Countryside

The countryside is now the frontline of transformation. A world formerly dictated by the seasons and the organisation of agriculture is now a toxic mix of genetic experiment, science, industrial nostalgia, seasonal immigration, territorial buying spress, massive subsidies, incidental inhabitation, tax incentives investment, political turmoil.

- Rem Koolhas

Simrishamn Regional Algae Farm by ecoLogicStudio

ecoLogicStudio has been completing phase1 of Simrishamn Regional Algae Farm, for the Osterlen region on the Swedish Baltic Sea. The project has been commissioned by the Simrishamn Municipality and it is currently exhibited to the public in the local Marine Centrum.

A decaying fishing industry in the Baltic sea and an ageing local polupation call for the introduction of a new type of economic and urban system; the farming of algae has been adopted by ecoLogicStudio as a medium to propose and incubate such new model.The design approach allows for top down strategies and investments, for the production of biofuelds and other renewable energies, and bottom up initiatives as well as know-how, of the local farmers and fisherman, to be combined in a plan of co-action.
The plan starts from the analysis of the existing environmental and social
potential of the local landscape and illustrates emergent correlations to algae farming. Such hybrid conditions are than articulated in space by proposing new architectural prototypes to be developed across the Osterlen region.

source:http://www.ecologicstudio.com/v2/project.php?idcat=3&idsubcat=59&idproj=110

Aquaculture Seascape Park by Moira Wilson

Aquaculture Seascape re-envisions a new, inclusive culture of aquatic food production. An experimental production park typology is generated through a synthesis of function (food production, data collection, environmental monitoring and restoration, the public park system) and process-based design. Tidal pool nurseries and polyculture production gardens are designed to delight the public. They also provide the space for commercial research to develop healthy, economically viable food production. The park’s mobile infrastructure sets up the conditions for detailed mapping of oceanic territory. This new kind of public space acts as an interface to mediate the sometimes complementary, but often conflicting points of view among private industry, public interest groups, community members, researchers, tourism, and government in relation to aquatic food production.

Moira Wilson is a Toronto-based designer interested in green infrastructure projects and process-based design. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Toronto.

Source: BRACKET [on farming], http://brkt.org/index.php/soft/entry/aquaculture_seascape_park

Burbank Water and Power EcoCampus by AHBE Landscape Architects

When Burbank Water and Power built an award-winning electric power plant in 2005, it also replaced several existing substations located on the campus. In restoring the old substation sites, BWP saw an opportunity to achieve something greater. Los Angeles based landscape architecture firm AHBE Landscape Architects was commissioned to create an ambitious master plan for an EcoCampus that focused on transforming the grounds from an aging industrial site into a regenerative green space.

source: http://worldlandscapearchitect.com/?p=9155

Hydroelectric Power Plant in Kempton Germany by Becker Architekten

source:http://www.ccaa.com.au/sub/cplusa/articles/issue/16/hydro-electric-power-station/

Chongqing Iron & Steel GasSteam Combined Cycle Power Plant

CECEP’s GCL Engineering Company, Science and Technology Company and Industrial Energy Conservation Company are capable of providing comprehensive energy conservation and environmental protection solutions for energyconsuming enterprises to improve the level of energy efficiency, mainly through energy saving diagnosis and assessment, technology reform, operation and fundraising based on the integration of domestic and international advanced technologies. These subsidiary companies have successfully developed a number of reuse projects of waste pressure, waste heat and waste gas for Larfage Cement Ltd., Chongqing Iron & Steel Group, Tianjin Iron & Steel Group, Beijing Shuangshan Cement Plant and Taiyuan Chemical Ltd. The investment for each of the contracted energy management projects implemented by enterprises in the sectors of building material, metallurgy, chemical engineering and coke making has exceeded RMB0.1 billion. In addition, the total investment in the Project of Chongqing Iron & Steel GasSteam Combined Cycle Power Plant and Waste Heat Recovery Coke Dry Quenching Power Generation conducted by GCL Engineering Company is about RMB2.2 billion, with the total installed capacity of 355,000KW for sending 1.85bn KWh into the grid annually, capable of meeting 75% of the power demand by production lines in the new Plant, where 750,000 tonnes of standard coal is saved each year and the emission of CO2 is reduced by 1,980,000T. At present time, CECEP has been implementing 11 energy management projects for waste heat and waste gas use with the contracted investment reaching RMB1.164 billion.

source:http://www.cecep.cn/g492.aspx

Teeside Power Station by Heatherwick Studio

Project Details: Architects: Heatherwick Studio

Value: £150m

Client: Bio Energy Investments Ltd

Date: Ongoing

“With a rising global population and increasing political focus on the future of power generation, the task of designing a 49 mega-watt, bio-mass fuelled power station in Stockton-On-Tees is an interesting design challenge.The site at Clarence Works is on the banks of the river Tees and is classified as brownfield, being both post-industrial and ecologically sparse. On the opposite bank is Middlehaven, a major new development of 3000 new homes.

