“You should be getting red fruits with flower notes and, of course, some acidity,” says Jaime Duque, the owner of E&D Cafe, a specialty roaster and “coffee lab” in Bogotá, Colombia. “See if you taste that.”

I’m about to drink from a cup of black coffee made with beans grown at 5,000 feet above sea level in Huila, a province in southwestern Colombia. Huila is not exactly a tourist hotspot. Much of it still mountainous backcountry where leftist guerrillas still roam — the Colombian army and FARC forces regularly clash in the steep passes and heavy jungle.

Back in Bogotá, however, coffee snobbery is on full display. Duque prepares the beans with triple-filtered water through an Aeropress, a method akin to the French press that uses a disposable paper filter. The coffee is exceptional.

For many years, coffee was the symbol of Colombia abroad— well, besides another export beginning with a “c.” Long before Blue Bottle and Ritual and Stumptown and the current class of high-quality, small-batch coffees, often sold with their far-flung country-of-origin prominently displayed, there were Colombia’s gourmet beans, something the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia has been bragging about since its formation in 1927. And still, the country’s coffee can be found at high-end coffee shops from Buenos Aires to Portland, London to Tokyo.

But in 2013, Colombian coffee is at a crossroads.

Read more at Modern Farmer.

Victor Cañas is sitting on an old wooden bench in the shade across from Bar Quindio, a pool hall lined with waist-to-ceiling windows that opened 90 years ago—about the time he was born.

“Salento used to be a ghost town,” Cañas tells me. “Everyone lived in the countryside because of the violence. From ’48 to ’70 it was political violence, from ’70 to ’80 it was drugs, from ’80 to 2000, guerrillas. And now it’s the era of tourism.” Together we look out at the lines of shops selling coffee-themed trinkets and woven cowboy hats and the gaggles of European and American tourists wandering between them.

Read more at Zocalo Public Square.

One hundred and fifty thousand people pour into Lima every year from Peru’s provinces. Like Rodas, most end up in pueblos jóvenes—literally young towns—in improvised dwellings with no running water and sporadic access to electricity. This constant influx means houses are added by the day, built into the rocky hillside with walls of salvaged wood or concrete if the family can afford it. Like Rodas´s parents, most immigrants come to Lima to find work, shelter, and perhaps a way to break out of poverty—they aren’t able to build themselves homemade shelters, except in some of the poorest areas of the country, where they often do so on unstable ground. Paradoxically, many residents of the pueblos jóvenes are forced to pay two to three times more than they would to live in downtown Lima: these settlements are unauthorized and so subject to extortionist landlords who tax access to pirated utilities.

To reach the upper limits of Villa Maria del Triunfo, our taxi crawled up a dirt road past hundreds of these ramshackle houses. Roosters stood guard out front, children played in the street, and the stench from pig pens spread throughout the settlement. Unlike most of the crudely-built houses in Villa Maria, the hogs and their sties are legal on these hillsides; Lima has for a long time zoned some of its marginal districts as agricultural. When the road became too steep for the beat-up station wagon, we got out to walk the last few steps to the highest point, a small neighborhood named Flor de Amancay after the bright yellow flower that blankets these hillsides throughout Lima’s damp winter.

With summer quickly approaching, it’s dry and dusty. But the air is crisp and fresh. It feels provincial, alpine. And for ten families living in Flor de Amancay, the location has provided them with a blessing: free water. With the help of local non-profit organizations and community outreach centers, they’ve erected four billboard-sized fogcatchers to harvest water from the fog that rolls into Lima nine months a year. The atrapanieblas stand on the steep hillside above the last row of houses, made of plastic mesh and eucalyptus posts.

Lima’s is a climate where hot coastal air mixes with cool winds off the Pacific to create dense fog. Though this may sound like San Francisco, the city is almost as dry as Cairo. Lima’s annual rainfall barely reaches 11 millimeters and usually falls as a chilly light mist Peruvians call garúa. But in a few hilltop neighborhoods, smart engineering is pulling water out of thick foggy air. Rodas and his neighbors trap close to 600 gallons of water every night between April and December. This means forty-two people in Flor de Amancay can draw water from cisterns filled by the fogcatchers. Though it’s not potable, they use it for washing clothes, to bathe, and to grow zucchini, potatoes, and squash.

To get up close to Flor de Amancay’s fogcatchers, we have to ask for permission. “Since we’ve handed the whole fogcatcher project over to them, we can’t just barge in here anytime we like,” explains Angela Nestarez, a social worker at a community center-cum-clinic-cum-school at the foot of the hill. She found the financing, delivered the materials, and helped train the locals how to build the structures. We knock on the plywood door of one of the community matriarchs. After a moment, a boy in a Barcelona jersey and dirty shorts pulls open the knobless door. “My mother says you can go ahead,” he says and disappears back into the darkness.

The fogcatchers are difficult to make out at first, but I soon spot them on the ridge, standing like towering soccer goals in the mid-morning haze. Their construction is simple: thick green plastic netting six meters wide by four meters tall is stretched between wooden posts that are anchored into the hillside with cement. A plastic gutter runs along the bottom of the net to collect dripping water and send it into a 7,500-gallon concrete holding tank. It can either be stored there—helpful during the fogless summer—or diverted into above-ground cisterns closer to Flor de Amancay’s houses for more immediate use. The entire system, which was helped put in place by Nestarez and her outreach center, is now run by the ten families to whom she handed off the project. They built the fogcatchers and storage and delivery system—with tutelage from visiting engineers—and have free reign over when to use the water they catch and who in their community they can give it to.

