For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
New agriculture projects feed Libya, thanks to the Great Man Made River. The artificial irrigation project, the most expensive in history, is good while it lasts.
BENGHAZI, Libya — Greg Cunningham is a long, long way from home. Since early 2004, the Colorado agribusiness consultant has lived in eastern Libya — growing wheat and corn irrigated with water piped in from the Sahara Desert. Cunningham, general manager of Technofarm International Ltd., holds the distinction of being the first American businessman in Libya once the doors opened. But risk-taking is nothing new for this 54-year-old entrepreneur, who’s lived and worked in at least 20 countries from Egypt to the Philippines.
“We did not have an ambassador here even a year ago, and a lot of American companies are uncomfortable investing in a country where there’s no active embassy,” Cunningham told The Diplomat. But he added that “Libya’s a very friendly place. Never in five years has anybody given me any trouble.”
As major oil companies pull out of Iran, analysts differ over the import of new economic sanctions.
By all objective standards, this week Iran is facing some version of a moment of truth. Responding to the impending imposition of beefed-up United Nations economic sanctions, French oil company Total announced publicly that it was suspending oil shipments to Iran and the Spanish oil giant Repsol withdrew from a contract to develop part of a large Iranian oil field. Even Iran’s neighbor, the United Arab Emirates, announced a series of moves to comply with the strengthened sanctions regime.
But analysts disagree over the import of the sanctions, and the degree to which the new approach will influence the Iranian government.
“These new sanctions will target Iran’s financial sector, Iran’s ability to trade, Iran’s ability to communicate with the external world and travel, which begins to target the energy sector, and squeeze a number of companies connected to the revolutionary guard,” Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and author of Under a Mushroom Cloud – Europe, Iran and the Bomb, told The Media Line. “All of these things combined will have a significant effect.”
“Obviously, it could have been much tougher, but there are some aspects of the resolution which if implemented honestly, conscientiously and resolutely can do a great deal of damage at a time when the Iranian economy is particularly fragile due to the vast incompetence of the current government. And the internal political situation makes the government more vulnerable,” he continued. “If you look at sanctions as a way to slow down and damage the efforts of the regime then these efforts are valuable.”
“Those who think that sanctions will solve the problem are wrong: sanctions are not going to convince President Ahmadinejad or the Supreme Leader Khamenei to reconsider their approach to nuclear power, nor are sanctions going to bring down the regime,” Dr Ottolenghi said.
“But if properly implemented, sanctions can achieve two goals: first, to reduce the ability of Iran to procure and acquire sensitive technology abroad which will significantly slow down the Iranian race to nuclear weapons. The second value of the sanctions is that they will immensely raise costs for Iran to engage in all of its illicit activities, wreaking havoc into the system by, for example, by sowing discontent among those within the regime who are in it just for the profit.”
But Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor at the University of Tehran, argued that the sanctions would fail in their stated goals.
“I don’t think that sanctions will have a major effect on Iran, especially since the Iranians had been preparing for the sanctions for quite awhile now,” he told The Media Line. “Iran is trading less and less with Europe and North America; and has been finding alternative partners in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
“Beyond diversifying its trade, Iran has also become more independent, for example in its consumption of oil, with heavy investment in oil refineries,” Dr Marandi said. “So Iran is much more independent than it was a few years ago.”
“There will be a minor effect,” he continued. “For example hospitals will have difficulty importing equipment from Europe. But at the end of the day it’s not going to have a major effect on the Iranian economy, and the irony is that the more sanctions that the west places on Iran, the greater the gap between them and the less leverage Western countries have over Iran.”
Dr Mehrdad Khonsari, a former Iranian diplomat and Senior Research Consultant at the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, argued that the sanctions would delay, but not solve, the principal conflict between Iran and the West.
“The sanctions will obviously have some kind of an effect on the Iranian economy by making conditions worse for all Iranians,” he told The Media Line. “But it will not be of sufficient strength or magnitude to force the Iranian government to change its stance or go a different way.”
