Abbotsford farmer says he's first in B.C. to grow saffron — the world's most expensive spice

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Avtar Dhillon has more than 250,000 saffron crocus growing on his farm

Jessica Cheung · CBC News · Posted: Nov 13, 2021 1:00 AM PT | Last Updated: 7 hours ago

Avtar Dhillon is shown at his saffron patch on his farm in Abbotsford, B.C. (Gian-Paolo Mendoza/CBC)

When Avtar Dhillon was looking for a crop to grow at his farm in Abbotsford, B.C., he thought, why not try the world's most expensive spice — saffron.

So Dhillon purchased a number of crocus sativus bulbs — commonly known as the saffron crocus — from Kashmir and planted them on his 25-acre farm.

Now Dhillon has more than 250,000 bulbs in his crop at Ramsar Berry Farm. He believes he's the first farmer to plant and harvest saffron in British Columbia — and one of only a handful of people to do it in the country.

When asked by CBC News, B.C.'s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food said it doesn't know of any other farms in the province growing saffron.

"I want to do something different and profitable," Dhillon told CBC Vancouver. "Nobody is growing here, and then I'm thinking, 'Why [can't I] try the saffron?'"

Each flower from the saffron crocus is hand-picked and produces three crimson stigmas, or threads, of saffron. The threads are then dried at room temperature for a couple of days, after which they are ready to sell. (Gian-Paolo Mendoza/CBC)

Saffron is an ancient spice with a distinctive taste and colour, commonly used for seasoning and as a colouring agent for food and textiles.

The saffron crocus usually grows in hot, arid weather, with 90 cent of the world's production coming out of Iran. But Dhillon found that B.C.'s wet climate has actually aided in the plants' growth.

Over five years, Dhillon tried different methods for growing the spice before finding one that works. He says the moisture in the air and rainfall keeps the soil moist and contributes to good growth, with flowers taking around four to five weeks to grow.

One bulb can grow up to 10 purple flowers, Dhillon said. Each flower is then hand-picked and produces three crimson stigmas, or threads, of saffron. The threads are then dried at room temperature for a couple of days, after which they are ready to sell.

Dhillon said 400,000 stems equals around one kilogram of saffron, which can be sold at around $50,000 to $65,000.

Dhillon has found that one saffron crocus bulb can grow up to 10 purple flowers. (Gian-Paolo Mendoza/CBC)

The farm is a family affair, with Dhillon running the business with his brother and their families. They all live together and everyone lends a helping hand when it comes time to gather the flowers and pick the threads.

"I'm very excited," said Dhillon. "And local businesses from Vancouver, they are already approaching me to ask to buy local saffron."

Around four businesses have already expressed interest in the locally grown saffron, he said.

The Acorn Restaurant in Vancouver is one of them. The vegetarian eatery has a focus on local farmers and foragers, with the aim of keeping the menu local.

"To have a farmer in B.C. who's growing saffron means, suddenly, we have access to saffron. Whereas before, it would be something that we probably wouldn't cook with, because we can't get it in Canada," said Kate Martin, one of The Acorn's cooks.

Ramsar Berry Farm is owned by Dhillon and his brother. Both of their families live together and lend a hand in harvesting the flowers and picking the saffron threads. (Gian-Paolo Mendoza/CBC)

Warming weather pushing farmers to be creative with crops

Farmers experimenting with new crops is becoming more common, said Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley.

She chalks it up to a changing climate, which is pushing farmers to increasingly become creative with what they can grow. Dhillon's saffron venture is a perfect example, she said.

"People are always looking for better crops," said Newman. "The climate is getting significantly warmer, so there's a chance to try some interesting new crops."

Dhillon himself said he first began searching for a new crop to add to his farm when the prices he was getting for his blueberry harvests began to drop.

Dhillon bought his saffron crocus bulbs from Kashmir, India, and planted them on his farm in Abbotsford, B.C. (Gian -Paolo Mendoza/CBC)

With files from Baneet Braich and Gian-Paolo Mendoza

'Those are our ancestors in the sky:' Sacred beliefs about the Northern Lights

Joely Bigeagle-Kequahtooway is Nakoda Cree Saulteaux and says she was taught at a young age not to look at, whistle at or disturb the sacred lights.

(Photo courtesy Chris Ratzlaff)


Teri Fikowski
CTV News Calgary Video Journalist
Updated Nov. 10, 2021 

CALGARY -

Albertans have been spoiled with a lot of sightings of the Northern Lights recently but not everyone believes you should actually look at the Aurora Borealis.

Simply put, the recent increase in those magical night skies in the prairies comes down to the sun’s cycle and longer nights.