***

Harvesting water from fog is no new concept: desert beetles and tree frogs are known to catch water through a process scientists call fog-basking. It was being studied as early as 1904 in South Africa, in the 1950′s across Chile, and by Peru’s National Meteorological and Hydrology Service in the 1960′s. In the last thirty years, designs to maximize water capture have been researched extensively and non-profits have installed fogcatchers at a cost of $600 to $1000 each in desert regions from Eritrea to Chile.

Today, Lima has more than thirty fogcatchers up and running. But the amount these harvest is trivial compared with what Lima needs. Ten percent of Limeños—almost 1 million—have no running water. Most of these residents live in the city’s squatter communities, home to about one third of Lima’s population. Abel Cruz, founder of the non-profit Peruvians Without Water, has led marches in Lima demanding equal access to water. “But we were protesting for so long about the need for the city to give these people water that we never stopped to think about how we could make our own,” Cruz tells me. So when the German organization Alimón e.V. came to Peru in 2006 with plans for a pilot project to harvest fogwater, he got onboard. Working with Alimón and other NGOs, Cruz helped with pilot studies, calculated optimal orientation and installation specifics, and then trained locals how to build the fogcatchers. He’s installed dozens above Lima’s shantytowns. Cruz recently secured $20,000 in funding from USAID to build twenty fogcatchers, and with more funding he hopes to grow that number to 200. On the taxi ride up to Flor de Amancay, Cruz was giddy as he pointed out tanker trucks and dozens of houses that had been built within the last month, some upon the steepest grading I had ever seen.

Look closely at any of Lima’s pueblos jóvenes and you’ll see them speckled with blue plastic barrels, in front of most houses or out in the road. Look long enough and you’ll probably see a blue tanker truck winding its way up the dirt roads, filling these 50 gallon kegs for one to two dollars a pop, depending on how high up the hillside they are made to drive. In Villa Maria del Triunfo, we saw no fewer than five of these enormous cumbersome trucks navigating the precipitous dirt roads. Often these trucks run out of water before they make it to the higher neighborhoods like Flor de Amancay. These water deliveries are a daily routine for Lima’s impoverished neighborhoods. A family of five—and many are larger than that—will go through at least one 50 gallon keg in a day. With such demand, the delivery service is susceptible to price gouging: trucks from the state utility company SEDAPAL, as well as private companies, reportedly fix prices and sometimes deliver water from questionable sources.

“In the winter, when the roads are all washed out, the trucks don’t make it up here,” explains Berta, a Flor de Amancay resident. Holding onto her restless toddler, she looks up at the fogcatchers. “The atrapanieblas have been helpful but there aren’t enough. We need ten times as many.” The neighborhood is also facing another problem that will affect its access to water. New squatters from the other side of the ridgeline have already cut a wide trail into the hill just above the fogcatchers. Once houses are built along this path, there will be little space to build the forty-five fogcatchers social worker Angela Nestarez plans on adding once she secures more funding.

The fogcatchers are clearly not a panacea. Lima remains a desert city with water problems that defy a simple solution. Authorities acknowledge that resource availability needs to be improved across social classes, but the state utility company SEDAPAL has been decades slow in building infrastructure in poorer communities, which are constantly expanding. The World Bank has moved to pick up the slack, having pledged $55 million to improve water connections in northern Lima’s poor neighborhoods. When completed, the project should bring water to more than 60,000 homes.

The visible truth is that artificial irrigation beautifies the rich neighborhoods and the poor stay thirsty. SEDAPAL recently estimated that Lima’s citizens each use an average of 251 liters of water per day. To put this in perspective: a five-minute shower can use up to 100 liters of water while washing a car can take up to five hundred. But if poor families of five in Villa Maria are all sharing a 200 liter blue keg of water every day, it’s clear that there are plenty of areas in the city where precious water is being wasted. On top of that, SEDAPAL claims that 35 percent of Lima´s potable water is never paid for or is lost through damaged infrastructure: enough water to supply 2.5 million people a day. One solution the utility has proposed to combat waste is to increase tariffs on water across the city. They argue that paying more for water will force Limeños to understand the value of the precious resource.

Lima’s limited freshwater resources are dwindling: tropical glaciers that feed Lima’s rivers are receding and the city’s water table is falling. With a population of 9 million and growing, water rationing is not a concept that is being taken seriously enough. The city’s water consumption is expected to rise 50 percent by 2040; Limeños will need to soon get used to rationing. The Peruvian government and SEDAPAL have scrambled to develop answers and claim they will invest $2 billion to build more dams and reservoirs in the Andes far from Lima. This may bolster water resources upstream—though likely also bring unforeseen changes to those communities—but without limiting overuse, Peru’s capital will dry out.

Despite the difficulties he faces in his small neighborhood of Flor de Amancay, Frank Rodas is genuinely hopeful. He’s an optimistic teenager, proud of the place that’s been home for the last four years since moving from Cajamarca, a provincial city 800 kilometers away. The training he’s received from NGO engineers on building the fogcatchers has made Rodas ambitious—he has big plans for Flor de Amancay. “I want this to be green year-round,” he says, gesturing up towards the ridgeline. “If we get enough fogcatchers up here, these hills would look great. They could even be a tourist attraction.”

Mine is an abiding relationship with Lima. My mother was born here and I’ve been to the city many times. But the chasm between rich and poor has never been so clear as during our visit to Flor de Amancay. I thought of the manicured lawns of Miraflores that teem with bright flowers and palm trees, with their legions of landscapers and conspicuous irrigation. Confronting water scarcity in Lima will mean addressing this gap. And soon.