“Life will become harder, Iran’s flexibility within the international community will be marginalized, but it doesn’t mean that the sanctions will achieve the behavior which they are aimed at achieving,” Dr Khonsari continued. “The oil companies are not pulling out, and those who are buying Iran’s oil are still buying the oil. What they are doing is essentially making sure that there is no new investment or technology and that production levels don’t increase.”
“If the international community were serious about containing Iran’s development towards nuclear weapons, they would recognize reality: we are moving towards a military confrontation, which is exactly what Ahmadinejad wants,” he said. “Sanctions are not working; diplomacy is not working; so what else is left? The choice is very clear.”
“Smoked pigs” decompose slower than those that don’t smoke. (They were actually injected with nicotine).
With smoking rampant in the Middle East, and rates in children increasing all the time, a new CSI study, using pigs of all creatures has found that those injected with nicotine decompose slower than those pigs which weren’t injected, reports the New Scientist.
Shimon Peres, Shari Arison and other notables toast water to Israel’s latest desalination plant, dubbed the largest of its kind in the world.
With news of new business in China this week, IDE launches its third desalination plant in Israel:
Champagne glasses containing the finest fresh water were raised in a toast last month to celebrate the opening of Israel’s third desalination plant, this one in the northern city of Hadera. Lauded as the largest reverse osmosis desalination facility in the world, the plant that takes water from the Mediterranean Sea and makes it safe to drink is expected to produce 127 million cubic meters of water each year – enough to meet the water needs of one in every six Israelis. But is it green?
Created with an investment of nearly half a billion dollars, the plant was built by IDE Technologies, an Israeli company that has already built two seawater desalination plants on the country’s Mediterranean Sea coastline, along with the Housing and Construction Group, a real estate and development firm owned by the Arison Group.
It was the government that put in place the plan to create the desalination plant, to meet the demands of a growing population and an imperiled water supply, dependent almost entirely on winter rainfall.
Aerial view of the new desalination plant in Hadera.
In a 25-year agreement with the government and with its full blessing, the water will be produced at just over 50 cents per cubic meter. IDE’s first desalination plant, built on the coast in Ashkelon, has been performing well since 2005, according to company reports. There is a third plant at Palmahim, just south of Tel Aviv, and two more are planned along the coast, in Ashdod and Soreq.
A new era of cheap water?
“The success of the mega-desalination plant concept has ushered in a whole new era of plentiful, affordable water for a world facing severe water challenges,” says Avshalom Felber, IDE Technologies CEO, in a press statement. “With the launch of the Ashkelon plant in 2005, we pledged to continue pursuing further breakthroughs in plant capacity and water cost.”
Ofer Kotler, CEO of the Housing and Construction Group (‘Shikun U’Binui’ in Hebrew) says: “As one of the most complex and largest building projects our group has ever undertaken, we are especially pleased to present this plant to a country facing severe water challenges.”
The project was financed via a consortium of international banks, including the European Investment Bank, Calyon, a French investment bank, and Portuguese investment bank Esperito Santo. Back in 2007, Euromoney, a prestigious business and investment magazine, touted the ‘global village’-style economic deal for the Hadera plant as the Project Finance Deal of the Year.
Inside the Hadera desalination facility in Israel.
IDE boasts technological breakthroughs in the fields of thermal and membrane desalination, and also, perhaps surprisingly for a country in the Middle East, in snowmaking. In desalination, the salt is removed from seawater using a process called Reverse Osmosis (RO) one of two ways to use desalination membranes to process water. In RO, water from a highly pressurized salty solution is channeled through a water-permeable membrane to separate it from its salty component. The second approach found in desalination plants like in Saudi Arabia is via a process called electrodialysis.
IDE is owned by two mega-industrial companies in Israel. The chemical company ICL has a 50 percent stake in IDE (this company also extracts potash and chemicals from the Dead Sea) and Delek Group, an energy and infrastructure investment company and holding tank, owns the other half.