“We’re starting to see the sun pick up in its 11 year cycle and in its activity and we’re seeing an uptick in sun spot numbers. Associated with sun spots are these solar flare events,” explains Roland Deschene with Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.


There are scientific explanations but there are also cultural ones. Many Indigenous peoples have a special relationship with the Northern Lights.

Joely Bigeagle-Kequahtooway is Nakoda Cree Saulteaux and says she was taught at a young age not to look at, whistle at or disturb the sacred lights.

“Those are our ancestors in the sky and what that means literally and figuratively is we’re not alone on this planet,” she says. “The stories I was told were those Northern Lights represent this timeless energy, timeless energy period of when our ancestors lived on this land.”

BigEagle-Kequahtooway says she remembers an experience when she was younger driving with a group of friends when they spotted the Northern Lights.

“As young people you want to challenge the teaching of 'don’t whistle' or 'don’t be loud or boisterous' or 'don’t be looking at the Northern Lights' because those are our ancestors and if you do they might come down because you’re calling them,” she says. “I remember this one drive between where I’m from and this city...we seen the Northern Lights and we were challenging this teaching and suddenly it seemed like the Northern Lights surrounded us and we became quiet, because were weren’t sure to why it seemed they were closer than they should have been.”

She says she’s heard different stories from different cultures but all have the same theme.

“The overall teaching is just a respect for Mother Nature and the respect for the natural laws of this earth,” she says.

She says while many don’t agree with taking images of the Northern Lights she believes culture has to evolve.

"To me it comes down to if you do take photos of Northern Lights and you have reverence and respect and also know the meaning, then for me I think you can take photos."

CHASING THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

Chris Ratzlaff is behind the Alberta Aurora Chasers and has been hunting down the Northern Lights for more than a decade.

“When you’re looking up at the sky and it’s dancing and shimmering and moving all over the place, every time it’s magical. Every time you’re just like, ‘holy cow!’”

He has been thrilled with the recent increase in light shows and says it’s hard to know exactly when they’ll make an appearance and that’s something the Facebook group tries to flag and educate people about.

CALGARY

(Photo courtesy Chris Ratzlaff)

“Not only is it about catching the aurora and knowing when to be out and see it which means going out in the middle of the night and staying out to three or four a.m. sometimes,” he says. “There is also the community we’re involved with. The community has exploded in the last year we’ve almost tripled in size to close to 150,000 members.”

Ratzlaff finds the Indigenous lens on the Northern Lights fascinating and says it makes him appreciate the spectacular sights even more.

“It really brings out the sense how cultural and how much apart of our identity aurora can be.”

‘Trickery and bad faith’: The Ontario government approved new mining permits using a map a local First Nation says is outdated and inaccurate

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When deciding to approve a flurry of mining permits in the province’s northwest corner, the Ontario government turned to a more than 30-year-old map of the Grassy Narrows First Nation.

The exploratory drilling would happen beyond the fringe of the First Nation, according to the map. So, the government decided, there was no need to consult the nearby Indigenous community.

The government was knowingly using an outdated and inaccurate map, members of the First Nation charge, green-lighting drilling and excavation in areas where the residents say they go for moose hunting, picking berries and camping.

“Grassy Narrows has been crystal clear for many years about the area that we use and want to protect. The only reason I can see to use a different map is trickery and bad faith,” Grassy Narrows spokesperson JB Fobister said.

The First Nation says it has provided the government with an updated map of the area — what is now called an Indigenous Sovereignty and Protected Area — multiple times over the last decade.

For Grassy Narrows, where generations of residents have suffered from mercury poisoning after a pulp mill upstream dumped its industrial waste into the river, the mining permits present yet another threat to their community.

“Our land and our way of life are already at the breaking point because of the ongoing impacts of residential schools, hydro dams, mercury poisoning, and clear-cut logging,” Fobister said.

Mining, he added, would “further fragment and degrade” the environment.

Drew Campbell, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources and Forestry, wrote in an email that Ontario is committed to meeting the Crown’s duty to “consult with Indigenous communities and strives to strengthen relationships with these communities.”

Campbell said the government is “reviewing the circumstances in which these permits were issued,” and the ministry is willing to meet with members of Grassy Narrows “to discuss and resolve these issues.”

Grassy Narrows officials say they were not informed about the exploration permits before they were issued between August 2019 and February 2021. They only stumbled upon the active permits in April.

The eight permits collectively cover more than 42,000 acres, about a third of which falls within Grassy Narrows’ area, according to the First Nation.

Under Ontario’s Mining Act, the government has a duty to consult Indigenous communities potentially affected by mining activities before deciding whether to issue a permit.

