array – and its royal champion – with follow-on stories on system performance, cost benefits and rate of return, will surely help spike domestic conversions across Amman.
Graphene nanotechnology makes desalination 100 times more efficient
Engineers at Lockheed-Martin recently developed and patented a molecular filtration membrane called Perforene which can desalinate seawater using only 1/100th the energy of the best existing desalination systems.
Perforene is made from graphene, the exciting new nanomaterial which comes in the form of one-atom thick sheets of carbon atoms. Like an overzealous nanotechnology, graphene seems to photobomb itself in as the solution to numerous environmental problems such as, storing electricity, removing air pollution, advanced photovoltaics, high strength materials and now desalinating water.
Under a microscope, this material looks like a mesh net with holes as small as one hundred nanometer. These holes are small enough to block the chlorine and sodium ions in salt water but large enough to allow pure water molecules to pass through.
The material was invented by Lockheed engineer. In an interview with Reuters, Stetson said that this new material is 1000 times stronger than steel and 500 times thinner than the best existing reverse osmosis desalination filter.
He said, “The energy that’s required and the pressure that’s required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less.”
Why desalinating water is not energy efficient
Desalination typically uses at least 3 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter. To put this into familiar terms, filling a 2 liter bottle with desalinated water consumes the same amount of energy as running a 15-watt compact fluorescent light for 24 minutes.
The energy required to purify two liters of freshwater would only run the same light for less than two minutes.
This may not seem like a lot of energy, but it adds up.
According to information published by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the world’s desalination plants consume approximately 360 million kilowatt-hours each day. Because of their gluttonous energy consumption, desalination plants are nearly always collocated with electrical power generating stations.
Nuclear power is often used. But in a bit of political doublespeak, the desalination plants are said to generate electricity. Electricity “generated” by existing desalination plants is only the excess energy produced by the collocated power plant that hasn’t been consumed.
If unconsumed energy is the same things as producing energy, Lockheed-Martin’s desalination technology might become one of the most important sources of energy and water in the Middle East. The company is seeking commercialization partners and hopes begin manufacturing this amazing new material in 2015.
Image of graphene molecular sheet via shutterstock
SONY’s underwater Dubai shop: is the concept all wet?
The Middle East and Africa subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation officially launched an outrageous shopping experience for its Xperia products this month, with a pop-up store located just offshore from the environmentally dubious World Islands in Dubai – and 4 meters under the sea. It’s the world’s first underwater store.
2015 will be the year of hummus
Hummus, the centuries-old Middle Eastern bean paste, is ready for its close-up. According to a report released by food industry trend-trackers Baum and Whiteman, hummus will emerge as America’s “it” food in 2015. “Once a niche product here, eaten primarily by Arab and Israeli immigrants,” says the report, hummus is matching the meteoric trajectory of Greek yogurt as the nation’s next food fetish.
Bamboo Warka Water towers pull drinking water out of thin air
Italian architect Arturo Vittori and his colleague Andreas Vogler designed a low-tech machine, based on passive design, that can produce between 50 and 100 liters of clean drinking water daily, without electrical equipment and independent of land-based water sources.
This inexpensive, easily assembled tower was designed specifically for rural communities in Ethiopia that lack access to safe drinking water. Turns out these 30-foot-tall, sculptural towers that pull potable water from the air can be deployed most anywhere, including the deserts of the Middle East.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=rDXWK5GRaiQ
Warka water towers collect rainwater and extract clean water from fog and dew. They are made from biodegradable materials that can be sustainably sourced and locally fabricated as ready-to-assemble kits that cost about $1,000 USD to produce. With minimal training, a team of four to six unskilled villagers can construct one in a day. Assembly is straightforward, using basic tools. 
The biomimetric design, based on passive design, is informed by the natural water-collecting properties of Namib beetles, termite hives, and cacti. It incorporates cultural references such as Ethiopian basket weaving, traditional fish trap design, and the Warka tree, an indigenous fig tree whose shade provides a traditional place of village gathering.
Fog-harvesting devices are not new, but Vittori’s version yields more water at a lower cost than earlier concepts. One of his first Warka prototypes is pictured above.