Originally published at GuernicaMag.

“We named it the ‘Nifty Whitney 1050’ because its starting gravity was 1050,” says Olin Schultz, a longtime homebrewer and first-time mountaineer who remembers the day—and the beer—fondly. Schultz, president of MoreBeer homebrewing supply company in California, had met his companions and planned the alpine brewing session on Homebrewer’s Digest, an email listserv from the late ’90s. But why lug so much equipment and ingredients to brew above 14,000 feet? (The water alone was 64 pounds.)

“We had heard of people brewing at Everest base camp,” recalls Schultz, “so we decided to set the record for brewing at the highest altitude in the United States.” Under bright sunny skies on Whitney’s summit, the group brewed a 2-gallon, all-grain batch of Pale Ale with Cascade hops, cooled down the wort by packing snow around the pot, and pitched the yeast. They then carried the bucket, already fermenting, down the mountain with them. Schultz’s record, though unofficial, seems to still be standing. In 2006, a team of homebrewing hikers from Denver’s Liquid Poets Society brewed a Brown Ale on top of Mt. Bierstadt, elevation 14,065 feet.

Colorado is no stranger to brewing in thin air. Most of its 160-plus breweries are more than 5,000 feet above sea level. But unlike the spontaneous homebrewer huffing it up America’s highest peaks to brew a beer, most professional brewers at altitude are downright scientific with their methods. And the first thing they point to is the temperature at which they boil.

Why does water boil at lower temperatures at elevation? For water to be converted from a liquid to a gas, its vapor pressure has to equal the surrounding air pressure. At elevation, this change can occur at a lower threshold becuase of lower air pressure. That’s why water can boil before reaching 212° Fahrenheit. In Denver—elevation 5,280 feet—water boils around 203°F. At 14,505 feet on top of Mt. Whitney, Olin Schultz’s water boiled at 186°F. At 7,481 feet, Christian Koch knows his water boils at 198°F. But when he and three friends first opened Elevation Beer Company near the ski slopes three hours south of Denver, his problem was getting the water that hot.

“We couldn’t boil our wort,” Koch says, laughing. When the brewery first fired up its new 400,000-BTU burner less than a year ago, Koch waited around for hours for a boil that never came. The thin air in the small town of Salida had reduced the burner’s efficiency by 25 percent, he says. “So we had to upgrade to 800,000 BTU’s.”

The brewery also had to upgrade to a bigger air compressor for washing kegs and bottles; with less air to compress, their original compressor’s output wasn’t strong enough.

Elevation Beer quickly recovered from equipment setbacks and put out more than 900 barrels in its first year—including barrel-aged beers that feature local ingredients like Salida-sourced honey, Colorado wet hops and bourbon barrels from Breckenridge Distillery. Two months ago, Elevation went statewide, and they’re currently expanding their capacity to 5,000 barrels a year.
But the altitude presents other problems, warns Koch. “Logistics and shipping can be a challenge.” He says that in the past, mountain roads have closed due to heavy snow and stalled ingredients coming in and beer going out. But one altitude problem has a very simple solution: “Beer goes flatter faster at elevation because lower air pressure causes gas to leave the beer sooner,” explains Koch. “So we drink faster.”
The altitude gets to the big guys, too. Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing—the country’s third-largest craft brewery—teamed up with Seattle’s Elysian Brewing in 2008 to start brewing some of Elysian’s mainstay beers, like Night Owl Pumpkin Ale and Immortal IPA, at New Belgium’s facilities in Fort Collins. From the get-go, they had problems getting flavor matches between the Elysian beers brewed in Seattle and the beers they were brewing at 5,000 feet.
“To make Elysian’s recipe taste the same when brewing it in Colorado, we had to use more hops, more caramel malts and special malts,” says Grady Hull, assistant brewmaster at New Belgium. “For us, the boil is 203°F as opposed to 212°F. We see less color change and get a lot less caramelization, less color pickup and less flavor change in the boil.” Hull found himself tweaking recipes to get the right color and hop profiles.

Hull foresees more recipe tweaking soon. Construction is imminent at a second New Belgium facility in Asheville, N.C. (elevation 2,165 feet), which will add 300,000 barrels to New Belgium’s 700,000 barrels of current annual production. Though brewing in Asheville is still a couple years away, there are various elements that Hull’s thinking about changing in the recipes, like shortening the boil time and lightening up on caramel malts, to account for the lower altitude. Hull also points out that the bittering power of hops changes with altitude.

Hops need to undergo a chemical reaction called isomerization before they can impart their bittering quality to a beer. This happens during the boil. At high altitudes, alpha acid isomerization is reduced because these chemical reactions are temperature-dependent. In other words, the less heat, the fewer alpha acids are converted into their bittering form, iso-alpha acids. Because boil temperatures are lower at elevation, alpha-acid isomerization is reduced. To solve this, brewers either add more hops or extend the boil time, or both.

