We can all agree that most humans have a pretty great relationship with water. We drink it and it keeps us alive. It doesn’t get much better than that. The issue is that beyond just drinking it (and let’s not forget that many still lack proper access to clean water) it’s also a crucial aspect of agriculture and the backbone of food production worldwide.
The challenge on the agriculture side is that not all land is created equal. Some regions are blessed with rich soil, predictable rainfall, and access to freshwater sources. Other parts of the world struggle with biblical climates, biscuit-crumb soil, and less water than Oktoberfest. That’s a pretty big problem when you consider that the global population is growing, food demand is increasing, and climate change isn’t exactly making things easier.
Deserts, in particular, are a farmer’s cold-sweat nightmare (and we mean the hot ones here, not cold deserts like Antarctica. Yes, it’s a desert). In these hellscapes, the land suffers from scorching temperatures and brackish groundwater, if there’s even water at all, making traditional agriculture nearly impossible without expensive and unsustainable water transportation methods. The solution?
Science, baby.
The Bright Idea
A group of researchers at Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University has proposed a game-changing, solar-powered system that not only desalinates water (the removal of salt) making the water viable for agriculture, but also generates electricity and produces green hydrogen. In essence, it’s an all-in-one, self-sustaining powerhouse designed to bring farming to places where nature dealt a bad hand.
At its core, the system uses bifacial photovoltaic panels, which — apart from requiring a degree to pronounce — represent a pioneering new version of solar energy that soaks up sunlight better than a Californian surfer by using both sides to maximize power generation.
The electricity generated from these panels then powers a freeze desalination process that extracts fresh water from brackish groundwater. At the same time, the system produces hydrogen via electrolysis, stores it in proposed containers such as metal hydride canisters, and later uses it to generate electricity through a fuel cell when the Sun isn’t shining. For those who love the numbers, this high-tech setup can apparently produce 52.8 cubic meters of freshwater, 6.3 MWh of air conditioning, 177 kg of hydrogen, and 2.4 MWh of electricity per day, all powered by a 10,785m² bifacial solar array.
For those who don’t love the numbers, that equates to enough fresh water to fill a small swimming pool, enough air conditioning to cool a large office building, enough hydrogen to fuel around 25 hydrogen cars for a day, and enough electricity to power about 800 homes for an hour — all from a solar array about the size of two football fields. Given that the Arabian desert alone consists of 900,000 square miles of unused land, that’s plenty of legroom to work with.
Deserting The Old Ways
It’s no secret that remote areas have long been considered too inhospitable for agriculture due to high water and energy demands, as well as a lack of necessary infrastructure. However, with this newly proposed solution presented in the desalination section of the peer-reviewed literature site, ScienceDirect, it’s entirely possible that once-avoided landscapes might now be able to sustain crops and even entire communities, possibly allowing for the creation of new cities.
This isn’t just theoretical science, either. Researchers have modeled and analyzed the system based on thermodynamic principles, and the results look promising. The system currently boasts peak energy efficiencies of 17.8% during the day and 56% at night, meaning it makes excellent use of the Sun when available and stores energy efficiently when it’s not. It could also mean a movement away from wind farms, which can be deceptively inefficient.
A Shining Future for Desert Farming
While this innovation to bring water to the desert could pave the way for self-sustaining farms in some of the planet’s driest places, scaling up such a system and making it commercially viable is going to see hurdles — like huge initial costs, energy storage limitations, infrastructure challenges, and potential maintenance issues in harsh desert conditions. Still, if this technology does take off, we might one day see lush green farms in the middle of barren deserts, powered entirely by the Sun and a bit of clever hydrogen magic.
From simple yet life-saving innovations, like the nut-sheller created by Jock Brandis to help feed famine-plagued regions, to the little engine that could power desert farming, science has the potential to solve our world’s biggest challenges.
So the next time you’re wandering through the desert, remember that maybe that oasis on the horizon isn’t a mirage after all.