The new desalination plant at Hadera is the largest of its kind in the world, and is expected to produce enough water for one in six Israelis.
Not an environmentally correct solution
Environmentalists in Israel do not see desalination as a definitive long-term solution for solving the water crisis in Israel and the Middle East, however. One prominent group is Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), whose Israel director Gidon Bromberg points out that desalination plants have a lot of corporate money at stake, in the hands of a few stakeholders.
In addition, in the context of climate change and protection of local environments, reliance on the extremely energy-intensive and pollution-emitting desalination process doesn’t appear to be a viable long-term solution, he says.
Bromberg and others dedicated to the protection of local water resources suggest that water-strapped countries like Israel, Jordan and others in the region first identify more effective means of reducing water use at home and cut back on water-intensive agricultural practices.
This debate between industry and the environment isn’t new, and now is the time to create common ground and circumvent a crisis, Shmulik Shai, general manager of H2ID, the Hadera desalination plant, tells me.
He says that for the past five years Israel has been facing a severe shortage in its three main sources of water: The Sea of Galilee, its mountain aquifer and its coastal aquifers. Below the red line in terms of volume and nitrates, if the country doesn’t find a solution now, these sources could be damaged indefinitely, he warns.
“The balance of rainwater is not good enough,” says Shai. If there’s one short season of rain and a spike in population, Israel’s semi-arid climate could find itself with a “chronic shortage problem,” he continues. And while 70 percent of the country’s water is supplied by rain that falls in the winter months, there are periods of drought in Israel when the rain does not come down at all. To make things worse, rainfall is not evenly distributed, he remarks.
The new plant will furnish a good portion of the 750 million cubic meters of water that Israelis require for personal use, he says. And among the desalination technologies that the Hadera plant utilizes are those developed by IDE, including new processes and new mechanisms, such as how to pressurize the water. To date, IDE has constructed some 400 desalination plants in 40 countries, with a total water output of 2,000,000 cubic meters per day.
Put down your matkotand take a tour of Greenpeace’s flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, this week.
Beachgoers on Tel Aviv and Haifa’s shores will be seeing something a little different over the next days, in the form of Greenpeace International’s famous flagship – the Rainbow Warrior. The most famous of all of Greenpeace’s eco-activist ships, the Rainbow Warrior’s name was inspired by a native American prophecy that predicted a time when human greed would make the earth sick and a band of warriors would descend from a rainbow to heal it. And so the ship travels the globe, protesting environmental crimes and disasters.
Profitability + altruism + saving the planet? Yosef I. Abramowitz from Arava Power, Kibbutz Ketura Israel – one of the latest ventures in clean tech launched from an Israeli kibbutz.
The Kibbutz Movement celebrated its centenary in 2010, but the last decades of the 20th Century were not kind to Israel’s collective settlements. The shift in Israel’s economy, politics and society beginning in the late 70s stripped the kibbutzim of their status and pioneering role, and brought harsh economic realities to their doorsteps. Being the pioneer elite for Zionism was no longer enough; kibbutzim were now required to pay their own way as well.
The patient has now stabilised, but in many cases this has meant kibbutzim having to abandon their socialist ideals and privatise their internal economies. While kibbutzim still offer an attractive lifestyle, based on their bucolic setting and community orientation, they have not managed to regain their sense of mission and purpose and leadership role in Israeli society. They are moving into the business of clean tech, Bloomberg reports.
Israel’s solar, water and other cleantech companies showcased their products this week at an exhibition in Tel Aviv.(Image via Israel Export Institute)
In his keynote address at the Cleantech 2010 Expo in Tel Aviv yesterday, the governor of Israel’s central bank, Stanley Fischer, emphasized the potential of cleantech as a growth engine for Israel and called for increased private investment to drive this growth.