“Hop utilization is the biggest thing that changes at elevation,” says Sean Terrill, a nuclear engineer turned brewmaster who’s applied more than a little of his science background to brewing. “You’re reducing the temperature so far that you’re going to get less bitterness per unit of hops,” Terrill explains, “but extending the boil is only going to work to a certain point. Beyond 90 minutes, hop utilization is going to level off because you’re reaching a limit with the alpha acids in the hops.”
To make matters worse, bitterness starts to fall after 90 minutes because the iso-alpha acids you’ve tried so hard to create start to break down. Mountain brewers have to adjust their recipes to carefully balance every step and ingredient that makes a beer.
Terrill is weeks away from breaking ground at Two Mile Brewing in Leadville, Colo. At 10,152 feet, it will be America’s highest brewery. On top of this crowd-drawing claim, Terrill is jazzed about his water supply, which is clean Colorado snow melt with a very low mineral and salt content; this means it will require minimal treatment before brewing. The opposite scenario is a headache for brewers who prefer a clean slate from which to build on top of. Many breweries worldwide have no choice but to use heavily chlorinated city water or hard, mineral-rich well or spring water that they must filter and treat before using.
Earlier this year, I was sitting in a second-floor bar in Cuzco, Peru, overlooking the main square at dusk. At nearly 11,200 feet, I was getting easily winded and had taken my time walking around the ancient Inca city. The guidebooks had all warned me to steer clear of alcohol on my first day at elevation, but the promise of a Cascade- and Summit-hopped American Pale Ale in the mountains of Peru had me calling the brewmaster upon landing.
Zac Lanham is a tall Australian who moved to Cuzco in 2005 to teach English, and ended up opening Wayki Brewing on a whim. He started with a homebrewing setup and was relying on the woman next door to weigh out his grain bill. Now, his beers have top-billing next to the likes of Delirium Tremens and Old Speckled Hen, at a fraction of the cost. After telling me about the three steps of filtration he needed to scrub clean Peru’s notoriously hard water (a sediment filter, carbon filter and reverse osmosis filter), and the vast distances his European grains and American hops were coming from, I realized what a colossal task brewing in the mountains was—especially in a land with virtually no craft beer infrastructure. But if a Peruvian craft brewery high up in the Andes can acclimate to its environment and put out a consistent line of good beers, there’s hope for mountain brewers everywhere.

Published March 2013 in BeerAdvocate Magazine

A group of young scientists in Germany has managed to brew a beer with added flavors that doesn’t break the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, the 1516 purity law that stipulates beer must only contain barley, hops and water (yeast would have been included too, had 16th-century scientists known microorganisms existed). By tinkering with the genes in yeast, students at the Technical University of Munich have engineered the microorganisms to impart additional flavors and substances to their beers, like lemon and caffeine.

“We think we found a loophole,” says Fabian Froehlich, a graduate student at TUM. Froehlich and his team of microbiologists thought to engineer ale yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) while brainstorming in early 2012. The idea came from just outside their window: Their laboratory is steps away from Weiheinstephan, the oldest brewery in the world.

Modifying yeast’s genetic makeup is simpler than you’d think. Much like adding a gene to corn to make it more resistant to drought, the German scientists inserted different genes into different strains of ale yeast to manufacture substances like caffeine during fermentation. Because the scientists are essentially plugging in a new snippet of code into the yeast’s genetic instructions, it’s no surprise that some biologists call it hacking.

Brewers know they can achieve clove and banana aromas by brewing with Hefeweizen ale yeast, or impart spicy and fruity characteristics using a Belgian Trappist yeast. But like heirloom tomatoes or a purebred Boston Terrier, these properties have been selected for and perfected over generations. The German students are simply speeding up the evolutionary process by inserting genes already known to produce certain flavors and additives. They’ve managed to brew a lemon beer, a caffeine beer and a sweet licorice-like beer.

The lemon beer uses a modified yeast strain that produces limonene, a compound normally used to add lemon flavors to food and drinks. The licorice beer has thaumatin, a compound that conveys a licorice-like sweetness that they predict would bode well in a Porter. Their caffeine beer has caffeine-producing yeast, though the dosing has varied from batch to batch. The team also attempted an anti-cancer beer brewed with yeast that produces xanthohumol, a chemical derived from hops that has been shown to inhibit tumor development and inflammation in mice, but they were unsuccessful.

The team got together in February 2012 to brainstorm a project with which they could enter an international biotechnology competition called iGEM (the international genetically engineered machine competition). iGEM is an annual synthetic biology competition that pits teams of students from around the world against each another to engineer a living organism using interchangeable genetic pieces called BioBricks—think of LEGO blocks that can be moved around and used to code different biological functions. Past projects have included pigmented bacteria, biological sensors that change when they find arsenic, and wintergreen or banana-smelling bacteria. With their modified yeast project, the Munich team placed in the top 16 out of 190 teams last October.

“The TU Munich project suggests that there is a great deal we could do using brewer’s yeast,” says Rob Carlson, a frequent judge at iGEM and author of Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life. “I am, of course, all for making more interesting beer. But I think the project also points the way to making all sorts of interesting compounds in relatively simple fermentation systems.”

That’s the whole idea behind the iGEM competition: creating biological parts and developing laboratory techniques that can be applied across industries to manufacture things like biofuels, vaccines and beer.

As for selling their beer, the students admit the German brewing industry and beer market are very conservative. In fact, the idea of genetically modified food and drink is a major turn-off throughout Europe. They think they might have a better chance marketing their brews in the States. And has the team tasted its brews? Yes. Are they any good?

“I think we need to practice our homebrewing,” admits team member Simon Heinze. “But the limonene was very intense. When we opened the flask it really smelled like beer and lemonade.”

Read more in Issue 72 of BeerAdvocate magazine.

Photo credit: Astrid Eckert/TUM

“There are times on the farm when you’re in mid-harvest and there’s not enough fuel,” explains Georges Breitschmitt, a soybean and corn farmer on the Pampas, the expansive plains that surround Argentina’s capital. But while others are lined up at the gas station waiting on deliveries of diesel, the tractors on the Breitschmitt family farm are chugging along on homemade biodiesel, leaving the smell of french fries behind them.

