Applied research to verify energy crops adaptation in desert and pre-desert climate area to produce energy and greening desert
Authors: Dimitri Wanda 
Published: November 2013

PROMOTING GROUP: Green Cross Italia Onlus -GCIt (IT) team leader, ENEA (IT), AIDMO (Arab League), Renviron Foundation (EG) BACKGROUND: the high cultivation flexibility of "Jerusalem Artichock", a perennial grass worldwide known as "topinambur", and its adaptability to different and severe climatic conditions lead to the possibility to verify its exploitability in Gulf desert and pre desert areas, more precisely in Qatar, to reduce desert negative impact on climatic condition of existing sea shoreline cities. Topinambur is a particularly interesting crop for its very high sugar content in its "green phase", suitable to be transformed into high quality biogas. ENEA (www.enea.it) has, at the moment, the highest worldwide topinambur energy transformation expertise, where as GCIt has already developed many cooperation activities towards development and technology transfer projects in Africa and Latin America (Argentina, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Senegal etc.). GCIt and ENEA have already established and developed a mutually profitable cooperation on biogas technologies and several other items related to RES. Technical director of GCIt owns already a multi-decennial background on innovative biogas technology promotion in Italy, Balkan peninsula, former Soviet Union area, Middle East (Lebanon and Egypt) and Africa (Senegal). INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY PROPOSED. The "dry anaerobic digestion" process (just 2 worldwide real patent on it) is the most efficient way to produce biogas without any watersupply in the process, key factor to deploy such an unique technology in the Gulf and Middle East Area. "Dry digestion" byproduct is a certified high quality compost perfectly suited to stabilize poor or marginal soils for future agricultural uses andcombating desertification. The proposed research main topics are: 1) Validation of growth topinambur factor in Qatar, near existing sea shoreline City (to have acceptable performance not less than 50 tons per ha); 2) Evaluation and scientific certification of the compost to be produced to combat desertification (to perform high values not less than 140 m3N/ton of treated material); 3) Evaluation and scientific certification of energy to be produced by biogas (CO2minimizing and fossil fuels substitution), aimed at about 10GWh of yearly production fromeach 30,000 tons of "green topinambur" properly collected; 4) Promotion of a very promising technology as the "dry anaerobic digestion" due also to the high flexibility of the raw material, or "fuel", suitable for it (it is possible also to be envisaged to recover compost and energy by municipal solid waste organic fraction). ROLE of PROPOSERS: Green Cross Italy will guarantee the social participation and will bring the worldwide cooperation towards development expertise and some technical aspects; ENEA will participate by its high research profile and multi-decennial expertise in the biogas and solar energy fields; AIDMO will participate to guarantee the highest result spreading to the whole Arab League context and, finally, Renviron Foundation will promote and innovative NGO approach among the Middle East and Gulf Countries.