“The field can serve as an engine for growth, and assist in diversifying exports and export [markets] and thereby reduce harm from [economic] crises. In addition, developing the sector will help promote environmental issues in Israel, reduce Israel’s dependence on imported fuel and assist Israel’s integration in the OECD,” Fischer explained, as reported in the Haaretz daily.
If you like to beguile the slow, hot summer hours with a good food book, you will love this one.
Author Peter Mayle, famous for his series of books on life in Provence as a British ex-pat, traveled left Provence to get a better taste of food festivals in other regions. He sat down at long trestle tables all over France and celebrated frog’s legs with plenty of garlic. Blissful cheeses. Chickens with blue feet.
Mayle experiences a wine tasting that goes on all afternoon and needs “a medicinal bottle of champagne” to cure the resulting hangover. (Something like what this reviewer experienced after the IsraWine Expo 2010.)A truffle auction that kicks off at early Mass. A marathon where sweating, cross-dressing runners wait for each other to catch up. Hilariously, the proper etiquette involved in kissing a fellow Frenchman.
I have quite a taste for post-apocalyptical fantasies myself (such as Cormac McCarthy’s chilling ‘The Road’, reviewed here earlier on GP), so I picked up ‘Everyone Can Be A Hero’ with some eagerness. It is a novel for teenagers set in a Britain devastated by a nuclear accident, where the remaining population is forced to return to the skills of the past in order to survive – quite a contrast to books like Let the Snog Fest Begin! or the ubiquitous Twilight series which throng the 12+ shelves in Waterstones and other bookshops.
The cover of ‘Everyone Can Be a Hero‘ is promising. It’s made of cardboard, laced with rough string, and my worries that this would mean it would be hard to open the book properly were not fulfilled. The paper is recycled. All of which sets the scene well for a new reality in which resources are scarce. Life is indeed different in this 2040 world. Roads have returned to wilderness. Children skate to school. Families all have allotments and grow their own food. There are some great ideas in here: I particularly liked the annual M1 sailboarder race.
For many mothers in the Middle East, breastfeeding in public is an issue because of modesty. In my post on breastfeeding in hijab, I mentioned Muslim women who use nursing covers. In this post I’ll explain what a cover does and how to choose one that is functional, comfortable and “green.”
Libyan pivot irrigation at Al KHufrah Oasis: These are not crop circles or part of an Alien movie plot!
Libya, in North Africa, now drilling for oil with BP is a country that is not exactly known for having ample quantities of fresh water let alone enough water to be used to any extent in agriculture. Yet this North African desert country, ruled by a man who most people consider to be a bit “eccentric” (if not entirely off the wall) has been involved for years in growing crops by a method known as pivot irrigation.
Jonathan Gilben, co-founder of GoEco, talks about his passion for eco-tourism. (Jonathan pictured at the center of this photograph and in the video clip below.)
A few weeks ago we wrote about GoEco, an organization founded by Jonathan Gilben and Jonathan Tal in 2005 that has pioneered bringing the concept of volunteer eco-tourism to Israel. We were so inspired by the organization’s altruistic mission and by its ability to attract good-doing volunteers that we decided to get in touch with Jonathan (Gilben, that is) and hear a little more about their programs.
To make up for the gap in its traditional supplies, the Libyan government, headed by Gaddafi, undertook the largest civil engineering project in the world, popularly known as The Great Man Made River Project (GMMR), to green the northern deserts of Libya
Libya invests $20 billion in massive man made river to irrigate the thirsty nation. It took new roads to build, and a vast amount of resources. So far investment interest from the US has been poor.
BENGHAZI, Libya — From the sky, Libya’s Grand Omar Mukhtar Reservoir resembles a shimmering blue circle nestled in the desert sands. At ground level, the artificial lake is so vast that it’s impossible to photograph the whole structure with anything but a fisheye lens.