The studio’s approach has been to treat the power station as an opportunity to make a positive architectural and cultural contribution to the area. Rather than placing yet another large industrial building onto this flat landscape, the studio’s proposal is integrated into it. By reconfiguring the arrangement of the energy generation equipment permitting it to be housed within an efficient single volume, the scheme occupies only a third of the site and provides four hectares of indigenous grasslands, which are literally pulled up the façade.

The scheme includes the creation of a publicly accessible park, education facility and events venue. The riverside site enables the fuel to be delivered by ship, achieving a further reduction in carbon emissions compared to road transport. The parabolic hyperboloid form is clad with a proprietary panelised façade system supported on a steel frame, which is structurally very efficient as it also carries the load of the internal equipment, effectively making it a lean-to.”

source: http://architecturelab.net/2010/08/teesside-power-station-by-heatherwick-studio/#!prettyPhoto

Veta La Palma, Seville, Spain

Veta la Palma is an aquaculture farm located on an island in the Guadalquivir river, 10 miles (16 km) inland from the Atlantic Ocean in Seville province of Spain. It produces 1,200 tons of sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp each year. Given its 32 km^2 area this gives a yearly yield of 37 tons per square kilometer. Yet unlike most of the world's fish farms, it does so not by interfering with nature, but by improving upon it. Dan Barber, a chef and restaurant owner in New York, describes it as "a farm that doesn't feeds its animals, a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators and a farm that's literally a water purification plant.

Veta la Palma is also the largest and most important[who?] private owned bird sanctuary in the world because of the 250 different species of birds feeding on the fishes of the farm. This farm is owned by food majors Hisparroz. Hisparroz president, Luis Contreras says "We call it the pata negra of sea bass."

Size: approx. 5.6km x 5.6km

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veta_La_Palma

Droppings from heaven

“Before there was oil, there was guano, so of course we fought wars over it,” said Pablo Arriola, director of Proabonos, the state company that controls guano production, referring to conflicts like the Chincha Islands War, in which Peru prevented Spain from reasserting control over the guano islands. “Guano is a highly desirous enterprise.”

Image: Workers collect guano on Isla Guañape off Peru, which conserves the resource to prevent depletion. Guano's status as an organic fertilizer has increased demand.

Source: New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/world/americas/30peru.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Fv355 to Bugøynes

summer : winter

Oyster-tecture by SCAPE

MoMA Rising Currents Exhibition, 2010

SCAPE proposes to nurture an active oyster culture that engages issues of water quality, rising tides, and community based development around Brooklyn's Red Hook and Gowanus Canal. An armature for the growth of native oysters and marine life is designed for the shallow waters of the Bay Ridge Flats just south of Red Hook. This living reef is constructed from a field of piles and a woven web of "fuzzy rope" that supports oyster growth and builds a rich three-dimensional landscape mosaic. A watery regional park for the New York Harbor emerges that prefigures the city's return to the waterfront in the next century. The reef attenuates waves and cleans millions of gallons of Harbor water through harnessing the biotic processes of oysters, mussels and eelgrass, and enables neighborhood fabrics that welcome the water to develop further inland.

Source: http://www.scapestudio.com/projects/oyster-tecture/

Kelp fuel breakthrough

Scientists have long struggled to produce ethanol from seaweed. The stumbling block was alginate, one of four kinds of sugars produced by seaweed. Alginate — a complex polysaccharide — is difficult for microbes to breakdown. The breakthrough came when the researchers identified a biochemical pathway used by Vibrio splendidus, a marine microbe that feeds on brown seaweed, and inserted the responsible genes into a strain of E. coli. The bacterium was designed to convert the seaweed sugars directly into ethanol.

"About 60 percent of the dry biomass of seaweed are fermentable carbohydrates, and approximately half of those are locked in a single carbohydrate - alginate," said Daniel Trunfio, Chief Executive Officer at Bio Architecture Lab, in a statement. "Our scientists have engineered an enzyme to degrade and a pathway to metabolize the alginate, allowing us to utilize all the major sugars in seaweed, which therefore makes the biomass an economical feedstock for the production of renewable fuels and chemicals." The study estimates that seaweed growing in less than 3 percent of the planet's coastal waters could produce enough ethanol to replace over 60 billion gallons of fossil fuels. It notes that large-scale seaweed production is already common around the world.