Argentina recently nationalized its oil industry in hopes it would increase production without Spanish oil company Repsol. But the move has somewhat backfired: the country has gone from being a net oil exporter to an importer. Oil production has fallen, exploration is stagnant, and the now state-owned oil company YPF has just announced a 3% price hike at the pumps on all fuels.

“I was using 600 dollars in fuel for every ton of soybean I harvested,” Breitschmitt says. “It was adding up.” Breitschmitt got the idea to produce biodiesel after living in Barcelona. He was impressed by how “up-to-date Spaniards were with renewable energy.” Breitschmitt started looking for industrial-size machinery to produce his biofuel, but a machine that cost $25,000 in the United States would set him back $60,000 in his own country thanks to Argentine import taxes. It just wasn’t an option.

Following comprehensive tutorials and schematics he found on the Internet, Breitschmitt welded together his own biodiesel production system for well under $4,000. He’s quick to point out that recycled parts have kept the cost down—his system uses an old washing machine motor and several used oil drums.

For his cooking oil, Breitschmitt drives over to the nearby city of Pergamino and picks it up for 10 cents a liter from restaurants and school cafeterias. Sometimes he gets his oil from the Monsanto seed factory outside Pergamino. Monsanto’s cafeteria feeds 1,000 employees, Breitschmitt says, most of them migrant workers from Argentina’s northern provinces.

By mixing the used cooking oil with methanol and sodium hydroxide, he makes one 200-liter batch of biodiesel per week, sometimes two, depending on the season. This is enough to run his farm’s two tractors and two pickup trucks.

Breitschmitt says the initial investment was well worth it. Each batch costs him $75, a fraction of the $250 he would be spending at the gas station. And besides the government-imposed monthly quota of 5 kilograms of sodium hydroxide each person can buy, there is no limit to the amount of biofuel one can produce. But like most biodiesel producers, he’s wary of using 100% homemade biofuel. The cost is higher because he mixes in gas station diesel to make a B60 blend (meaning 60% biodiesel) for his tractors and B40-50 for his Chevy pickup trucks.

Breitschmitt is excited about his project, which he’s named Recup-Oil, and he’s eager to spread the word. Recup-Oil has a hotline people can call to have their used cooking oil picked up. Earlier this year, Breitschmitt went around to several classrooms to talk about recycling cooking oil as a way of reducing dependency on fossil fuels. “The schools are really receptive to these ideas,” says Breitschmitt, “which is great because it’s the children that are going to push this forward.”

Solarpack’s Calama Solar 3 in Chile

Chile

Chile has been serious about diversifying its energy portfolio. With fewer than 150 million barrels of proven oil reserves and 85 billion cubic meters of gas reserves, the country imports most of the oil and gas it uses. In 2011, Chile consumed 5.9 bcm of gas and more than 300,000 barrels of oil per day, most of which came from imports that cost the country over US$10 billion. The country’s limited conventionals and reliance on costly imports have triggered investment in alternative energy production, which Chile is well suited for. “Chile has the most impressive renewable energy resources in both quality and diversity of any country I know,” said Amory Lovins, energy consultant and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, in a recent interview.

Chile’s renewables sector is only beginning to exploit the country’s wealth of renewable resources. Most promising is the sun-drenched Atacama desert, where Spanish-owned solar company Solarpack is currently building Latin America’s first industrial-scale solar farms. Its Calama Solar 3 is now online and will supply 2.69 gigawatt hours (Gwh) per year to Chilean copper company Codelco’s Chuquicamata mine in northern Chile. Solarpack has just won another contract for two solar plants that will supply 60 Gwh per year to Codelco’s Collahuasi mine. “Chile needs long-term vision that includes this kind of energy,” Solarpack Managing Partner Jon Segovia told this reporter in 2011. “Who knows what the price of oil will be in 15 years?”

Chile has also invested heavily in hydroelectric production. More than 40% of Chile’s electricity production comes from hydroelectric sources, while 27% comes from oil and 23% from coal, according to the World Bank. A recent setback for hydroelectric power came when a 2.75 Gwh hydroelectric project in Patagonia was shelved due to environmental opposition and problems approving the transmission line.

Venezuela

Conventional hydrocarbons will still play a pivotal role in the region’s continued growth. Venezuela has no plans to stop doing what is working, afterall it has the largest petroleum reserves in the world, points out Luis Oliveros, a professor of economics in Caracas and columnist at El Universal. Though the last 14 years state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela (PdVSA) has seen production decline from 3.45 million barrels of oil per day in 1998 to 2.85 million boepd today, says Oliveros, the company hasn’t thought of developing alternative energy.

“By believing that oil is everything, Venezuela hasn’t wanted to, nor been able to I think, develop energywise,” Oliveros told me. PdVSA is currently focused on increasing production to offset falling oil prices, but with huge domestic subsidies and energy at giveaway prices (gasoline is at US$0.02 per liter), your incentive to pollute is incredible, says Oliveros. Venezuela’s entry into Mercosur became official last week, meaning its oil exports to partner countries are set to rise. One direct beneficiary of Venezuelan oil: Uruguay.

Uruguay

Uruguay has no conventional hydrocarbon production and imports the 50,000 boepd it consumes from Venezuela, Ecuador and Iran. To diversify its energy portfolio, the country has invested heavily in hydroelectric generation; four facilities currently produce 51% of Uruguay’s electricity. However, concerns over drought have encouraged Uruguay to develop its wind energy further. It currently has 43 megawatts of installed capacity but the country has announced an ambitious plan to have 1,000 megawatts installed by 2015. This is enough so that on a windy summer night, 80 to 90% of the country can run on wind power, said Ramon Mendez, director of energy at the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining, according to Bloomberg.