The ministry spokesperson said the province consults with Indigenous communities about exploration mining applications where they understand that proposed project activities have a potential to “adversely affect a community’s established or credibly asserted Aboriginal and/or treaty rights.”

The ministry did not notify Grassy Narrows about the eight mining permits because they “lay outside” of what the government understood at that time was the First Nation’s traditional land, a spokesperson said.

“Over time, (Grassy Narrows) has asserted jurisdiction over a significantly larger area of provincial Crown land than community members had previously identified as the community’s traditional land use area,” Campbell said.

Grassy Narrows officials told Torstar the old map was hastily made in the 1980s and was not accurate. They say it had been replaced a decade ago.

As early as 2011, the First Nation submitted an updated map of Grassy Narrows during a court battle to determine whether the government had the power to authorize clear-cut logging in the area.

Over the last decade, Grassy Narrows says it has submitted the same updated map to the Ontario government on multiple occasions. In 2017, the updated area map was included in the province’s 10-year management plan for logging part of the Whiskey Jack Forest, home to Grassy Narrows and where clear-cut logging has been suspended.

The area of the new map was not challenged by the government, according to Grassy officials.

Grassy Narrows has also requested the land outlined in the map be designated by the federal government as an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA).

IPCAs are lands and waters where Indigenous governments take on a primary role in protecting and conserving an ecosystem. That role includes determining the boundaries and land management plans. No decision on the designation has been made.

Campbell said in September 2018 the ministry reached out to Grassy Narrows about an additional permit application — not one of the eight permits that cover 42,000 acres — that overlapped Grassy Narrows territory according to the old map. He said there was no response.

Fobister said Grassy officials never received any correspondence on the application.

The ministry approved that permit in 2019.

“In general, it is not honourable to send a letter to a community in crisis and then to charge ahead with potentially damaging industrial activities if you don’t hear back,” Fobister said.

Grassy Narrows officials say they requested dispute resolution under the Mining Act as a response to an email from the ministry staff inviting discussion on the map for the Indigenous protected area.

The invitation came June 25 — more than a year after the first of the eight permits was approved — and after the Indigenous community repeatedly wrote to the ministry for information about the permits.

Minister Greg Rickford has agreed to meet Grassy Narrows officials to discuss dispute resolution and the early exploration permits in question.

Ontario approved these exploration permits at a time when Grassy Narrows saw a surge in active mining claims.

An April 2021 Torstar investigation found the area covered by mineral claims had expanded fourfold on Grassy Narrows territory since October 2018, when the First Nation made a land declaration banning industrial activities — including mineral staking and mining — on its territory.

The Doug Ford government came under fire for facilitating mining on the territory while alleged mercury dumps upstream have not been excavated.

A ministry spokesperson had attributed the increase in gold claims to soaring mineral prices as well as the discovery of gold on a nearby property in 2018. He also noted that the overwhelming majority of claim registrations and exploration projects do not result in an operating mine.

Toronto Star investigations have previously identified two suspected mercury dump sites upstream from the Indigenous community, where residents have long suffered mental and physical health problems due to mercury poisoning.

Fish near Grassy Narrows remain the most contaminated in the province, and scientists strongly suspect that old mercury still contaminates the mill site and pollutes the river.

The spokesperson said the ministry is holding mill site owner Domtar responsible for assessing the extent of mercury contamination in and around the site.

Vegan Glitter Is Here and Now We're Never Going to Be Rid Of It

Instead of vanquishing glitter, scientists just made it biodegradable. Thanks?

By Andrew Liszewski


“The photograph shows three vials containing an ensemble of photonic CNC particles dispersed in three different solvents: water, water: ethanol and ethanol. The particles are the same in the three vials, the colour difference between the three vials results from the ability of water to swell the structure of the particles. Higher water content means greater swelling of the cholesteric structures and a redshift of the colour of the particles.”

Photo: Benjamin Droguet


The only thing worse than getting a year older on your birthday is opening a card to find someone has hi-lariously pranked you with a mountain of glitter. It’s not only annoying, the stuff is bad for the planet—or at least it was. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have created a non-toxic vegan glitter alternative that ensures those shiny little particles aren’t going anywhere.

We now know that the thousands of tons of microplastics used in products like cosmetics and face-scrubbing soaps are especially bad for the environment, but not before the tiny non-biodegradable particles found their way into our oceans, our national parks, and even plants. It’s a serious pollutant we may never be able to clean up at this point, but we can work toward completely eliminating the production and use of microplastics.

