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Energy company Repsol has extended its co-innovation partnership with Dublin-based professional services firm Accenture to accelerate the use of generative AI across the company, through the introduction and deployment of AI agent systems. This “agentification” will help to improve the efficiency of processes as they are scaled across all company businesses.

Introducing AI agents is part of the evolution of Repsol’s digital program, an extension of the work carried out for more than two years in the energy firm’s Generative AI competence Center, which has laid the foundations for analyzing and understanding the advantages of generative AI and defined a strategy to extend it throughout the company.

“With the extension of our collaboration with Accenture, we continue to drive our digitalization and AI push through the introduction of generative AI agents,” said Josu Jon Imaz, CEO of Repsol. “We aspire to be one of the pioneering companies in the energy sector in the use of these technologies. Since we launched our Digital Program more than six years ago, Accenture has been providing us with tools to improve our efficiency and competitiveness, in our effort to transform the company through technology.”

The deal means Accenture will help build and deploy customized, autonomous AI agents, powered by components of the Accenture AI Refinery platform and the Nvidia AI platform, including Nvidia accelerated computing and Nvidia AI enterprise software.

In a press release, Repsol says these agents will help “reinvent and streamline processes into more dynamic and less complex workflows to boost productivity, ranging from planning and forecasting to application maintenance and incident resolution,” enabling Repsol employees to work faster, simpler and more efficiently.

The two companies will also explore the use of AI agents and Nvidia Omniverse for digital twins and robotic solutions to perform maintenance and other activities in its industrial and logistics centers more efficiently.

“We are excited to help Repsol achieve a new level of performance by working together to create tailored AI agents with the Accenture AI Refinery and the NVIDIA AI platform. Accelerating the use of agentic AI will enhance efficiency and productivity at speed, better serve customers with personalized experiences, and ultimately help Repsol gain competitive advantage,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture.

On the customer side, these technologies will deliver personalized offers with greater accuracy and speed.

As part of this agreement, Repsol will also expand training for its employees.

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In the search for carbon free or carbon neutral energy sources to replace fossil fuels, hydrogen is a subject of active development. In rocketry, it’s a very high-performance fuel, and when reacted in moderate temperature combustion processes, the primary exhaust gas, water vapor, is harmless.

But the highest quality energy in any system is electric current, and fuel cells promise to deliver direct conversion of gaseous hydrogen to electricity. They have been powering spacecraft for over half a century, and there are currently some commercial applications, but technical challenges still need to be overcome before fuel cells can become a power source for popular consumer applications like motor vehicles or home power.

Jim Anderton discusses progress in fuel cell technology with Carl Cottuli, Head of Development Engineering at Bloom Energy.

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The creation of a carbon free energy infrastructure by 2050 is a widely sought goal for Western economies, and America is no exception. Achieving both green energy production and grid distribution at scale, however, is a problem almost impossible to resolve in only 25 years with current technology. 

Argonne National Laboratory has published a report which presents a roadmap toward a clean energy future, driven by artificial intelligence. According to the laboratory, the key will be to harness very large data sets from laboratories, government, and the private sector, to enable AI systems to develop new materials, new technologies and deployment strategies using established techniques such as the digital twin. If regulators will accept artificial intelligence results at face value, timelines for certification of new technologies could be compressed by at least 20%.

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Practical, commercial nuclear fusion power has been a dream for decades. Promising limitless, clean energy, multiple research organizations and companies have been struggling for 60 years to make it a commercial proposition, and several are nearing the point of prototype testing. One, Longview Fusion Energy Systems Inc., has signed a memorandum of understanding with civil engineering giant Fluor to build a pilot plant, using Longview’s solid-state laser driven, inertial confinement technology. Going directly to plant construction without a working prototype is ambitious, especially for a venture capital funded operation, and it suggests supercomputers and advanced simulation to generate the high confidence levels needed for commercialization. 

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Reducing the carbon footprint of the chemical industry requires a two-pronged strategy: reduction of fossil fuel use as an energy input, and carbon dioxide generated by chemical processes themselves.

A joint venture by Celanese Corporation and Mitsui & Co., the Fairway Methanol project is operating a CO2 to methanol plant in Clear Lake, Texas. The process uses piped waste CO2 and clean hydrogen sourced from a nearby Linde plant. The resulting low carbon methanol can be used as a feedstock for multiple downstream production processes making plastics, coatings, adhesives, pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals. 