Next door, Argentina has been looking to unconventionals and renewables to offset the decline it has seen in its oil production since 1998. One of the fundamental objectives of Argentina’s National Energy Plan is to diversify its energy grid, says Ricardo de Dicco, director of the Latin American Center for Scientific and Technical Investigations (CLICET). Argentina plans on doubling power from hydroelectric and renewable sources, De Dicco says, while reducing the 88% stake hydrocarbons make up in his country’s energy portfolio (50.3% of this is natural gas, 36.4% petroleum, and 1.3% coal).

Argentina

Since 2004, Argentina has invested in renewable energy infrastructure, expanding hydroelectric capacity by 1,800 megawatts at Yacyreta along its border with Brazil and by 350 megawatts at its Rio Grande facility in Cordoba. The country has also built two new hydroelectric facilities in western San Juan and Rio Negro provinces, capable of generating 120 MW and 7.5MW, respectively. De Dicco also points out that Argentina will be building a 25.2 MW wind farm in northern Argentina’s La Rioja province and a 77.4 MW wind power facility in Chubut province in Patagonia.

Despite its plans to spend US$12 billion on infrastructure projects under the National Energy Plan, Argentina is strengthening its ties to Venezuelan crude. Argentina’s state-owned YPF has entered into a cooperation deal that grants it access to Venezuela’s Orinoco heavy crude belt, in exchange for allowing PdVSA to join exploration and production projects in Argentina. Venezuela’s energy minister Rafael Ramirez told Reuters that PdVSA would develop several plays in Argentina, including Neuquen’s Vaca Muerta shale deposits, a formation estimated to hold over 21 billion barrels of unconventional oil and gas reserves.

A report published last month by the World Bank stressed that a more diversified energy portfolio—with more renewable energy and natural gas—would work as a hedging strategy and shield many Latin American and Caribbean countries from volatile oil prices. The World Bank’s aim for Latin America is to advise on sustainable development and focus on renewable energy sources and energy efficiency, says Rigoberto Ariel Yepez-Garcia, a senior energy specialist at the World Bank’s Sustainable Development Department and an author of the report. Part of that means working on renewable energy projects at the community level like small scale wind, solar, and hydro.

“Another component of our portfolio is improving the performance of public utilities,” Yepez-Garcia told me, pointing out that the World Bank is currently advising utility companies in countries like Honduras and the Dominican Republic to help improve their bottom line while working towards a more sustainable energy matrix.

Latin America may see its resources seriously depleted if the region’s continued growth isn’t balanced by including renewable energy sources and structuring policy. And there is a myriad of environmental and social components that also need to be integrated.

Originally published in LatAmOil, a Latin American oil and gas monitor published by UK’s NewsBase.

“In the last six years there’s been total disequilibrium,” says Jorge Luis Ceballos, a research scientist at Colombia’s national institute of hydrology, meteorology and environmental studies (IDEAM). “If these conditions persist, it’s probable that they will disappear completely in the next 30 or 40 years.” Ceballos and a team from the federally-funded IDEAM have installed five meteorological stations across Colombia’s highest peaks to monitor air temperatures, solar radiation and other factors that could be driving the retreat of the remaining glaciers.

Colombia’s glaciers are some of the few worldwide that are equatorial—Ecuador, east Africa and New Guinea host the others—which Ceballos says makes them particularly sensitive. “The high fragility of these zones make these ecosystems highly vulnerable to small climatic changes,” he says. Which is why he’s intent on monitoring atmospheric changes at these high-altitudes and mapping the area and volume of the remaining glaciers.

“But glacial melting is not as straightforward as people like to think,” says Stefan Hasenrath, a glaciologist and emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin who has done fieldwork on equatorial glaciers in Ecuador, New Guinea and East Africa. He stresses that the notion that warming temperatures are the only reason for equatorial glaciers’ retreat at high altitudes is incorrect. His research on cloud cover on Mount Kilimanjaro points to an important factor: solar radiation. Above a certain altitude, solar radiation is the driving factor of glacial retreat because warmer air simply contains more water vapor. At high altitudes this would fall as precipitation and presto, more glacial cover.

Another concept to appreciate is how melting happens at high altitudes. At air temperatures well below zero, Hasenrath points out, the only way melting can occur is through evaporation. Though this takes a lot of energy, diminished cloud cover lets enough solar radiation through to drive this evaporation and glacial retreat, according to Hasenrath. At lower elevations, of course, temperatures can climb above zero and melting can occur traditionally.

One of the Colombian glaciers that Ceballos is continually hiking to altitudes of more than 15,000 feet to monitor is Ritacuba Negro in El Cocuy National Park, 250 miles northeast of Bogota. The alpine tundra—known as the paramo—is surrounded by snowy peaks and dotted with frailejones, squat thick-trunked shrubs named for their friar-like appearance. The tundra at Ritacuba Negro used to host a large glacier. Ceballos’ evidence? A watercolor painting drawn in 1851 by the Italian geographer Agustin Codazzi. The glacier has since retreated to a point a five-hour hike away from the point denoted in the painting. IDEAM estimates this glacier’s retreat at 20-25 meters a year.

Fortunately for Colombians, most do not rely on glaciers for drinking water—save for a few villages near Cocuy—Ceballos points out, unlike regions lying near the Himalayas. Which may be keeping glaciers somewhat distant in their consciousness. “Glaciers are looked at in Colombia as something very remote, static and still,” sighs Ceballos.