The tower consists of lightweight and flexible bamboo stalks, woven to allow unobstructed airflow and stability in the face of strong wind. It’s “crown” is designed to deter bird perching. A nylon mesh net hangs inside and collects dew drops that form along its surface. As air temperatures drop, the droplets gravitate down into a container at the tower bottom where it passes through a tube to people on the ground.
System maintenance is also simple, requiring regular monitoring and periodic replacement of filters, occasional mesh fabric repairs and periodic tightening of support cables. The development team at Vittori’s architectural firm, Architecture and Vision, estimate that a tower’s shelf-life in this African setting will reach 10 years.
According to Australian water conservancy organization the Water Group, Ethiopians spend 40 billion hours a year trying to find and collect water. Once found, the water is often unsafe, as ponds and lakes are often teeming with infectious bacteria or contaminated with animal waste. But don’t be seduced into thinking this is just an African problem.
Water scarcity is one of today’s most urgent world problems. In the past hundred years, our water use has grown at more than twice the rate of population increase. Earth holds enough freshwater for seven billion people but distribution is uneven and much is wasted, polluted and unsustainably managed.
A United Nations Water Human Development Report published in 2006 stated water scarcity affects every continent. Consider that around 1.2 billion people (one fifth of the world population) live in areas of water scarcity. Another 1.6 billion people live in countries that lack the necessary infrastructure to take water from rivers and aquifers.
Build new wells, you say? Vittori told Smithsonian, “[In Ethiopia], public infrastructures do not exist and building a well is not easy. To find water, you need to drill in the ground very deep, often as much as 1,600 feet. So it’s technically difficult and expensive. Moreover, pumps need electricity to run as well as access to spare parts for when the pump breaks down.”
Toilets for People founder, Jason Kasshe, wrote in a New York Times editorial, “If the many failed development projects of the past 60 years have taught us anything, it’s that complicated, imported solutions do not work.”
Green Prophet has broadcast innovative water-production kit such as Eole’s double-duty turbines that wick water from wind, and South American billboards that siphon water from the atmosphere. Other low-tech water purification inventions like the Life Straw need a traditional water source.
The Warka water towers may lessen the devastating impacts of water scarcity in specific locations, but we need to act now – everyone, everywhere – to smarten up about conservation and peaceful cooperation about this most essential planetary resource. This goes beyond peeing your shower, or dropping a brick in your toilet.
Water is more than a building block of life, it can a be a powerful tool for peace between nations. Mumbai-based think tank Strategic Foresight Group (SFG), asserts that trans-boundary water cooperation directly correlates with regional stability and peace. The inverse also holds true: failure to collaborate when managing shared water resources raises the risk of war. Efforts like these water-producing towers are a small step in the right direction.
Nine towers have been built so far; a prototype installed in Bomarzo, Italy allows for testing and design changes. The team is working on version 3.1 (see lead image) while searching for investment partners to allow project scale-up.
The first Ethiopian pilot is scheduled for early 2015.
Update May 1, 2019:
The Warka Tower, Ethiopia, has been selected as one of the 20 shortlisted projects for the 2019 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Kazan, Russian Federation, 25 April 2019 – The 20 shortlisted projects for the 2019 Aga Khan Award for Architecture were announced in Kazan at an exhibition on the Aga Khan Award for Architecture that was inaugurated by His Excellency Rustam Minnikhanov, President of the Republic of Tatarstan.
Imagine a new kind of sustainable city in the desert?
Luca Curci architects studio presents Desert City, a project proposal for a sustainable way to live in the desert. It surely beats the maze of crazy unsustainable cities we see in regions in the United Arab Emirates, save for Masdar the zero energy city outside Abu Dhabi.
The architects say that their theoretical project was born from the interpretation of borders, conceived not only as a line which divides two places but, at the same time, as a meeting point between private and public space.
In these artistic sketches the architects from Italy envision a new kind of community, one based on new characteristics and social identities, a socioeconomic model aimed to cooperation and people participation.
In our world changing it’s important to imagine new paradigms when we build communities from scratch in deserts. Luca Curci Architects give us something to chew on and dream about. Pessimists might argue that we will have no choice.