The process is now certified by the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification system, allowing users of the clean methanol to use the low carbon feedstock as a method to reduce overall CO2 emissions. The plant can capture 180,000 metric tons of CO2 annually, producing 130,000 metric tons of methanol.

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According to the report, the digital technologies with the highest potential for upstream oil and natural gas (O&G) applications are:

1. AI-based predictive maintenance
2. AI analytics decision-making
3. AI- and IoT-powered digital twins
4. IIoT data and asset management
5. IIoT remote monitoring
6. Robotics for inspection and maintenance
7. Autonomous drilling
8. XR technology for oil exploration
9. Automated well design
10. Automation technologies for oil and gas electrification

The focus on decarbonization, digital transformation and technology innovation accelerated in the O&G industry in the past five years, according to Research and Markets, which predicts that these trends will continue to add significant benefits for the O&G sector and its customers for many years.

(Image: Unsplash / Dean Brierley.)

Automation technologies are becoming increasingly important in most industries, including O&G. Research and Markets reports that in 2022, the O&G automation market for products and related services reached sales of $17.78 billion, driven by the adoption of digital transformation initiatives, attractive improvements in price/performance of the technologies and the urgent need to reduce the number of safety incidents. Research and Markets forecasts the automation technologies market will grow steadily at a CAGR of 7.61% from 2022 to 2030, ultimately reaching a market value of $32 billion.

Digital technology and new business models are driving the optimization of O&G to achieve critical business goals, including:

• Driving profitability through cost reduction
• Maintaining operational efficiency
• Achieving sustainability goals
• Reducing GHG emissions
• Advancing decarbonization
• Reducing safety incidents

Artificial intelligence, digital twins, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), machine learning, robotics, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will dominate the technology market because they enable operational automation to reduce operating costs. In O&G, the predominant applications of these technologies will be asset management, data-driven decision-making, predictive maintenance, remote site monitoring and energy management, according to Research and Markets. These AI-augmented applications pave the way to cleaner and innovative oil and gas processes, including sub-surface 3D modeling for exploration, geostatistics, subsea production facility design, autonomous drilling operations and immersive virtual training.

The report concludes that automation technologies will play a significant role in achieving the digital transition in O&G and supporting the energy transition, claiming that these technologies are essential for the O&G industry to advance meaningfully toward the 2050 net-zero objectives.

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Carbon capture technology company Spiritus novel adsorbent-based direct air capture technology for CO2 in a unique way: by offsetting the carbon footprint of Taylor Swift’s recent transpacific jet flight from Tokyo to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl. At current pricing, carbon neutrality for this single flight cost $28,000. But the company claims that the cost of removing CO2 by direct capture can be reduced by a factor of seven. If it works, Taylor Swift’s flight would have cost $4,000 to achieve neutrality, and the average American passenger car could be made carbon neutral for about $40 per month. At that pricing, it may be possible to keep the internal combustion engine relevant for decades to come.

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Episode Transcript:

When the Kansas City Chiefs won their historic Super Bowl victory in Las Vegas, millions of people were watching who had no interest whatsoever in the NFL: Taylor Swift fans. 

The pop diva has been a star attraction at Chiefs’ games all year, but to get to the Super Bowl, she flew from Tokyo, Japan, site of a recent concert, to Los Angeles — a distance of some 5,488 miles. That flight was made in the comfort of a Bombardier Global 6000, flying at 39,000 feet with a 652 knot ground speed on average.

It’s a comfortable way to travel, but like all private jets, CO2 emissions per passenger mile are considerable: Swift’s transpacific flight generated an estimated 40 tons of CO2. In one of the more clever guerrilla marketing efforts of the year, that CO2 was offset courtesy of Los Alamos, New Mexico-based Spiritus.

The company has developed a direct air capture CO2 removal technology which the company claims is scalable and capable of removing carbon dioxide on megaton scales. The Spiritus system uses silo-like machines the company calls “carbon orchards” where ambient air circulates passively across a proprietary solid sorbent that the company calls “fruit,” where CO2 is adsorbed. The “fruit” is then passed into a desorption system where the CO2 is stripped off the sorbent, which is then cycled back into the airstream. 

From an engineering perspective, absorbent types of CO2 capture are technically both simple and elegant with the right materials, but the secret sauce is in removing the CO2 from the sorbent surface.

