The initiative of the Sustainable Bioenergy Research Consortium (SBRC) creates a new agriculture industry, using salt water and desert land to grow salt-resistant cash crops producing biofuel in the UAE. It also supports the UAE’s growing aquaculture sector [producing seafood] that has an investment of more than Dh100 million. Daily headlines from the UAE and around the world brought to you by Gulf News. See more at: http://gulfnews.com/videos
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00:00Abu Dhabi's ambitious project to produce alternative aviation biofuel along with seafood
00:06will bring overall benefit to the economy, environment and food security.
00:11The seawater energy and agriculture system will bolster the economy by supporting the
00:16growth of multiple sectors in the UAE, such as aviation, oil refining, agriculture and
00:22aquaculture.
00:23The initiative of Sustainable Bioenergy Research Consortium creates a new agriculture industry
00:30using saltwater and desert land to grow salt-resistant cash crops producing biofuel in the UAE.
00:37It also supports the UAE's growing aquaculture sector that has an investment of more than
00:43a hundred million dirhams.
00:44The seawater energy and agriculture system consists basically of three subsystems.
00:50It's an integrated system that has an aquaculture farm, a halophyte agriculture portion and
00:57a halophyte agroforestry portion.
00:59These three subsystems work together to produce food in the form of fish and shrimp, to produce
01:06biomass from the halophyte agriculture portion and to clean the water and absorb carbon dioxide
01:12from the atmosphere through our halophyte agriculture and agroforestry subsystems.
01:18So in our halophyte agriculture subsystem, we are cultivating a plant that is called
01:24Salicornia bigelovii.
01:26This plant is an oilseed plant.
01:30It has its roots in the soil but is able to grow in desert sand using seawater.
01:37This plant produces fruit and inside this fruit we have very small seeds.
01:44These seeds contain about 30% oil.
01:48So we actually plant the seeds, we let them grow, we harvest the plants and we take these
01:58plants and we put them through a grinder so that the biomass is dissolved and then we
02:06winnow out the seeds.
02:08So we separate the seeds from the straw.
02:11We take these seeds and we use them to extract the oil, the vegetable oil from them and we
02:18obtain a seed cake or a seed meal.
02:21The oil is put through a refining process that is essentially the same as the refining
02:28process for crude petroleum and we produce what is called a synthetic paraffinic kerosene
02:34which is an alternative sustainable fuel that can be used in the aviation industry.
02:41For more information visit www.fema.gov