Aora’s solar tulips start shining in Ethiopia, without water!
Investments in solar energy innovations are not dead! Remember those weird and wonderful solar energy harvesting tulips planted in Israel and Spain? Seen miles away the sky-high tulips have found a new commercial home – in Ethiopia, the company announced last week in a press statement.
We’ve covered Aora over the years and thought possibly that this CSP, or concentrated solar thermal power innovation didn’t grow. We were wrong.
The Ethiopian Government, looking for resilient off-grid systems, is now piloting Aora’s system for sustainable development.
Aora’s tulips collect solar energy from 50 small mirrors and then focus the energy to heat oil and air, creating pressure to drive turbines in the tulips. The turbines create electricity. The solution runs without steam and water, important for off grid locations where there is no water.
We all may know that Ethiopia has grand ambitions to grow its economy fast and is creating the Renaissance Dam to hold back water from Egypt’s Nile to create hydro power. But even when this goes online, getting the power to the people through the grid can take 20 years or more.
This is where Aora’s solution may help:
Rural communities and villages in Ethiopia, and all over Africa for that matter, have not been able to develop themselves due to inefficient access to electricity. This affects the daily lives of people, from needing power to run schools, hospitals, and industry, to providing refrigeration for food processing and post-harvest storage.
Aora’s solar tulips collecting solar power in Samar, Israel
We see solar power solutions for Africa out there already like Nova Lumos which has a novel business model to provide solar power for phones and limited residential use (individual units). Where people are poor and not able to invest in the one time fee, Nova Lumos lets people pay in increments – for the energy and system through the phone. Read here about how Nova Lumos from Israel puts power pimps out of business in Africa.
Aora however operates on the community or village level, giving electricity even during cloud cover or rainy days where the unit switches seamlessly to biofuels.
Unlike huge CSP systems (think Brightsource – also from Israel) Aora needs less than acre, or 3,500 square meters per module. Each module can provide 100kWh of solar electricity as well as 170kW of thermal power. The system’s heliostats follow the sun.
Built to be off grid the Aora system doesn’t require intensive investment to hook it up to the energy grid, nor does it require expensive energy storage operations since it can be hybrid and run on alternative power when the sun doesn’t shine.
The Aora systems are modular and farms of Aora tulips can be connected to generate larger amounts of power, together.
How Aora solar energy works in residential areas. So pretty!
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9qO33wGgVM[/youtube]
Their press associate told Green Prophet that the site in “Almeria, Spain, as well as the site in Israel and the site being built at Arizona State University are sites built for testing and research.
“The news announced [last week] about AORA‘s newest site in Ethiopia is different,” she tells us. “This is the first commercial pilot of AORA‘s system from a paying customer. It is the first phase of what should be a much bigger deal.
“Upon a successful pilot of this site, the Ethiopian government plans to expand deployment of AORA’s system to other off-grid communities in rural areas of the country. Each module produces 100kW of solar electricity and 170 wW of thermal power that can be harnessed for many applications including heating and cooling/refrigeration.
Construction of the first pilot plant is expected to begin by mid-2015.
Hoping to learn from mistakes made by the west, the Aora solar energy project is tied to Ethiopia’s Climate-Resilient Green Economy Strategy, in which the country aims to enhance access to affordable and environmentally friendly renewable energy.
The goal is to provide adequate uninterruptible and grid independent power to support the achievement of middle-income status by 2025 while developing a green economy.
“We are transforming our Green Economy Strategy into action and are pleased to partner with AORA to help achieve our vision,” said H.E. Mr. Alemayehu Tegenu, Minister of Water, Irrigation and Energy for Ethiopia. “AORA’s unique solar-hybrid technology is impressive and well-suited to provide both energy and heat to support local economic development in off-grid rural locations in Ethiopia.”
Aora collecting solar power in Almeria, Spain
Dead Sea relic robbers captured at Cave of the Skulls!
Last weekend, a gang of antiquities thieves were caught in the act of cave-robbing by inspectors of the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery (UPAR) of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), with help from the Arad Rescue Unit. It was the first time in 30 years that relic robbers were captured while plundering. The suspects are six men from Seir village near the West Bank city of Hebron.