In fact, it takes a good 10 minutes to drive around the reservoir’s 3.5-kilometer perimeter gravel road. Holding 24 million cubic meters of water, Omar Mukhtar is the second-largest reservoir in the world — and a crucial element in Libya’s ambitious, $20 billion Great Man-Made River (GMMR) project.
“Before the implementation of the GMMR, the Libyan people were desperate for a few drops of water throughout the year,” says a government brochure describing the project. “Now, with a daily flow of over six million cubic meters, there is enough water to supply each citizen in the Great Jamahiriya with over 1,000 liters per day. In addition, 135,000 hectares of land will be freed from drought.”
The GMMR ranks easily as the largest and most expensive irrigation project in world history. Conceived in the late 1960s, its mission is simple: to pump water from Libya’s vast, underground Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the south to populated coastal areas in the north where most of the country’s six million inhabitants live and work.
Phase I of the GMMR, with a price tag of $5.5 billion, commenced in 1984 and since 1991 brings two million cubic meters of water daily from the immense Sarir and Tazerbo basins 1,200 kilometers north to the coastal strip between Sirte and Benghazi.
Phase II, costing just over $8 billion, carries 2.5 million cubic meters per day from the Murzuq Basin, feeding the cities between Sirte and Tripoli. Libya’s capital received its first supplies of GMMR water in September 1996.
Following the completion of Phase II, a third phase — estimated to cost $6 billion — was built to connect the two existing networks. Total production of the GMMR comes to 6.43 million cubic meters a day, using 1,149 production wells, most of them more than 500 meters deep.
Over the next 50 years, cumulative investment is expected to hit $33.7 billion, with total production of 120 billion cubic meters of water, said quality control manager Salim al-Hawari.
Without the GMMR, it’s evident that Libya would soon face a crisis of enormous proportions. According to the UN Development Program, available renewable water per person in Libya is expected to drop from the 1955 benchmark of 4,103 cubic meters annually to only 332 cubic meters by 2025.
Al-Hawari bushed off concerns by environmentalists that the water in the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System — which accumulated during the last ice age — may actually run out within half a century at present rates of consumption.
“Total volume of fresh groundwater stored in the Nubian Aquifer is about 373 billion cubic meters. Therefore, if annual groundwater extraction of 1.38 billion cubic meters remains constant, recoverable reserves should last for a period of 4,860 years,” said the engineer, interviewed at GMMR’s Phase II headquarters in Qasser Bin Ghashir, just outside Tripoli.
To put things into perspective, the total quantity of cement used to build the GMMR is enough to build a concrete road from Tripoli to Sydney, Australia. If superimposed on a map of the United States, the GMMR — which Col. Muammar Qaddafi has called the “eighth wonder of the world” — would easily stretch from Louisiana to western New Mexico and up into northern Colorado.
Despite its massive cost, civil engineer Abdulmajid M. Elgaoud said Libya had no other alternative.
“I think it’s quite clear,” said Elgaoud, who as secretary of the People’s Committee has overall responsibility for the GMMR’s management and implementation. He said his country’s options were limited to piping fresh water from Greece across the Mediterranean to Libya; transporting water by ship or building desalination plants.
Based on official studies, the Great Man-Made River Authority (website not working Nov, 2019) concluded that one Libyan dinar would buy 0.74 cubic meters of piped water, 0.79 cubic meters of desalinated water or 1.05 cubic meters of water transported by ship. By comparison, the GMMR provides a whopping nine cubic meters of freshwater for that same Libyan dinar.
“Desalination plants were among the options, but so far, it’s expensive, because we’d have to generate power and then use this power to run the desal plants. So accordingly, if the cost of power is high, so would the cost of desalinated water. That’s one reason the water from our project is much more feasible,” Elgaoud said.
In addition, he explained, “the desalination plants would be on the coast, and the water needed for agriculture is inland, so you’d have to pump the desalinated water again to irrigated areas, and that would be expensive. So in fact, the cost of our tap water today is 28 cents per cubic meter, while desalinated water wouldn’t cost less than 85 cents. And when you add that to the cost of pumping the water inland, it comes to between $2.50 and $3.00 per cubic meter. So in fact, our water is quite economical.”
