The Kubuqi Desert has become a global model project for desertification control.
In the impetuous economy and society, more and more people are beginning to regard hiking as a kind of spiritual practice, trying to stay away from the stalemate in front of them, and carry simple luggage to look for poetry and distant places. The extremely high level of difficulty of hiking through the desert attracts a number of bold people who are eager to try it. This is indeed a cool thing. The endless yellow sand can’t be seen to the end. The road ahead is full of challenges and unknowns. Wear your hiking equipment, bring a few bags of dry food and plenty of water, challenge your physical limits and conquer nature. The sense of accomplishment can't help but leap into my chest.
However, this is just a popular sport. The desert is actually not friendly to human survival at all. The raging sand, extremely dry climate and scarce water sources make it a forbidden area for life, always threatening hiking. the person’s life. For a country, desert has also become a major obstacle restricting regional development.
In China’s vast land, the total area of desert and Gobi is as high as 1.28 million square kilometers, accounting for 13% of the total land area. Nearly 80% of these deserts are concentrated in the northwest region of the motherland. The climate is arid and inaccessible, making them increasingly desolate. Among them, the Kubuqi Desert, the seventh largest desert in China, has recently become famous and attracted much attention. This is not only because of the unique tourism characteristics of the Kubuqi Desert, but also because of the remarkable achievements in sand control that people have achieved in this desert in recent years, which has amazed the world.
The example is ahead
The Kubuqi Desert is located in the central and western part of Inner Mongolia, on the south bank of the "several" bend of the Yellow River on the Hetao Plain, with a total area of 18,600 square kilometers. Due to its distance from Beijing The straight-line distance is only 800 kilometers, and it is also known as "a basin of sand hanging over the capital." According to the Book of Songs, during the Western Zhou Dynasty 3,000 years ago, the Kubuqi Desert was once a grassland with lush water and grass and herds of cattle and sheep, where herders of multiple ethnic groups lived and multiplied. However, after thousands of years of impact by the Yellow River and the destruction of human civilization by wars, the once prosperous land was gradually covered by yellow sand and turned into a barren area with few plants and scarce rain.
Not only that, the area of Kubqi Desert also continued to expand. When the People's Republic of China was founded, the Kubuqi Desert advanced tens of meters toward the bank of the Yellow River every year, with an inflow of 160 million tons of sediment, posing a direct threat to the Hetao Plain, known as the "granary beyond the Great Wall." Desertified land is like psoriasis, making the land unhealthy. For China, which was founded on agriculture but has a serious shortage of per capita cultivated land, land desertification will seriously threaten people's lives and hinder the development of western China.
In the 1980s, there was a salt lake in the hinterland of the Kubuqi Desert that attracted the attention of the local government, and the salt farm that relied on the salt lake also became a key enterprise. However, due to the deterioration of the environment, the area of the salt lake continues to shrink and is gradually being swallowed up by yellow sand. At this time, a young man named Wang Wenbiao voluntarily resigned from his government job and invited himself to be the director of the salt farm. When he took office, he saw the bleak operating conditions of the salt farm and was determined to control desertification. He immediately proposed to extract 5 yuan of profit from each ton of salt sold to control the desert. After persisting for eight years and planting tens of thousands of saplings, the seemingly fruitless work defeated the desert that was constantly encroaching on the lake. The local environment near the salt lake has been improved, the boundaries of the desert have continued to recede, the area of the salt lake has gradually recovered, and there has been a historic breakthrough in the revenue of the salt farm.
While everyone was rejoicing at this good news, new problems began to appear. The output of the growing salt farm has increased, and the surrounding market has become saturated, requiring the salt to be transported out to find new sales. The inherent transportation method requires a detour of more than 200 kilometers across the desert to the nearest Dengkou Railway Station in Hangjin Banner. If this plan is implemented, most of the salt farm's profits will be consumed by transportation costs.
At this time, Wang Wenbiao came up with a bold idea to build a highway through the sand to transport salt out. What he received at this time was no longer doubts, but decisive opposition from the people around him. Although the operating status of the salt farm has improved qualitatively, the funds required to build this road will put huge pressure on the company. Moreover, the mechanical equipment and other conditions at that time were far inferior to those of today.