The Arad police were conducting routine training that morning and noticed suspicious movement in a cave on a distant cliff in Nahal Ze’elim. They immediately alerted UPAR inspectors who arrived on site with surveillance equipment that enabled them to observe and document the activity.
The cave is known as “The Cave of the Skulls” sited in an area known as “Leopard’s Ascent”.
Robbed by goat cliff
It is 70 meters below the cliff-top plateau and 150 meters above the valley and can only be reached via a narrow goat path that threads through upright bedrock walls.
The IAA said it observed the suspects carrying out “illicit excavation using a metal detector and a large amount of excavating equipment.” The robbers caused extensive damage to the cave by digging through layers of earth while destroying archaeological strata and historical evidence from the Roman period dating 2,000 years ago and the Chalcolithic period five thousand years back.
IAA inspectors captured the suspects at the top of the cliff; the thieves were carrying ancient artifacts, including a 2,000 year old lice comb from the Roman period (image below).
“The robbers attempt to locate and find Dead Sea scrolls, pieces of ancient texts and unique artifacts that were left in the caves, particularly during the Great Revolt against the Romans in 66–70 CE and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 132–135 CE, when Jewish fighters fearing the Roman army sought refuge in the desert,” said UPAR director, Amir Ganor.
In a press release, Ganor said, “For many years gangs of antiquities robbers have been operating along the Judean Desert cliffs. The robbers attempt to locate and find Dead Sea scrolls, pieces of ancient texts and unique artifacts that were left in the caves, particularly during the Great Revolt against the Romans in 66–70 CE and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 132–135 CE, when Jewish fighters fearing the Roman army sought refuge in the desert.
“These are sold for large sums of money in the antiquities markets in Israel and around the world.”
He added, “What makes the Judean Desert so unique is its dry climate that enable the preservation of rare leather, bone, and wooden objects, including the scrolls, parchment and papyrus, on which various texts were written. Over the years many of the plundered finds reached the antiquities markets in Israel and abroad, but it has been decades since perpetrators were caught red-handed. This is mainly due to the difficultly in detecting and catching them on the wild desert cliffs”.
A special operation to foil robbers was part of a complex operation which had been underway for over a year.
Excavating in antiquities sites without a license and destroying an ancient site constitute a severe violation of the law, and can result in prison sentences of up to 5 years. Additional suspects will be investigated in connection with this theft and others in the region.
Images used with permission from the IAA
Barnyard supermodels may put you off meat!
A stunning series of portraits by American photographer Kevin Horan casts barnyard regulars into supermodels, resulting in anthropomorphic images that capture the personalities of these oft-overlooked animals. I showed them to a Jordanian photographer friend – he says he’ll never eat goat tagine again. Look into the faces of these animals and tell me if you share the same reaction.
Can you believe earth is running out of sand?
British economist Milton Friedman once warned that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years you’d have a shortage of sand. Whether governments or free markets are to blame, it is possible to deplete abundant resources such as Irish rain.
Now thanks to global obsessions with concrete icons, fracking and poor resource management, even places such as Saudi Arabia are running out of sand.
Sand, it seems, is the epitome of abundance. There are an estimated seven quintillion grains of sand on earth.
That’s 7000000000000000000, count them! But as with oil and water and Helium, the second most abundant element in the universe, we are consuming sand with the false assumption that a very large number is the same as infinity.
Sand may be inexpensive compared to other natural resources but it is extremely useful, even crucial to certain parts of our modern life. Sand is used to make the glass and concrete used in dams and massive skyscraper construction projects in places such as Dubai and Saudi Arabia. It is also being used in 3D printed structures and other futuristic building designs.
The recent obsession with fracking has also caused a rapid rise in the consumption of this limited resource.
In 2009 Green Prophet reported that the massive construction boom caused a shortage of the high quality desert sand used in construction.
So Bahrain and other Persian gulf countries began to restrict the export of sand. Not long after this, sand was being imported to replenish eroded beaches in places such as Cesarea where man-made structures interfere with the normal inflow of sand from the sea.
