Food vs. Fuel: Saltwater Crops May Be Key to Solving Earth's Land Crunch

Saltwater-loving plants could open up half a million square miles of previously unusable territory for energy crops, helping settle the heated food-versus-fuel debate, which nearly derailed biofuel progress last year.

If the world's irrigated acreage by 50 percent, saltwater crops could provide biomass for alt fuel makers. An article in wired.com said Saltwater plants could be put in over a million miles of previously unusable land. This the article said, will “tone down the rhetoric of U.N. officials worried about food prices, one of whom called the conversion of arable land to biofuel crops "a crime against humanity."

NASA scientists have taken new interest in the salt-water crops.

The article said, “that salt-loving crops could be used to produce 1.5 billion barrels of ethanol annually on a swath of new agricultural land almost five times the size of Texas.”
Because of the worlds need to feed 6.7 billion people its hard to find room for biofuels.
So the article said, “social and environmental groups agree that the best location for bioenergy crops would be on currently unusable land. That would ensure that land used to grow food crops in poor countries was not converted to growing energy crops to power cars in developed nations.”

So the one problem is where do you find all this land, solution is overly salty land could be used to grow a special set of salt-tolerant plants — halophytes. The article said, “calculated that this could produce 1.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent per year. That's 35 percent of the United States' liquid fuel needs.”

-Adam

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/saltwatercrops.html