Modern glitter is an absolute nightmare on many levels, and not just because it seems to end up on everything long after someone opened a sparkly birthday card or took their macaroni art to the next level. It’s made from tiny flecks of plastic and aluminum and is not only difficult to assemble, but requires a lot of energy to produce, including a trip through an incredibly hot energy-hungry furnace to make it shiny and reflective.


The photograph is a close-up of the glass slide that has been covered with gold flakes with high lighting contrast and observed at larger angle.

Photo: Benjamin Drouguet

The obvious and ideal solution would be to ban glitter forever, but now that’s not going to happen thanks to a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge. (Insert a sarcastic “thanks!” here.) In a recently published paper, the team details a new approach to creating glitter-like particles from “colloidal particles of cellulose nanocrystals” which are sourced from the cellulose building blocks of trees, plants, and fruits and vegetables. Instead of using pigments or dyes to generate color, it’s the structure of the nanocrystals themselves that bend and reflect light to produce vibrant and visible shades in a similar technique to how peacock feathers and butterflies produce their vibrant colors.

Even if these non-toxic vegan glitter particles lasted for a billion years, their color would not fade or change, assuming the physics of light in our universe remain the same. But these particles won’t be around that long because they’re completely bio-degradable and will eventually just break down when discarded. This type of glitter is also easier to manufacture, as the researchers have developed a process where a cellulose solution is applied to a thin material that can then be peeled away when it’s completely dry, leaving a film that can be ground up to produce a desired consistency of glitter. One day your anger toward a friend who filled a birthday card with glitter will still be completely justified, but maybe you’ll be slightly less furious—you know, for the environment.

Glitter is an environmental disaster. So scientists invented an eco-friendly version

Don't worry -- it's just as annoying as it has ever been.

Monisha Ravisetti
Nov. 11, 2021 

Normally, glitter microplastics pollute oceans and slowly enter the food chain. Scientists are rethinking the sparkly decoration and producing the environment-friendly glitter above.

Benjamin Droguet/University of Cambridge

We have a love-hate relationship with glitter. It's undeniably sparkly, cute and festive. But dip your hand into a jar of the iridescent plastic particles, and you'll spend the next year finding specks of it in surprising places.

Those places could range from your hair and clothes all the way to oceans and lakes, where microplastics, or minuscule nonbiodegradable bits like glitter, become an environmental hazard.

Nevertheless, glitter continues to adorn the shelves of art studios, appear in cosmetics and star in holiday wrapping paper. That's why scientists from the University of Cambridge have invented an eco-friendly alternative inspired by fresh fruit and nature's own glimmery structures: butterfly wings, peacock feathers and buttercups.

The glistening invention is even vegan, as opposed to some other cosmetic glitter products that include glycerin, which is derived from animal fats.

"It will be just as annoying -- but it won't harm the planet and is safe for your little ones," Silvia Vignolini, a professor at Cambridge's Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, said in a statement. She's the senior author of a paper on the sustainable glitter published Thursday in the journal Nature Materials.

The glitter is vegan.

Benjamin Droguet/University of Cambridge

Instead of building glitter from toxic plastic, her team created thin, shimmery films from cellulose, a material found in the cell walls of plants, vegetables and fruit. They put the cellulose into the form of nanocrystals, which dictate the film's color through a phenomenon called structural coloring.

A shimmery film of nanocrystals will soon become beautiful and glimmery specks.

Benjamin Droguet

With structural coloring, the angle of the nanocrystals forces light to scatter in a particular way, emitting a certain color. It's the same thing that happens with butterfly wings and other beautiful features of nature, which is why some sparkly insects seem to change color when exposed to different types of lighting.

Traditional minerals used to produce color typically must be heated to a whopping 800 degrees Celsius (1,472 degrees Fahrenheit), said Benjamin Droguet, a researcher in the Cambridge chemistry department and first author on the paper. As you might imagine, that heating process takes up a ton of energy and indirectly harms the planet through the use of fossil fuels.

"Conventional pigments, like your everyday glitter, are not produced sustainably," Vignolini said. "They get into the soil, the ocean and contribute to an overall level of pollution. Consumers are starting to realize that while glitters are fun, they also have real environmental harms."

Once the team's opalescent film is ground up, the resulting nontoxic, glimmery grains are identical to plastic, hazardous glitter. They might even have a leg up. Unlike normal glitter, the vivid color won't fade even after a century, the researchers say.

A closeup of the team's gold glitter.

Benjamin Droguet/University of Cambridge

The mechanism of generation can also be easily scaled up, they say, ensuring that industrial equipment can replace toxic glitter with the biodegradable form for commercial use.

Aside from the issues related to pigments, microplastics like familiar glitter are also unsafe for the environment. They aren't biodegradable, so they end up clogging sewage pipes, hurting marine animals and even entering the human body.