Peak sand
And while some desert sands are excellent construction materials, these fine-grained sands tend to blow or erode too much to make for good beach sand. So Saudi Arabia has imported beach sand from as far away as Australia.
According to an article published in Der Spielgel, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) estimates that 40 billion tons of sand are consumed each year, 3/4ths of it in the production of concrete– enough to encircle the earth with a wall 25 meters high.
Fracking requires yet another type of sand. Companies which were previously focused on the relatively small market of sand for golf course have made hundreds of millions of dollars by strip mining places such as the North American pine barrens where enormous flocks of passenger pigeons once lived.
This sand is then used in hydraulic fracturing (fracking), a process where materials are pumped into the ground at high pressure in order to fracture rock and force the stubborn last few drops of oil out of geologic deposits.
Sand is also being used to increase and decrease the amount of territory belonging to certain countries. Singapore has reportedly imported enough sand from Indonesia and Vietnam to increase its area by more than 20% over the past 50 years.
Hong Kong may be doing the same and China is pouring sand into South China Sea in order to create new territory in the disputed Spratly Islands. Poorer countries such as Cape Verde are smuggling their sandy shorelines away to richer countries in a practice that could complicate already difficult political situations in the Middle East.
So the next time you visit a sandy beach or desert, be sure to dump the sand out of your shoes before you go home.
Slash your UAE utility bill by 20% – copycats welcome!
A United Arab Emirates-based firm has just concluded what it says is the region’s first water and energy audit of a large-scale housing facility for over 1,000 guest workers. Facilities management company Farnek assessed performance of their staff accommodation center in Al Quoz, Dubai, identifying opportunities to slash annual utility bills by 20 per cent (an estimated $82,000). They aim to incite other UAE facilities to similarly self-audit for immediate environmental – and economic – benefits.
Hilarious Arab American (and dancing mom) explains why paste is NOT hummous (VIDEO)
Arabs eat hummous with religious fervour. And it’s true: mamma usually does best. As this Arab American in this video points out, if it comes in a plastic container, it is not hummous. Not the kind you want to eat any way.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGUFaizAHs[/youtube]
For a great laugh watch the video above. And for a great hummous recipe you can do at home, click here for Green Prophet’s killer hummous recipe – not that paste!
Also did you know that you can spell hummous and number of ways? The creamy chickpea spread, full of protein is made is with tehina, lemon and oil. It’s also spelled hummus, humus, humous- you name it.
Israeli oil spill catastrophe seeps into desert sands and rivers (PHOTOS)
Israel’s worst environmental accident, possibly worse than the devastating Carmel fires of 2010, happened yesterday morning. An estimated 600,000 gallons of crude oil (3 million liters) is causing severe damage to the southern port city area of Eilat, endangering also those close to the Eilat border, media outlets confirm.
The damage was caused by a pipeline burst while workers were upgrading the pipeline. The oil spill reached as far as the Evrona nature reserve. Some 80 people from both Israel and Jordan have been taken to the hospital, showing us once again that environmental problems have no borders.
Cleaning up the oil spill and the delicate ecosystem could take months, possibly even years.
Israeli officials say the pipeline burst during maintenance on the line 15 miles from the port city of Eilat at a new section of the pipeline.
The pipeline was breached during maintenance at a spot some 20km from Eilat on Wednesday evening. The oil spill leak has been stopped, but it has caused damage, even leaking into streams and rivers nearby.
Now is the time for winter rains in Israel, meaning that the oil spill could get much worse if the bulk isn’t cleaned up before another downpour.
The Evrona nature reserve is an important part of the Jordan Rift Valley, the natural corridor that runs from the Sea of Galilee in the north, down to the Red Sea. The corridor also extends up into other countries in the region.
Millions of wild birds pass through this corridor twice a year from Africa to Europe and then back again.
The pipeline was built back in the 1960s in better diplomatic times to bring Iranian oil from the Persian Gulf to Europe. After the Islamic Revolution it has been used primarily to transport oil within Israel.
#2 image via Haaretz; top image Israel Environment Ministry; photos 3, 4 and 5 Israel Police