Although it is difficult to build a road through the sand, it seems to be the only way for the salt farm to survive. Fortunately, the local government helped solve the funding problem. When dozens of bulldozers drove into the hinterland of the desert, it seemed that success was just around the corner. However, the yellow sand blowing in the wind soon buried the built roadbed, and the hard work every day became in vain.
A sharp contradiction lies before us: building roads is not difficult, but protecting them is a difficult problem. Following the experience of protecting salt lakes, ecological road protection has become the answer to the problem. The road construction team changed their working methods and greened the roadside while repairing. Two years later, the first Chuansha Highway in the Kubuqi Desert was built, and trees and medicinal herbs were planted on both sides of the road.
In the 1980s and 1990s, strong winds raged in the Kubuqi Desert, and yellow sand rolled in. As a result, Beijing, 800 kilometers away, suffered from sandstorms. Today, the sand and dust weather has been greatly improved. The management of the Kubuqi Desert is inseparable from Wang Wenbiao and the Elion Energy Group he later founded. In the struggle between humans and the desert for thousands of years, there has been a see-saw of advancement and retreat, with several victories and some losses. Improving the ecological environment is obviously the most effective method that has been tested.
Explore new methods
At the 13th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in September 2017, a report released by the United Nations Environment Program showed: Kubuqi Desert* It is planned to restore and green deserts of 9.69 million acres, sequester 15.4 million tons of carbon, conserve 24.376 billion cubic meters of water, and release 18.3 million tons of oxygen. The changes in the ecological environment have lifted more than 100,000 local people out of poverty and provided more than 1 million job opportunities.
The State Forestry Administration also released data stating that: China’s desertified land area has increased from 10,400 square kilometers per year to shrinking by 2,424 square kilometers; the desertified land area has increased from 3,436 square kilometers per year to shrinking by 1,980 square kilometers per year. km, achieving a historic transformation from the advance of sand and the retreat of people to the advance of green and sand retreat.
Continuous exploration and the emergence of new technologies have given rise to a new dawn in desert management. Although China's northwest region is the region most severely affected by wind and sand, and large areas of land are severely desertified, it is also the region with the richest solar energy resources. With the advancement of solar energy development technology, many photovoltaic power plant builders and operators have begun to explore the "photovoltaic desert control" model that combines photovoltaic power generation with desert control, hoping to develop a new model of industrial desert control with good results.
The Dalat Banner Leading Photovoltaic Base Project is located in Zhaojun Town, Dalat Banner, Ordos City, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Its construction was approved by the National Energy Administration on November 30, 2017. It is the third batch of 10 key photovoltaic projects in the country. One of the leading bases for power generation applications. The project promotes the development of solar power generation, desert ecological management and specialty tourism through the "photovoltaic + desert control + agriculture and forestry + tourism" model.
The Hetao Plain area where Dalate Banner is located has a typical temperate continental climate, dry and less rainy, with an average annual sunshine hours of about 3,000 hours, making it very suitable for the construction of large-scale photovoltaic power stations. The project covers an area of 100,000 acres, with a total investment of 15 billion yuan, and a planned capacity of 2 million kilowatts. After completion, the annual power generation is expected to reach 4 billion kilowatt-hours, achieving an output value of over 1.5 billion yuan. Industries at all levels can increase the income of about 1,500 surrounding farmers and herdsmen and create more than 2,000 jobs.
At the same time, the completed photovoltaic power generation base will increase the local forest coverage rate by nearly 0.6 percentage points, effectively curb the expansion of the Kubuqi Desert, prevent and control 200,000 acres of desertified land, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 3.2 million tons per year. 700,000 tons of dust, playing an important role in regional land desertification control and ecological environment restoration. The Dalat photovoltaic power generation application leading base project not only produces huge economic benefits, but also produces environmental improvement benefits that cannot be ignored.