A coating of the team's novel glitter on a wood plank.

Benjamin Droguet/University of Cambridge

While glitter on its own doesn't comprise a significant portion of microplastics in the ocean, its limited quantity has allowed it to escape scrutiny even though it's part of the bigger problem. Recently, makeup companies have attempted to cut back on their use of glitter to prevent adverse ecological consequences, but unfortunately, experts in the cosmetics industry have struggled to reach consensus on environmentally friendly, yet glittery, cosmetic products.

Said Vignolini, "We believe this product could revolutionize the cosmetics industry by providing a fully sustainable, biodegradable and vegan pigment and glitter."

First published on Nov. 11, 2021 at 9:32 a.m. PT.

Humans Have Broken One of The Natural Power Laws Governing Earth's Oceans


(Má Li Huang Mù/EyeEm/Getty Images)


TESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS
12 NOVEMBER 2021

Just as with planetary or molecular systems, mathematical laws can be found that accurately describe and allow for predictions in chaotically dynamic ecosystems too – at least, if we zoom out enough.

But as humans are now having such a destructive impact on the life we share our planet with, we're throwing even these once natural universalities into disarray.

"Humans have impacted the ocean in a more dramatic fashion than merely capturing fish," explained marine ecologist Ryan Heneghan from the Queensland University of Technology.

"It seems that we have broken the size spectrum – one of the largest power law distributions known in nature."

The power law can be used to describe many things in biology, from patterns of cascading neural activity to the foraging journeys of various species. It's when two quantities, whatever their initial starting point be, change in proportion relative to each other.

In the case of a particular type of power law, first described in a paper led by Raymond W. Sheldon in 1972 and now known as the 'Sheldon spectrum', the two quantities are the body size of an organism, scaled in proportion to its abundance. So, the larger they get, there tend to be consistently fewer individuals within a set species size group.

For example, while krill are 12 orders of magnitudes (about a billion) times smaller than tuna, they're also 12 orders of magnitudes more abundant than tuna. So hypothetically, all the tuna flesh in the world combined (tuna biomass) is roughly the same amount (to within the same order of magnitude at least) as all the krill biomass in the world.

Since it was first proposed in 1972, scientists had only tested for this natural scaling pattern within limited groups of species in aquatic environments, at relatively small scales. From marine plankton, to fish in freshwater this pattern held true – the biomass of larger less abundant species was roughly equivalent to the biomass of the smaller yet more abundant species.

Now, Max Planck Institute ecologist Ian Hatton and colleagues have looked to see if this law also reflects what's happening on a global scale.

"One of the biggest challenges to comparing organisms spanning bacteria to whales is the enormous differences in scale," says Hatton.

"The ratio of their masses is equivalent to that between a human being and the entire Earth. We estimated organisms at the small end of the scale from more than 200,000 water samples collected globally, but larger marine life required completely different methods."


Using historical data, the team confirmed the Sheldon spectrum fit this relationship globally for pre-industrial oceanic conditions (before 1850). Across 12 groups of sea life, including bacteria, algae, zooplankton, fish and mammals, over 33,000 grid points of the global ocean, roughly equal amounts of biomass occurred in each size category of organism.

"We were amazed to see that each order of magnitude size class contains approximately 1 gigaton of biomass globally," says McGill University geoscientist Eric Galbraith.

(Ian Hatton et al, Science Advances, 2021)

Hatton and team discussed possible explanations for this, including limitations set by factors such as predator-prey interactions, metabolism, growth rates, reproduction and mortality. Many of these factors also scale with an organism's size. But they're all speculation at this point.

"The fact that marine life is evenly distributed across sizes is remarkable," said Galbraith. "We don't understand why it would need to be this way – why couldn't there be much more small things than large things? Or an ideal size that lies in the middle? In that sense, the results highlight how much we don't understand about the ecosystem."


There were two exceptions to the rule however, at both extremes of the size scale examined. Bacteria were more abundant than the law predicted, and whales far less. Again, why is a complete mystery.

The researchers then compared these findings to the same analysis applied to present day samples and data. While the power law still mostly applied, there was a stark disruption to its pattern evident with larger organisms.

"Human impacts appear to have significantly truncated the upper one-third of the spectrum," the team wrote in their paper. "Humans have not merely replaced the ocean's top predators but have instead, through the cumulative impact of the past two centuries, fundamentally altered the flow of energy through the ecosystem."

(Ian Hatton et al, Science Advances, 2021)

While fishes compose less than 3 percent of annual human food consumption, the team found we've reduced fish and marine mammal biomass by 60 percent since the 1800s. It's even worse for Earth's most giant living animals – historical hunting has left us with a 90 percent reduction of whales.