“Glaciers are an alarm that has been going off for decades,” says Ceballos. “They tell us that in the high mountains of the Andes, strong and rapid changes are occurring.” And the disappearance of these glaciers could impact the paramo, the forests and other ecosystems, he says, although the extent of this impact is unknown without further monitoring. The good news is, in an effort to fund more basic science, the Colombian government is financing Ceballos monthly trips to his country’s remaining glaciers.

Originally published in Spanish at Science Friday.

YPF’s announcement was made last week alongside Houston-based EOG Resources, who have been drilling exploratory wells in Vaca Muerta since early 2012. EOG Resources secured exploration rights to 100,000 acres of the Neuquen Basin in late 2011. Though Vaca Muerta could mean substantial profits for EOG Resources, CEO Mark Papa has underlined several obstacles companies like his are confronting in Neuquen. In spite of them, he’s cautiously optimistic.

“We need to apply the technology we’ve learned in the U.S. to the shale in Vaca Muerta and see what the cost is for this well, and what type of production it will have, and then do the economic analysis,” said Papa in an interview with Neuquen newspaper La Manana. “But first we need to look at the technical details.”

Papa was in Argentina’s Neuquen province last month for the Cluster Shale Neuquen 2012 summit, where he expressed optimism about Vaca Muerta’s potential, saying it would change Argentina’s energy panorama. The United States Energy Information Administration has assessed Argentina’s shale gas reserves at 774 trillion cubic feet, which makes it the third largest country by shale potential behind China and the U.S. YPF and partners like EOG Resources hope to be extracting 130,000 barrels of oil per day and 565 million cubic feet of natural gas per day in the next three years.

“Vaca Muerta is going to be an elephant compared to Eagle Ford,” said Papa, referring to EOG Resources’ south Texas crude oil field, which holds an estimated 1.6 billion boe. He stressed that EOG would use the lessons learned in Texas to tackle Argentina’s shale reserves.

But Papa also expressed concern about operating in Neuquen, pointing out that a lack of equipment, not financing, was holding back production. “If the province wants to develop Vaca Muerta it’s going to have to solve the restrictions on equipment imports,” Papa was quoted as saying by La Mañana.

Papa also underlined the lack of water in the region, a crucial ingredient for the fracking necessary to extract oil and gas from Vaca Muerta’s shale reserves. Fracking requires 15 times the amount of water that a conventional oil well needs. Argentina’s first shale gas well required the simultaneous use of 16 water tankers, according to Argentina’s National Academy of Engineers. This is a large obstacle for developing Neuquen’s unconventional reserves; water scarcity in the region is such that for these exploratory wells, water is currently being trucked in.

Ricardo De Dicco and Federico Bernal, directors of the Latin American Center for Scientific and Technical Investigations (CLICET), study the energy sector in Latin America and have been following Vaca Muerta closely.

“With regard to this geological formation, it is calculated that the proven reserves could reach 22.8 billion barrels, which is to say more than 10 times the remaining proven oil reserves in all of Argentina,” De Dicco and Bernal told me. And the proven reserves for natural gas are 6.8 trillion cubic meters, they say, which is 20 times the country’s remaining proven reserves of natural gas. At the current rate of extraction, Vaca Muerta means at least another century of oil and natural gas for Argentina.

Of course, this hinges on proper investment and mobilization of resources to the formation, which is why YPF is teaming up with companies like EOG Resources and ExxonMobil. De Dicco and Bernal point out that ExxonMobil has agreed to make an initial investment of US$25 billion, which will be administered by YPF, with all future profits split down the middle.

With YPF’s recent nationalization—the details and purchasing price of which are still being negotiated—the company is looking to drastically increase the production that Repsol couldn’t deliver. YPF’s newly-appointed CEO, 44-year-old Miguel Galuccio, cut his teeth in unconventional reserves at multinational oil services company Schlumberger. Now back in Argentina, his priority is developing the country’s unconventional reserves and converting it into a net exporter of energy again.

“The Argentine state has regained the energy planning that had been irresponsibly delegated to the private sector in the 1990s, which resulted in a structural energy crisis in 2003 and 2004, because of a lack of investments during the preceding 15 years,” De Dicco and Bernal point out. Argentina has since invested US$24 billion in energy infrastructure and the country is now in a second round of public investments that total US$12 billion for 2012-2015. Federal investments, coupled with strong interest from veteran companies experienced in unconventional reserves (EOG Resources, ExxonMobil, Shell, Wintershall, Total, Statoil, Americas Petrogas, among others) will expedite production at Vaca Muerta.

As for solving the water problem, De Dicco and Bernal propose constructing an aqueduct and a desalinization plant, and utilize seawater from the Argentine coast, 250 miles away.

Gilbert Brewery in Bariloche, Argentina uses locally-sourced hops

“Argentines are finally developing a taste for hoppier beer,” says local brewmaster Tomás Gilbert with a huge smile. He’s pouring and capping bottles of his popular Oatmeal Stout. In 2004, he and his father opened Gilbert Brewery in a restored horse stable from 1934, steps away from Lago Moreno, the clear glacial lake from which they draw water to brew. The other ingredients are local, too. The hops come from El Bolsón, a fertile valley about an hour’s drive away, and the grain is grown and malted on the plains near Buenos Aires.

Like most of the 14 other microbreweries in the region, Gilbert offers three styles of beer on tap—a Stout, a Pale Ale, and a Blonde—and he’s begun experimenting with English-style Bitter beers, Brown ales and Wheats. “Unfortunately,” sighs Gilbert, “we’re still using imported yeasts for each batch we make. But you know, Patagonia may soon have its own yeast to brew with.” Gilbert is referring to the recent discovery made by a scientist from the nearby city of Bariloche.

