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

If we look at the consensus of today's climate reports, we have one conclusion: we are in trouble, however, the technology that changes the rules of the game has a real history that takes it to new avenues where better possibilities exist today. I'm going to talk about Christian, my father, an inventor and As an engineer and the innovative technology that he developed through work, we established contact in Egypt because we were testing the product and during those two years we finally discovered that that was not working and every time the professors come and tell him this isn't working, you had this kind of embarrassing moment with the lead researcher and that's when we started talking about what's the best idea Egypt has ever had and how you did it and the professor got it.

It seemed like we were talking about this kid, he started digging in his office chair, took reports about clay and said that this had been at the national level where they had decided to dig 100 kilos per square meter into the ground and try to get it down as much as they could, but it is very difficult to get clay into the

soil

when you do it manually, but that was their best case, where they got very good results, unfortunately, that was too expensive, so they closed the case and the report now was what said that They won't use it anymore, so feel free to check it out and do whatever.

My dad started flipping through the pages and I've known him for a couple of years so I know when he has an idea so we started. Digging deeper into the problem and about five months later we had filed the patents, we happily returned to Egypt with a Professor Wasif and told them that we had found a way to mix water and play like kids do in kindergarten, basically, and call it liquid nanoclay, we mechanically separate the flakes with air bubbles. The idea was to suspend the clay in water and just pour it into the

sand

and go in, we'll see if he looks at us and says.

We have been doing. this for 70 years we have been trying to find a solution 20 of those that I have personally been involved in trying to solve with clay we tried a lot it doesn't work what happened is you pour them sport there is a mixture on top of the

sand

and the clay just settles It adheres to the surface and creates a crust that drowns everything down to the bed. My dad didn't know it at the time, so we took a cylinder with Sam and filled it. We make a batch with liquid nanoclay which was our patented idea and we pour and the clay goes right into the sand and it bonds together perfectly now this sieve look at this and he had a facial expression I've never seen before he gets up, leaves the office, there is something mechanical working on one of the walls outside after a while he comes back again and the work stopped he sits down and says okay let's do this later he confessed that he was so angry because two Hillbillies from Norway had found the solution that they were told He had escaped for so long. and at the same time I was so happy that there was finally hope because I immediately knew what this would mean, so we tried it, as you can see, there is a slight difference, we got ridiculous results, we had a 416 percent increase from what they could.

They managed to get out of their

soil

when we applied the liquid nanoclay to the soil and then fertilized it, which was an amazing improvement, but unfortunately that was also urban because there was no researcher willing to approve this, everyone thought it was a joke. They got together they saw what they were doing those are the ones who paid attention the whole time they knew we hadn't cheated and they asked me if I can have him in my backyard in my field and we told them sure but they would like to sign the report and he is not going for any part and the reason was that he said the last time would be this is society, if I do it I will never work as a scientist again.

I can see the results but I can't explain it, so it took us almost six years to find out why they were so angry about this, then we found out that Christian finally discovered that there is a fungus that wouldn't grow in sand without the liquid nanoclay and that the fungus It is responsible for converting fertilizers into nutrients for plants and 80% of all plant life on Earth needs that fungus to grow or thrive, so we accidentally found a way to make that fungus enjoy living in the desert and that was the magic, now all the researchers said, "Oh, that's very easy, we can do it." do it anyway, so what's so innovative that we can make it grow a little in the sun here?

Well, if you look at all the deserts that exist and imagine them green, that's a third of the planet that is now considered fertile farmland that we had. the same performance as a good American Farm soil in a pure desert, even better, we used only a kilo of clay per square meter and we also irrigated it, we only used a third of the water, so we were saving water. Ridiculous results and we could do it in all the sandy deserts, but to put it in a perspective that understands that the United States as we think of it is using 16% of its land mass for agricultural land, that is, the United States.

On a real scale, compared to the Sahara Desert, the Sahara Desert is larger than the US and that is a desert and we can use all of that as farmland, which leads 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 proven practical technology, we have planted more than 10,000 trees and we have had several wheat fields. we have pepper fields, we have had date trees that we treated and they have all improved and we thrive in pure deserts and yet water is always a problem, but that technology already exists today, USA, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which we are all using. and many other countries are using desalination, which means taking salt water and turning it into fresh water at quite an energy cost.

Saudi Arabia, for example, is using 25% of all the oil they are producing and they are producing a lot to keep going. desalination to produce water for the population is an amazing feat, unfortunately it also pollutes a lot, so instead you could take, for example, a region of the desert that no one uses anyway, we plant the forest, we can take some of that biomass and convert it into energy. intensive farming and since we use very little water we can grow a large amount of biomass and that can be converted into mg either through bio-oil or without biochip or any other emerging technology that converts biomass into energy.

This hasn't been so popular lately is that they were taking farmland away from farmers but now that's not a problem we have to do this to grow in the desert so this is what we started with and the heat when it comes out , Well. I was driving with a car. I'm European so I have air conditioning in the car and then you get out of the car and you can feel the heat hitting you, it's hot and we had bulldozers leveling it, then they leveled it and we started planting. and I said, yeah, so we spent about seven

hours

and we were using liquid nanoclay, just watering it, we had fertilizer and we planted seeds and then I came back a year later and we had wheat fields, we had five meter tall trees and the funny thing is, everyone tried this, they go on asphalt, which is hot, when it's summer it's hot, their feet burn and then they go on the grass and they say oh, and the same feeling was there.

I entered between the trees and it was a sensation. Hey, I can have a picnic here, it would be nice to sit in the shadows, life isn't that bad, so this is something we can do anywhere you have Sam and south of the salt water, now we can. We have the technology to produce water, food and energy, that is the button that is the basis of a society and of course many jobs, and you can do this anywhere there is a desert, you can always transport the water. China, for example, is now building a canal from the coast. road to Inner Mongolia it's just a matter of will this is a slightly photoshopped image, but what is real is that in reality the sand dunes on both sides are the same, we just level them and plant a wheat field and freeze the tree, the background is also bad, but the point is that with today's technology we can change the future.

I believe we are on the verge of a new era, a biological era in which we will have unlimited amounts of food, water and energy, and at the local level we will have to produce a lot of work at the global level, we will reduce it this year also because this is a carbon negative process . If you plant, you use some of those plants for energy, food and whatever, and then you plant some more and then we can expand instead of Saving, now we can expand, build more and fix the environment at the same time and we will have many jobs and we will love it.

I think this is the era that is coming, it is the era of biology and I hope we can build. this future together thank you