At present, 70 percent of the water produced by the GMMR goes to agriculture, with another 28 percent for municipal use (drinking water) and the remaining 2 percent for factories and industries.
All pipes used in the project are manufactured in Libya in accordance with American Water Works Association standards. Two factories, in Sarir and Brega, produce a combined 200 four-meter-diameter pipes per day. Since production began in September 1986, the two plants have manufactured around 530,000 pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes weighing 75 to 83 metric tons apiece. Laid end to end, the pipes would stretch 4,000 kilometers.
“We monitor the pipes 24 hours a day using satellite technology, because if there’s any corrision, the pipes will burst,” said Elgaoud, noting that several thousands of kilometers of special-haul roads had to be built across the desert just to transport the pipes to where they needed to go. The pipes are laid in trenches seven meters deep and must be buried underground, he said, because of the extremely high pressures involved.
Elgaoud said the GMMR continues to expand, offering enormous potential for joint ventures and investment by American companies. “But this depends on the willingness of American companies to come and establish joint ventures,” he said. “Honestly, we expected more interest than we’ve seen up to now.”
On the other hand, Elgaoud praised an irrigation venture between his agency and two U.S. equipment manufacturers, Valmont and Case, that aims to grow wheat, corn and other crops on previously unusable land. “We think this project could be an example for other investments if it succeeds,” he said, “and I think it’s going to succeed.”
(This guest post is written by Larry Luxner, journalist and photographer.)
New construction in the West Bank, a national water scandal, a shift to green by kibbutzim, and more headlines related to Israeli cleantech and the environment.Image via alicia bramlett.
During the week of June 22, 2010 news spread that a male birth control pill has been created (by an Israeli professor). Such a pill, once on the market, could help protect the environment as well. Meanwhile, BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has Israel carefully planning its delivery of the natural gas it recently discovered, and BrightSource Energy’s planned solar plant in the Mojave Desert is expected to be the most efficient in the world. For these stories and more, see this week’s headlines below.
It’s as though oil drilling has reached a holding pattern off the Red Sea coast of Egypt as the media, investors, drilling companies, governments and NGOs work to establish or even decide on the cause of the oil spill off the coast of Egypt’s Red Sea last week. Some say the spill was caused by a leaking rig; others blame the spill on the hot weather releasing oil from previous bilge dumps (like from Russian tankers). But stocks of oil and gas companies invested in the region are taking a nosedive. Bloomberg reports that stocks of the Maridive & Oil Services SAE, an Egyptian marine and oil services company, fell to their lowest levels in the past 13 months. The spill, lo and behold, will hurt the company’s profits.
New agriculture projects feed Libya, thanks to the Great Man Made River. The artificial irrigation project, the most expensive in history, is good while it lasts.
As major oil companies pull out of Iran, analysts differ over the import of new economic sanctions.
Aerial view of the new desalination plant in Hadera.
Inside the Hadera desalination facility in Israel. 
Profitability + altruism + saving the planet? Yosef I. Abramowitz from Arava Power, Kibbutz Ketura Israel – one of the latest ventures in clean tech launched from an Israeli kibbutz. 
Israel’s solar, water and other cleantech companies showcased their products this week at an exhibition in Tel Aviv. (Image via Israel Export Institute)
If you like to beguile the slow, hot summer hours with a good food book, you will love this one. 
I have quite a taste for post-apocalyptical fantasies myself (such as Cormac McCarthy’s chilling ‘The Road’, reviewed 
Libyan pivot irrigation at Al KHufrah Oasis: These are not crop circles or part of an Alien movie plot!
New construction in the West Bank, a national water scandal, a shift to green by kibbutzim, and more headlines related to Israeli cleantech and the environment.Image via 
A Maridive rescue boat.