Nopal: Moving the world from ‘fuel or food’ to ‘fuel and more food’

The World's Green-Gold: The potential of the prickly pear cactus as a globally significant bioenergy resource.

Across the globe bioenergy is widely seen as being in competition with food for land resources. But, now there is real potential for nopal to generate globally significant quantities of renewable electricity without displacing productive agriculture and increasing food supply - both, for human consumption and animal fodder. Nopal plants require 10-times less water per unit of dry biomass produced than do common crops, such as corn, wheat and soybeans, and because of their succulence are endowed with substantial water-storage capacities that helps to buffer intermittent water availability. This allows them to thrive in areas where traditional agriculture struggles, either because of poor soil condition, low rainfall, or because the seasonality or unpredictability of rainfall is too great to allow profitable arable farming.

The team at CIC-Global, with their NopalPower program, are proving the contributions farming nopal makes to global electricity supply when used as feedstock for anaerobic digestion. Nopal shows a high degree of drought tolerance and produces promising yields with low rainfall. Global power generation from gas is around 5 PW h per year. The data suggests that 5 PW h of electricity per year could be generated from nopal cultivated on between 100 and 380 million hectares of semi-arid land, equivalent to between 4% and 15% of the potential resource.

If your ready to learn more about how NopalPower is providing the world's most fragile regions with sustainable energy, food, organic fertilizer and dozens of other byproducts, visit the CIC-Global team online at http://nopalpower.com, or connect via email at [email protected].