RIO URUGUAY uruguay
"Living Archive"
Designed in collaboration with Max Fernandez
Serving the boarder of Uruguay and Argentina, this project aims to deal with agricultural runoff from Uruguay. Uruguay has made the decision to put its agricultural economy ahead of the ecological stability of the surrounding rivers and estuary, through highly cultivating its land up to the edge of the Rio Uruguay and Rio de La Plata. This project is founded in ecological completion, in that it uses plants to compete with algae for excess nitrogen in the fertilizer runoff from Uruguay. Excess algae contaminates the water and creates a film that blocks light from passing through to the other plants and organism that live below. The project consumes this excess fertilizer in the region, while concentrating it and the algae in pinpointed locations to be able to refine the algae and turn it into bio fuel. Tubes that float just below the surface of the water act a scaffolding for the algae to grow. Algae is then sucked into the lattice tube system where it comes into contact with light from the sun, and blooms even further, to insure its concentration. It then is drawn into the center of the project were it is brought down beneath the surface of the river to be refined into fuel. It goes through a centrifuge, is separated and synthesized into a fuel that can be used to generate electricity or power aircraft. The fuel is pumped up and out of the project either through the entrance for barges to deliver it internationally or through pipes under the shoreline that lead to the surface where trucks can deliver it to neighboring cities like Montevideo or Buenos Aires. Fitting into a more global context this project has economic ramifications that span the globe. Much of the food that is grown in Uruguay is distributed all over. The agricultural industry is only set to grow meaning the environmental effects will as well. Uruguay is also exploring options to building another hydroelectric dam as their energy usage increases with more capital entering its economy. Hydroelectric dams destroy ecosystems, as organisms can no longer freely move up and down stream in their natural cycles. This project provides a solution to an ecological issue while creating a new source of capital gain through the sale of the produced bio fuel, while preventing the destruction of other neighboring ecologies, through providing an alternative to additional hydro power plants. Using excess fertilizer from a booming economic sector that will only continue to grow, turning it into a carbon neutral form of energy is in a sense “Hacking the Nitrogen Cycle”.