This really highlights the inefficiency of industrial fishing, Galbraith notes. Our current strategies are wasting magnitudes more biomass and the energy it holds, than we actually consume. Nor have we replaced the role that biomass once played, despite now being one of the largest vertebrate species by biomass.

Around 2.7 gigatonnes have been lost from the largest species groups in the oceans, whereas humans make up around 0.4 gigatonnes. Further work is needed to understand how this massive loss in biomass affects the oceans, the team wrote.

"The good news is that we can reverse the imbalance we've created, by reducing the number of active fishing vessels around the world," Galbraith says. "Reducing overfishing will also help make fisheries more profitable and sustainable – it's a potential win-win, if we can get our act together."

Their research was published in Science Advances.

UNICORN TECH

Nuclear Fusion Is Close Enough to Start Dreaming

A world of cheap, clean energy may be closer than many people realize, and its consequences more profound.

By Tyler Cowen 
November 11, 2021

What happens if the coal plant is replaced by a vegetable field?
Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.”

The nuclear fusion startup Helion, which announced last week that it has raised $500 million, says it has developed new technologies that may make nuclear fusion viable — practically, economically and environmentally. It is too early to tell if its claims will pan out, but there have been so many breakthroughs lately that they cannot be dismissed.

The possibility of carbon-free energy generation raises a seldom discussed question: Just how much would it change the world if cheap and clean energy sources were truly abundant?

Keep in mind that one source of cheap, clean power will lead to others. Maybe nuclear fusion cannot be used to fly a jet plane, but perhaps it could be used to produce relatively clean hydrogen fuel, which could then be deployed in ways fusion could not. A chain reaction would occur, eventually bringing cheap, clean energy across the economy.

As an inveterate traveler, my first thought is that I would be able to get everywhere much more quickly. How about a supersonic or perhaps suborbital flight from Washington to Tokyo? A trip to Antarctica would no longer seem so daunting. Many remote places would be transformed, one hopes for the better.

One second-order effect is that countries with good infrastructure planning would reap a significant relative gain. The fast train from Paris to Nice would become faster yet, but would trains on the Acela c

Next in line: Desalinating water would become cheap and easy, enabling the transformation and terraforming of many landscapes. Nevada would boom, though a vigorous environmental debate might ensue: Just how many deserts should we keep around? Over time, Mali and the Middle East would become much greener.

How about heating and cooling? It might be possible to manipulate temperatures outdoors, so Denmark in January and Dubai in August would no longer be so unbearable. It wouldn’t be too hard to melt snow or generate a cooling breeze.

Wages would also rise significantly. Not only would more goods and services be available, but the demand for labor would also skyrocket. If flying to Tokyo is easier, demand for pilots will be higher. Eventually, more flying would be automated. Robots would become far more plentiful, which would set off yet more second- and third-order effects.

Cheap energy would also make supercomputing more available, crypto more convenient, and nanotechnology more likely.

With the relative plenty of material goods, however, people might invest more resources in status-seeking. Buying memberships into exclusive clubs — that select group of people who own an original van Gogh, say — might become relatively more expensive.

And limiting climate change would not be as simple as it might at first seem. Yes, nuclear fusion could replace all of those coal plants. But the secondary consequences do not stop there. As water desalination became more feasible, for example, irrigation would become less expensive. Many areas would be far more verdant, and people might raise more cows and eat more beef. Those cows, in turn, might release far more methane into the air, worsening one significant set of climate-related problems.

But all is not lost! Because energy would be so cheap, protective technologies — to remove methane (and carbon) from the air, for instance — are also likely to be more feasible and affordable.

In general, in a carbon-free energy world, the stakes would be higher for a large subset of decisions. If we can clean up the air, great. If not, the overall increase in radical change would create a whole host of new problems, one of which would be more methane emissions. The “race” between the destructive and restorative powers of technology would become all the more consequential. The value of high quality institutions would be much greater, which might be a worry in many parts of the world.

At least in the short run, fossil-fuel-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia would be the losers. Over the longer run, many commodity-producing nations would have to worry, as nations like China might find it easier to grow more of their own soybeans and stop buying from Brazil and Argentina. Drought-stricken areas with deserts and water problems but decent institutions could be some of the major winners; perhaps the American West would continue to gain economically on the East. All that extra land could be put to more productive use, but improving New Jersey might prove tougher.

As is so often the case with new technology, the challenges are real but the potential is enormous. I’m looking forward to whenever this new world comes to pass.