"Generating electricity on the board, repairing under the board, and planting trees between the boards" is a three-dimensional new industrial cycle model adopted by the Dalat Banner photovoltaic base. First use bulldozers and other engineering machinery to flatten the sand dunes, place solar photovoltaic power generation devices on the flattened land, and then plant cash crops on the land under the photovoltaic panels. In addition to absorbing solar energy, photovoltaic module panels can block direct sunlight, reduce evaporation by 20% to 30%, and can also effectively reduce wind speed, which greatly improves the living environment of plants. The growth of various landmark vegetation effectively fixes sand and retains water. In turn, ecological improvements have a positive impact on solar power generation. The raised dust has a greater impact on the power generation, and vegetation can reduce the raised dust.
Create a model project
The desert photovoltaic project is a confrontation between man and nature. The desert soil quality is improved through engineering construction, and the local environment is improved when people advance and the sand recedes. The built photovoltaic equipment can convert sufficient, clean and pollution-free solar energy to achieve the goals of energy conservation, emission reduction and greenhouse effect reduction. At the same time, photovoltaic equipment has the advantages of safety, reliability, long service life and easy maintenance. For the people near the desert, it can increase the income of herdsmen, reduce the damage to vegetation during grazing in pastoral areas, and reduce the damage to vegetation in disguise.
However, such a good project that achieves multiple goals at the same time also faces the harshest construction environment in the desert. Chen Tao, director of Shantui's Inner Mongolia office, was transferred to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 2014. He is mainly responsible for market research, customer visits, feedback collection, and national macro policy energy development and support. He participated in the entire Dalat Banner photovoltaic leading base project in 2018. According to Chen Tao, "The difficulty of construction mainly focuses on the confrontation with harsh sand and high temperatures. Sand and dust seriously damage the cooling system of the equipment water tank. The engine air system requires high cleanliness, and the cab must also be sealed and humanized." . The technical requirements for equipment and personnel are very high.”
The Ordos Oasis Garden General Contracting Company involved in the project construction is a loyal user of Shantui, and a total of 50 new and old bulldozers were invested in this project. units, including multiple fully hydraulic bulldozers DH17 and SD16L. During the construction process, the Shantui office sent experienced technicians to follow up on the equipment usage on site, communicate with the drivers on construction techniques, and collect feedback. In the later stage of the project, Shantui developed a dual-purpose DH17-DS fully hydraulic bulldozer and a hydraulic SD16D bulldozer based on desert construction conditions, which bought valuable time for the later intense construction.
While the country is promoting desertification control in the west, social capital has also joined in.
According to Wang Wenbiao, chairman of Elion Resources Group, corporate desertification control will be more effective than government financial desertification control. "Controlling deserts is like a bottomless pit. Controlling deserts through national finance and controlling desertification simply for the sake of controlling desertification will not only achieve The results are particularly good, but more importantly, it is difficult for farmers and herdsmen in the desert to obtain corresponding benefits under a single desert control model, and the government has to provide subsidies. ”
Under the industrial desert control model, The government does not invest funds, it only needs to provide enterprises with corresponding policies. "We turn desertification control into a coin. On the one hand, we control desertification and on the other hand, we develop the sand industry. We rely on sand to build industries and rely on profits to control desertification, thereby increasing the income of farmers and herdsmen." Wang Wenbiao said.
The project adopts a phased construction method. The planned capacity of the first phase of the project is 500,000 kilowatts, accounting for a quarter of the total planned capacity. The investment in the first phase of the project is approximately 3.75 billion yuan, with an annual power generation capacity of approximately 800 million kWh. The first phase of the project was jointly won the bid by SPIC Inner Mongolia Company, CGNPC and CECEP. Construction started on June 30, 2018. After nearly half a year of intense construction, the originally deserted sand dunes have been covered with large The area of solar photovoltaic panels has become a "blue ocean". On December 10, 2018, the first phase of the project was successfully completed and grid-connected power generation at full capacity began. Although the desert is a part of nature, it is not irredeemable.
Although the formation of deserts is inseparable from natural factors, man-made destruction also contributes to the deterioration process. Likewise, human agency can reverse this process. Today, the results achieved in the Kubuqi Desert are the best example.
(Please indicate Seetao.com www.seetao.com for reprinting) Seetao.com Strategic Column Editor/Wang Xufang