While walking in the woods not far from his laboratory, microbiologist Diego Libkind stumbled upon a familiar smell: ethanol. He knew this meant yeast were hard at work converting sugars to alcohol, the byproduct of organic decomposition. Scattered on the ground were clusters of the globular orange Llao Llao fungus that had fallen from the deciduous beech trees endemic to this region of Patagonia. Taking a sample back to the lab, Libkind found that living on these edible mushrooms was a species of Saccharomyces yeast, the same genus used to brew beer.

S. pastorianus, the yeast strain first used by Bavarian monks in the 15th century to brew lagers, is a hybrid of two other yeast strains: S. cerevisiae, and another strain of unknown origin. Libkind, at the Universidad Nacional del Comahue in Bariloche, is part of a worldwide team of scientists who have been searching for traces of that unknown genetic parent of lager yeast. So when he found this new Patagonian yeast strain, called S. eubayanus, to be 99.5 percent identical to the unknown other half of S. pastorianus, it was a major breakthrough; the discovery was published in August 2011 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Brewing yeasts must be especially adapted to working under harsh conditions. They have to tolerate high levels of alcohol and sugar during fermentation, an environment that would be poisonous to most yeasts. And, in the case of lager yeasts, they must ferment within a lower temperature range than ale yeasts. How all these adaptations were selected in the lager yeast we know today is the process that Libkind is trying to explain. His study gives a genetic answer to how the lager yeast was domesticated.

“The genetic similarity is unquestionable,” said Libkind at a recent seminar in Bariloche. As he explained his results while simultaneously recounting the history of lager brewing, the same question came to everyone in the audience: How did genetic material from a yeast in South America end up in a yeast in Bavaria? Libkind’s answer: What if, sometime in the last 500 years, the Patagonian strain hybridized with ale yeast to create the yeast now used worldwide to brew lagers?

Bariloche is nestled in Argentina’s lake district in northern Patagonia

“If you knew microorganisms like I know them, you’d know this isn’t far-fetched,” says Libkind, pointing to yeast’s promiscuity, adaptability and tolerance for long voyages—say, a trip across the ocean blue? The genetics told that story, but the logistics were disputable. The Bavarian monks were brewing lagers at a time that essentially coincided with the discovery of the New World. For their yeast to have hybridized with the Patagonian strain would have been impossible. Libkind and his team postulate that the yeast could have been brought to Europe sometime after the Spanish settled Argentina—whether accidentally or not—and thus have affected a subsequent generation of lager yeasts.

“There’s a gap of a few hundred years where we don’t know what exactly happened to lager yeast,” says Libkind. Perhaps this is where the elements of the Patagonian yeast were taken up. There’s also another theory: Europe could have had a yeast strain identical to the Patagonian strain that has since gone extinct. No one has found evidence of that so far, he says, even after the team’s five years of research. They traveled to Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Asia and North America in search of a yeast strain like the one found in Patagonia and couldn’t find anything remotely close—evidence that lends more credence to the team’s otherwise far-fetched theory.

Libkind knows the story is difficult to digest, but he’s convinced. He’s shown the Patagonian strain is adapted to fermenting under cold conditions, and whether or not it can brew a lager is what he’s currently testing. After wrapping up his seminar in Bariloche, we gathered around a pony keg sent over by local microbrewery La Cruz. Libkind says he’s pleased that so many microbreweries are calling Patagonia home and takes a sip of his Pale Ale.

If the Patagonian yeast strain can be used to brew, Argentinian breweries would be able to produce truly local beers—which, since the region also sees the highest hop production in South America and produces three-quarters of the country’s hops, isn’t hard to imagine.

Most hops cultivated in El Bólson are Cascade, though the Patagonian climate has altered their profile slightly: Northern Patagonia’s ample sunshine has bred a Cascade cultivar with a weaker alpha-acid profile than its North American counterpart—3 to 3.5-percent alpha acids versus 4.5 to 7 percent, as found in Oregon. With their sweet, spicy, lemongrass-like aroma, Argentine Cascade hops became a popular substitute for aroma hops like Hallertau and Tettnang during the US hops shortage.

Alfredo Leibrecht, one of the seven hop producers in El Bolsón, is happy to distribute his extra-aromatic Cascade hops to the microbreweries in the region, but he says that it’s Cervecería y Maltería Quilmes that overwhelmingly drives demand. The macrobrewery, which is part of the AB-InBev portfolio, purchases almost all of the valley’s hops, though the harvest only makes up 15 percent of the hops they need annually for production, according to Leibrecht. For about 25 years, the region grew German Spalt hops until Quilmes found out about Cascade, which grew better than Spalt and were more resistant to fungal infections. They told all the farmers to start growing those.

“Now, Quilmes wants Nugget hops,” sighs Leibrecht, who farms about 22 acres of Cascade. “Years ago, they loved our Cascades. Now they want something cheaper.”

On a small experimental plot, Leibrecht was trying to grow new breeds of hops; he recently gave up on growing Willamette, Tomahawk and Columbus hops in favor of focusing on Nugget, which has 14 percent alpha-acids—Quilmes sees Nugget as more bang for their buck. Until craft brewers can outbid the macrobreweries and drive up demand for other types of hops, Leibrecht and the other farmers will grow what sells. Meanwhile, Diego Libkind and his fellow scientists will continue researching the genetic ancestry of the lager yeast that brewers worldwide have been using for over 500 years. Politics of big beer aside, the region is cultivating a burgeoning culture of craft brewing.

Originally published in Beer Advocate’s April 2012 Issue. En Espanol.