UNICORN TECH

The Race For Nuclear Fusion Is Going Private

By Haley Zaremba - Nov 11, 2021

• Nuclear fusion has been regarded as the ‘holy grail of clean energy,’ but it is an extraordinarily expensive endeavor.
• 
  
• Countries around the world have been collaborating on experiments with nuclear fusion.
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• Private firms are now jumping into the race, and investors are ready to fork over huge amounts of cash for the best and brightest in the field.

For the past 100 years, commercial nuclear fusion has existed in a realm far closer to science fiction than to scientific practice. In fact, when English mathematician and astronomer Arthur Eddington hypothesized that our sun and stars generate their own power through a process of merging atoms to create massive amounts of energy, heat, and light just a century ago, he was very nearly dismissed as a quack. But since that time, nuclear fusion has advanced by leaps and bounds, from thought experiments to lab-tested experiments, and in the last few years, to major breakthroughs that hint that commercial fusion could really finally be just around the corner.

Nuclear fusion is sought after as the “holy grail of clean energy” because it is a totally clean energy source with the potential to create essentially limitless power with absolutely zero greenhouse gas emissions if the full power of fusion reactions can be harnessed by humans. “Simply put, nuclear fusion is the process by which two light atomic nuclei combine to form a single heavier one while releasing massive amounts of energy, the International Atomic Energy Agency explains. “Fusion reactions take place in a state of matter called plasma — a hot, charged gas made of positive ions and free-moving electrons that has unique properties distinct from solids, liquids and gases.”

The trick is creating an environment here on Earth that facilitates fusion, but recreating the kind of conditions found in the core of the sun is a tall order. Amazingly, scientists are already capable of creating man-made nuclear fusion reactions in controlled spaces. The issue is that provoking these reactions requires immense amounts of energy, and so far controlled nuclear fusion experiments have not been able to produce more energy than they consume. 

Experimenting with nuclear fusion is an extraordinarily expensive endeavor. The reactors that are built big enough to achieve potentially commercially viable fusion are massive, and require huge amounts of costly materials as well as years of research and development led by some of the smartest scientists out there. Because of these massive barriers to entry, huge government projects have led the charge toward nuclear fusion. Related: Metals Will Be The Oil Of The Future

ITER, an intergovernmental project located in the South of France, has announced that it expects to reach net-positive energy in its massive tokamak reactor by 2036, with a price tag of around $22 billion. China also has an “artificial sun” which set a record for a sustained nuclear plasma reaction this summer. But now, for the first time in nuclear fusion history, private companies are entering the race to get to commercial fusion first. 

In what can be seen as a clear sign that nuclear fusion is getting close to viability, private financiers are getting involved in the research and development process and funneling money into nuclear fusion startups. Just this month, Helion Energy, based in Washington State, was the subject of what is allegedly the largest single fundraising round for a private fusion firm in history. The company raised $500 million in this round alone, and will receive another $1.7 billion, contingent on achieving designated performance milestones. Helion’s reactor has already achieved the necessary temperature threshold of 100 million degrees Celsius, and the company says it will reach net-positive energy by 2024.

“Other private companies have set similar targets: TAE Technologies in California says it will be commercially viable by 2030, while MIT’s Commonwealth Fusion Systems expects its reactor to achieve this goal by 2025,” Quartz reported this week. “The UK, which says it wants to become the first country to commercialize fusion energy, has set a more modest target. The government has invested in a £200 million ($248-million) reactor which it hopes will be viable by 2040.”

Whether by causation or correlation, the nuclear fusion industry is heating up at the same time that the rest of the world is getting serious about combating climate change. Weaning the world off of fossil fuels in time to meet the targets set by the Paris climate accord is an urgent imperative that is going to be extremely hard to meet without serious technological advances. While commercial nuclear fusion still isn’t a proven technology, the influx of new actors to the market with lofty goals of achieving net-positive energy production before mid-century is certainly a hopeful development.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

World’s Largest, Most Powerful Wind Turbine Stands Complete

The third and final 108-metre blade has been installed on Siemens Gamesa’s SG 14-222 DD prototype offshore wind turbine at the test centre in Østerild, Denmark.

Source: Siemens Gamesa

November 12, 2021, by Adnan Durakovic

With the final blade in place, the SG 14-222 DD prototype has become the world’s largest and most powerful turbine to be installed, taking the mantle from GE Haliade-X 14 MW prototype operating in the Port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

The SG 14-222 DD turbine model has a 14 MW capacity, reaching up to 15 MW using the company’s Power Boost function. The model features a 222-metre diameter rotor and a 39,000 m2 swept area.

The model is expected to be commercially available in 2024, according to Siemens Gamesa.