Source: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0120-kelp_power.html#ixzz1oFXFNZSP

Japan from nuclear to LNG

“The Japanese market is the biggest LNG market in the world and considering the decision by the Japanese government to reduce nuclear power generation, the demand for LNG into Japan will only increase,” Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller told reporters on Monday, Reuters reports.

Several shipping companies worldwide are now prospecting ice-classed LNG tankers to ship Barents- and Yamal Arctic gas to the markets in Asia, as previously reported by BarentsObserver.

source: http://www.barentsobserver.com/shtokman-lng-to-substitute-nuclear-in-japan.5011294-16149.html

Feedback 23.02.11

Alf
- The remoteness of the region but proximity to Russia. Where is Murmansk? Include Murmansk into the discussion.
- Debate about open border with Russia like Sweden, how would this affect the region?
- Can be conceptualised as Kirkenes, Vadsø, Vardø AND Murmansk.

Giambattista
- Intermediate scale between supralocal and regional where currently there's a big jump.
- Diversify within ecological potentials, exisiting marine network with terrestrial systems, examining points of intersection.
- Present the different landscapes and produced landscapes through photos.
- Construct project through georgraphical and physical relationships.
- Layering of different systems to break down complex visual information.

Paul
- Socio-economical issues. What's the population growth with projected industries?
- Include NSR route

Sigurborg
- Where are the lines that reveal exchange between Russia and Norway? Goods, people, knowledge etc.

Pernille
- Clarify kelp characteristics

Blue carbon

”.. Vegetated coastal habitats… are hot spots for biodiversity, they provide important and valuable ecosystem functions, including a large carbon sink capacity, and they are experiencing a steep global decline..”

UNEP/FAO/UNESCO-report (Nellemann et al. 2009)

Kelp fuel

Less than three per cent of the world's oceans — that's about 20 per cent of the land area currently used in agriculture — would be needed to fully substitute for fossil fuels. A small fraction of that sea area would be enough to fully substitute for biofuel production on land.

source: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/online/2040/diffusing-biofuels-debate-with-seaweed?page=0%2C1

Counterintuition

Ask not how we can save the oceans but how the oceans can save us.

Feedback 22.02.12

Geir

OBJECTIVES

- How do you make this place electric? What is the innovation?
- Clarify the contours of the project, what, why and how?

STRATEGIES
- Organise and structure the idea of the project from global-local, and local-global scale.
- Close the loop between aquaculture, algae, energy and Kirkenes.
- Establish a matrix to locate potential areas of intervention or at intersection of mapping trajectories

IDEAS
- Continue to work with Kirkenes as the oil base, and how to better link it to the city while having fish production and algae farming as the core themes that frame the entire area.
- Potential mini projects: port + oil base at Kirkenes, kelp forest monitoring at Vadsø to Vardø, integrated aquaculture and algae farming at Bøkfjord.

WORK
- elemental matrix
- diagrams that tie in project at different scales

REFERENCES
-LNG plant at Gossa

Popular fish

Consumption of freshwater fish (such as carp) and fish that migrate between freshwater and saltwater (such as salmon) has shown the greatest increase over recent years, especially in China, where per capita consumption of these fish increased nearly 10-fold between 1981 and1997.

Global per capita consumption of crustaceans has nearly tripled since 1970, with shrimp, both farmed and wild-caught, leading the way. Per capita consumption of shellfish such as oysters and clams has also tripled. China had a 13-fold increase in per capita consumption of these mollusks from 1981 to 1997. Consumption of fish that are not suited to aquaculture production, such as many marine fish, has remained relatively constant because of the stagnation in wild fish production.

source: Blue Frontiers, Managing the environmental costs of aquaculture, Policy Brief

Fishy appetites

In the past 30 years the global appetite for fish has doubled. From 45 million metric tons in 1973, total fish consumption jumped to more than 91 million tons in 1997. Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food production sectors in the world. It has grown at an average annual rate of 8.4% since 1970 and total production reached 65.8 million tonnes in 2008.

There is a general consensus among published studies that the growth of global aquaculture production will continue along a trajectory similar to that of the recent past for at least the next five years. This results in an “uncertainty envelope” for production in 2020 estimated at between 65 and 85 million tonnes. Estimates that extend to 2030 have a wider margin of error, yielding a conservative range of 79 to 110 million tonnes.

source: Blue Frontiers, Managing the environmental costs of aquaculture, Policy Brief