Jamila Bargach’s team sets up fog-capturing nets in Morocco.
Imagine a huge volleyball net on the side of a mountain enveloped by a thick fog. The polyethylene mesh of the net captures the tiny liquid droplets of water in the fog. As more and more tiny droplets are captured, they merge together to become rain drops and drip down the nets into collecting tubes at the bottom of the nets. Gravity propels the drops down pipes that terminate at a water storage tank at the bottom of the mountain — providing clean, safe water for an otherwise parched community.
This weekend, I will be going with a group of six Rice University students to Morocco, in North Africa, as part of a Baker Institute Energy Forum program to assist Jamila Bargach and her foundation Dar Si Hmad. The purpose of the trip is to work with fog-capturing nets to help relieve the water scarcity problem in a rural mountain city called Ifni and to survey opportunities for biofuels ventures in the region.
Jamila, who graduated from Rice University in 1998 with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, started her nonprofit foundation to improve the quality of life for some of the more impoverished communities in and around Ifni. Our goal this summer is to work with her on the necessary background research to put this sustainable development project together. Our efforts will focus on completing the calculations for the designs and locations of the nets, along with developing the required infrastructure for a future Rice group to finish the project next summer. Determining the location to position the nets will be especially important for maximizing the efficiency of the nets in regards to the orientation, frequency of fog, and wind speed and direction.
Fog capturing nets can by no means supply water for an entire urban city. However, for roughly $1,000-$1,500 to cover materials and maintenance for an average 10-year lifespan, we can provide anywhere from 200 to 1,000 liters of water per day for a village. This is a sustainable project that we feel is incredibly important in regard to supplying potable water for a city with very few clean sources. When I signed up for Baker Institute Energy Forum director Amy Jaffe‘s class on “Integrated Approaches to Sustainable Development” this spring, I would never have imagined that, at one point in the future, I would be actually practicing what we learned.
There’s no doubt our project will be a lot of work. But I’ve never been to Morocco (or Africa, for that matter), and our hotel will be right on the beach, in sight of the majestic mountains. The weekends will be our own and Jamila already has put together some plans for us. Skydiving, anyone?