The 14 MW capacity allows one SG 14-222 DD machine to provide enough energy to power approximately 18,000 average European households every year. Approximately 30 SG 14-222 DD offshore wind turbines could furthermore cover the annual electricity consumption of Bilbao, Spain, the company said.

The 222-metre diameter rotor uses the new Siemens Gamesa B108 blades. Each 108-metre IntegralBlade® is cast in one piece using patented Siemens Gamesa blade technologies.

Additionally, the turbine’s 39,000 m2 swept area is equivalent to approximately 5.5 standard football pitches. It allows the SG 14-222 DD to provide an increase of more than 25 per cent in Annual Energy Production compared to the SG 11.0-200 DD offshore wind turbine, Siemens Gamesa said.

And Siemens Gamesa is not stopping there. As reported earlier this month, the turbine maker is upgrading this flagship model.

The newly introduced, enhanced SG 14‑236 DD offshore wind turbine, has a 236-metre diameter rotor, a 43,500 m2 swept area, and a capacity of up to 15 MW. The SG 14-236 DD prototype is scheduled to be installed in 2022 and the model will be commercially available in 2024.

 

Chemists discover new way to harness energy from ammonia

by Tatum Lyles Flick, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels.

The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases—rather than requires—energy, was reported Nov. 8 in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

"The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy," explains Christian Wallen, an author of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UW-Madison chemist John Berry. "It's not a great economy because we burn hydrocarbons, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We don't have a way to close the loop for a true carbon cycle, where we could transform carbon dioxide back into a useful fuel."

To move toward the United Nations' goal for the world to become carbon-neutral by 2050, scientists must consider environmentally responsible ways to create energy from elements other than carbon, and the UW-Madison team is proposing a nitrogen energy economy based on interconversions of nitrogen and ammonia.

The scientists were excited to find that the addition of ammonia to a metal catalyst containing the platinum-like element ruthenium spontaneously produced nitrogen, which means that no added energy was required. Instead, this process can be harnessed to produce electricity, with protons and nitrogen gas as byproducts. In addition, the metal complex can be recycled through exposure to oxygen and used repeatedly, all a much cleaner process than using carbon-based fuels.

"We figured out that, not only are we making nitrogen, we are making it under conditions that are completely unprecedented," says Berry, who is the Lester McNall Professor of Chemistry and focuses his research efforts on transition metal chemistry. "To be able to complete the ammonia-to-nitrogen reaction under ambient conditions—and get energy—is a pretty big deal."

Ammonia has been burned as a fuel source for many years. During World War II, it was used in automobiles, and scientists today are considering ways to burn it in engines as a replacement for gasoline, particularly in the maritime industry. However, burning ammonia releases toxic nitrogen oxide gases.

The new reaction avoids those toxic byproducts. If the reaction were housed in a fuel cell where ammonia and ruthenium react at an electrode surface, it could cleanly produce electricity without the need for a catalytic converter.

"For a fuel cell, we want an electrical output, not input," Wallen says. "We discovered chemical compounds that catalyze the conversion of ammonia to nitrogen at room temperature, without any applied voltage or added chemicals. This is the first process, as far as we know, to do that."

"We have an established infrastructure for distribution of ammonia, which is already mass produced from nitrogen and hydrogen in the Haber-Bosch process," says Michael Trenerry, a graduate student and author on the paper. "This technology could enable a carbon-free fuel economy, but it's one half of the puzzle. One of the drawbacks of ammonia synthesis is that the hydrogen we use to make ammonia comes from natural gas and fossil fuels."

This trend is changing, however, as ammonia producers attempt to produce "green" ammonia, in which the hydrogen atoms are supplied by carbon-neutral water electrolysis instead of the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process.

As the ammonia synthesis challenges are met, according to Berry, there will be many benefits to using ammonia as a common energy source or fuel. It's compressible, like propane, easy to transport and easy to store. Though some ammonia fuel cells already exist, they, unlike this new process, require added energy, for example, by first splitting ammonia into nitrogen and hydrogen.

The group's next steps include figuring out how to engineer a fuel cell that takes advantage of the new discovery and considering environmentally friendly ways to create the needed starting materials.

"One of the next challenges I would like to think about is how to generate ammonia from water, instead of hydrogen gas," Trenerry says. "The dream is to put in water, air and sunlight to create a fuel."New photocatalyst produces ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen at room temperature without fossil fuels

More information: Michael J. Trenerry et al, Spontaneous N2 formation by a diruthenium complex enables electrocatalytic and aerobic oxidation of ammonia, Nature Chemistry (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41557-021-00797-w

Journal information: Nature Chemistry 

Provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison