E2EDEN LLC
A Geo-engineering firm leveraging recent advances in boring technology in the service of the most ambitious planetary transformation projects of our generation
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In contrast to cities and wall street firms, who had inflicted inflicted economic damage to agricultural communities by buying their farmland for the water, fallowing the land, and bankrupting the local businesses that serviced the farmers - we sought to partner with farmers.
Could we create imaginative solutions, that could enable farmers to save water to sell AND stay in business? Could technology and creativity enable us to drive efficiency, and unlock water as a new product farmers could sell?
To date, farmers spend $18,000+ of water to produce $4,000 worth of crop like alfalfa per acre per year!
Why?
It turns out plants, like people, sweat tremendously in the hot, dry, windswept deserts of Arizona and Imperial County, California where most of the Colorado River water is spent. These farms use 10 times the water per acre as those on the cool, humid coasts!
When you drive past these farms, you see lush green fields.
We see oceans of water being evaporated and lost.
How are these economics possible?
Because farmers pay $25/acre-ft for their water, whereas cities pay $2,500-$4,500 for the same amount, or 100x -200x as much!
Now imagine if farmers could save enough water to BOTH continue producing the same $4,000 worth of crop, employing their communities as they have done ... AND sell their extra water.
They could 3x, 4x or even 5x their revenue per acre, not only keeping their farming economies in business, but also unleashing the prosperity and investments their communities have lacked.
We believe we found just such a way
Desalination has been, and will be too expensive for desert farming at $2,500-$3,500/acre-ft.
Reverse-Osmosis requires 40-80bar of pressure, more than 2x the pressure needed to crush military submarines - requiring substantial energy and making it far too costly for farming.
An innovator named Charlie Paton realized that 90% of the water used by crops in the desert went to "sweating" to cool the plant, and had no benefit to growth or yield.
This heat, in fact stressed plants, driving down yields despite the ferocious water consumption.
Charlie creatively repurposed "evaporative filters" used to cool cattle sheds to instead cool and humidify fields.
The best part?
Salt water worked just as well as fresh water, which had the added benefit of leaving behind calcium precipitates, effectively turning the cardboard into a hard coral-like structure able to last a decade or more!
HOW IT WORKS
The effect?
A 70-90% reduction in the scarce freshwater used by the crops!
And thus "evaporative desalination" was invented, where the free heat energy in the desert air is used instead of electricity, creating a microclimate that saved freshwater instead of creating it!
WHY IT WORKS
It drops temperature and windspeed while creating humidity to dramatically cut transpiration
Short term, the farms could be run with the underground brines currently being tapped for their lithium in the region. To truly transform the region would require large amounts of salt water, yet the desert in Imperial County, like many deserts, is far from the ocean.
In 2018 the State of California issued an RFP and funded a $3M study that we submitted a proposal to to answer a similar question - how to get water, salt or fresh, to the Salton Sea?
100 years of attempts to import ocean water overland to the Salton Sea had failed and been ruled infeasible by a 2020 California State funded three year $3M study.
Tunnels offered a solution where all others had failed, boring under mountains to deliver the ocean water for not only the Salton Sea, but enough to supply thousands of acres of Saltwater Farms, freeing up enough water to supply all of Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles AND San Diego combined.
The Salton Sea could be used as a brine dump, or rehabilitated in more ambitious plans by pumping the brine back out to ocean to flush the sea and convert it into a marine environment.
In 2016 Elon Musk launched The Boring Company to revolutionize both the cost and speed of tunnel boring. 10 Years and 3 generations of machines later, we now stand on the precipice of a new paradigm infrastructure.
Bore a 75 mile tunnel under the previously impassable mountains to deliver an endless supply of ocean water to the Salton and Saltwater Farms
Constructed without modern machinery in 1939-1945, the Delaware Aqueduct ran 85 miles and to this day provides 50% of NYC's fresh water.
The Boring Company has worked to crush the costs of tunneling from $1B/mi to $10/mi and speed tunneling from 1 mile per year to 1 per week! You can visit their sites in Vegas.
Infrastructure has historically been thwarted by densely populated regions and mountains.
Tunnels unlock the ability to move fast, cheaply, and through a far less regulated space - underground.
For the first time in history, we have the opportunity to re-envision our infrastructure and unlock new solutions previously too costly or complex to attempt.
A final configuration could not only unleash agriculture in the desert, but could also flush and rehabilitate the Salton Sea. In addition to bringing in the ocean water, tunnels and pumps could remove and return the brine to the Pacific, converting the Salton from a lifeless sea into a lush, marine habitat.
Fish could be stocked, bird migrations returned and the region's economic potential unleashed as the next American riviera as was first imagined.
The framework developed here in the US Southwest to save the Colorado River and revolutionize desert agriculture could generalize to many locations around the world...
...Some of which we have already begun exploring.
