From sand to soil in 7 hours | Ole Morten Olesen | TEDxArendal

if we look at the consensus of the climate reports today it has one conclusion we are in trouble however game-changing technology has true history taking it into new avenues where better possibilities exists today I'm going to talk about Christian my father an inventor and an engineer and the game-changing technology that he developed through work we had established contact in Egypt because we were testing out the product and during those couple of years we finally figured out that that wasn't working and when every time professors come in and tell this isn't working you have this kind of embarrassing moment with the chief researcher and was then we started talking about so what's the best idea Egypt has had and how did you go about it and professor receive it was that even if a researcher it looked as if we're talking about this child he started digging into his office chair took up reports on clay and said that this had been up on a national level where they had decided to shovel into the ground 100 kilos per square meter and trying to get it as far down as they could but it's really difficult getting clay into the ground when you're doing it manually but that had been their best case where they had really good results unfortunately that was too expensive and so they closed the case and the report was now what he said that they are not using it anymore so feel free to look through and do whatever my father started flipping through the pages and I've known him for a couple years so I know when he has an idea so we start digging into the problem and about five months later we had filed the patents we returned happily to Egypt down to a professor Wasif and told them that we found a way that you can mix water and play just like the kids do in the kindergarten basically and we call it liquid nano clay mechanically separated the flakes with air bubbles the idea was that we suspended the clay in water water and we would just pour it onto the sand and it will go in what see if looks at us and goes we've been doing this for 70 years we've been trying to find a solution 20 of those I personally have been involved in trying to figure out with clay we try that a lot it doesn't work what happened is you pour on them deport there is a mixture onto the sand and the clay just binds on the surface and creates a crust that chokes everything to bed my father didn't know that at the time so we took up a cylinder with Sam fill it up we make a batch with liquid nano clay which was our patented the idea and we pour a poured on and the clay goes straight into the sand and binds perfectly now this sieves looks at this and he had a facial expression I've never seen before he gets up he leaves the office there's some mechanical work on one of the walls outside after while he comes back again and the work has stopped he sits down and goes okay let's do this later he confessed that he was so angry that two Hillbillies from Norway had found the solution that evaded them for so long and at the same time he was so happy that that finally was hope because he immediately knew what this would mean so we tested it as you can see there is there's a slight difference we got ridiculous results we had an increase of 416 percent what they could manage to get out of their soil when we applied the liquid nano clay to the ground and then fertilized it that was an amazing improvement but unfortunately that was also urbane because there was no researcher willing to sign off on this they all thought it was a joke they met up they saw what were they doing those are the those who paid attention all the time they knew we hadn't cheated and they asked can I have it in my backyard in my field and we say sure but would you like to sign the report and he goes no way and the reason was that he said I would be last time this is the society if I do that I will never work as a scientist again I can see the results but I cannot explain it so it took us almost six years to figure out why they were so angry about this then we find that Christian finally found out that there is a fungus that wouldn't grow in the sand without the liquid nano clay and that fungus is responsible for converting fertilizers into nutrition for plants and 80% of all plant life on Earth need that fungus to grow or to thrive so that's by accident we had found a way to make that fungus enjoy living in the desert and that was the magic now all the researchers went oh that's brilliant easy we can do that anyway so what's so game-changing about that we can make here grow a little bit in the Sun well if you look on all the deserts that exists and imagine them green that's one third of the planet that is now considered fertile farmland we had the same yield as good American Farm soil in pure desert even better we were using only one kilo of clay per square meter and we watered it in on top of that we only used one-third of the water so we were saving water we were getting ridiculous results and we could do it all over the sandy deserts but to put it into a perspective that you understand the us as we think of it is using 16% of their land mass for farm soil that is the u.s. in true scale compared to the Sahara Desert the Sahara Desert is bigger than the US and that's one desert and we can use all of that as farmland that brings us up to an almost unlimited amount of farmland that is now possible to use and where we have living where we have farmland you can have civilization you can have cities you can have forests you can do whatever you want I'm not talking about theoretical science I'm talking about practical proven technology we have planted over 10,000 trees and had several wheat fields we have pepper fields we have had date trees that we treated and all of them have improved and we thrive in pure deserts and however water is always a problem but that technology already exists today the US and China Iran and Saudi that we're all using and many other countries are using desalination that means you take salt water and turn it into fresh water by a rather energy cost that Saudi for example is using 25% of all the oil they're producing and they're producing a lot to go straight into desalination to make water for the population it's an amazing feat unfortunately it's also polluting a lot so instead you could take say a region of the desert that's nobody using anyway we plant the forest we can take some of that biomass and turn that into energy by intensive cropping and since we use a very little water we can make a lot of a biomass grow and that can be turned into mg either by bio oil or it didn't bio chip or any other emerging technology that turns biomass into energy now the reason this hasn't been so popular lately is that they were taking away farmland from farmers but now that's not a problem we need to do this to actually grow in the desert so this is what we started with and the heat when you come out well I was driving down with a car I'm European so I have air cooling in the car and then you go out of the car and you can feel being hit by the heat it's warm and we had bulldozers leveling it it was later leveled we started planting and I go yeah so we spent about seven hours and where we were using liquid nano clay just watering it on we had fertilizers and we had seeds planted and then I returned a year later and we had wheat fields we had trees five meter high and the funny thing is you all try this you go on asphalt which is warm when it's summer it's hot you feet are burning and then you go on the lawn and goes ah and the same feeling was there I went into among the trees and it was the feeling that hey I can have a picnic here this would be nice a sit in the shadows life isn't that bad so and this is something we can do all over wherever you have Sam and south of salt water we can now we have the technology to produce water food and energy that's the button that's the foundation of a society and of course a lot of jobs and you can do this anywhere there is a desert you can always transport the water China for example is now building a channel from the coast all the way up into Inner Mongolia it's just a question of will this is a little bit photoshopped picture but what is real is actually the sand dunes on both sides are the same we only leveled it and planted a wheat field and freeze the tree the background is also wrong but the point is that we can by today's technology change the future I believe we're standing on the brink of a new age an age of bio where we'll have unlimited amount of food water and power and on a local level we will produce a lot of work on a global level we will be reducing this year too because this is a carbon negative process you plant you use some of those plants for energy for food and whatever and then you plant some more and thus we can expand instead of saving we can now expand build more and fix the environment at the same time and we'll have a lot of jobs and love mg I believe this is the age that is coming is the age of bio and I'm hoping that we can build this future together thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 223,724

Rating: 4.8310122 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Norway, Technology, Biosphere, Environment, Global issues, Green, Invention, Nature, Product design

Id: stc5MUIloP0

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Stephanstewart101]

Here’s a crazy idea instead of spending 100s of billions on war and mass migration mitigation in the Middle East why don’t we make the Middle East into a place where people want to live.

[u/Stephanstewart101]

Would be cool to see this used the the South West USA.