This can be achieved by heat, vacuum or combination of both, in a process called vacuum temperature swing adsorption, but Spiritus uses a proprietary low-temperature desorption process, which the company claims can reduce both energy requirements and overall system cost. And costs with current technology are high, typically on the order of $700 per ton of removed CO2. 

Spiritus believes that their technology can reduce the cost to below $100 per ton, a carbon price level which could introduce some interesting economics into the CO2 balance equation. A typical passenger car emits about 4 ½ tons of CO2 per year, so if an internal combustion engine’s emissions are offset with the projected Spiritus system, net zero emissions could be achieved at a cost of approximately $40 per month.  

Current U.S. electric vehicle pricing is approximately $5,000 higher than average internal combustion engine models, so if fossil fuel offsets were charged at the $40 a month rate for internal combustion engines, it would take about a dozen years to match the price premium for an electric vehicle. 

This is coincidentally about the average age of cars and trucks in the American consumer fleet. From an economic perspective, this would make the consumer choice for electric vehicles dependent almost entirely on factors like the cost of charging, maintenance and insurance. 

In essence, advanced direct air capture technologies like the Spiritus system would be a new lease on life for traditional fossil fuel combustion technologies in transportation and power generation. There are literally dozens of firms from industrial gas suppliers to oil companies working on direct air capture technology, with radically different technologies, and at this point it’s not clear which will be the first to commercial viability, or if direct air capture will ever emerge as the solution to the CO2 problem. 

At current pricing, to offset Taylor Swift’s Super Bowl flight cost $28,000. That cost needs to drop by a factor of 7 to 10 for commercial viability, so direct air capture firms are in a race against companies developing non-fossil fuel-based energy sources and electrified vehicles, who also must reduce costs significantly to stay competitive.  

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Stockholm, Sweden-based Corpower Ocean has developed a standalone generation source the company calls a Wave Energy Converter, a floating generator unit tethered to a seabed anchor. The converter is essentially a floating buoy, resembling a giant sport fishing float or “bobber,” containing a novel mechanism. As the converter rises and falls relative to its seabed anchor, the vertical motion is converted by a rack and pinion mechanism into rotation, driving generators. The technology has been tested in real-world conditions since 2018 and has little environmental impact on marine life. Ocean wave power resources globally are approximately 500 GW, enough to potentially supply 10% of the world’s electricity needs.

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Episode Transcript:

The recent COP 28 climate conference in Dubai was centered on possible timelines for a phase-out of fossil fuel use globally. It’s a highly contentious issue, with the oil industry strongly represented for the first time at a major climate change event. Solutions to rising CO2 levels in an energy-hungry world are, of course, engineering solutions. And at COP 28, two approaches were discussed: carbon sequestration and alternate energy sources. 

Solar photovoltaic and wind, along with nuclear power, are the most popular forms of alternate energy in use worldwide, but there are others that have outstanding output potential with sensible economics. One that gets relatively little attention is wave power. 

Stockholm, Sweden-based CorPower Ocean has developed a standalone generation source the company calls a Wave Energy Converter, a floating generator unit tethered to a seabed anchor. The converter is essentially a floating buoy, resembling a giant sport fishing float or “bobber,” containing a novel mechanism. As the converter rises and falls relative to its seabed anchor, the vertical motion is converted by a rack and pinion mechanism into rotation, driving generators. The device uses a pneumatic pretension linkage which addresses the inevitable resonance problems encountered in any wave harnessing technology. The system allows the floating mass to be tuned in or out of phase with the incident waves, both optimizing electrical output and damping the unit’s motion as necessary in rough seas. Sealing rotating elements such as turbines against seawater ingress has always been a challenge for ocean power systems, but the Corpower device oscillates vertically, simplifying the sealing problem with slower, purely linear motion in the moving element. 

Unit hulls are produced as fiber-wound composite monolithic structures, which are built on site using a mobile factory. Wave Energy Converters weigh 70 tons, in a 9 x 18 m footprint, producing 300 kW. According to the company, this represents an energy harvest using 1/10 of the volume of conventional wave energy conversion technology. 

In development since 2012, and initially tested in 2018, the CorPower system will be deployed in numbers to form local networks for grid scale power production, with full commercial rollout in 2025. The total addressable market is considerable. Current estimates of commercially feasible wave energy resources are about 500 GW, of which just over 330 GW are expected to be in use globally by 2050. Wave energy could deliver 10% or more of the world’s electricity needs if deployed fully. Plus there is an additional environmental bonus: the Wave Energy Converters have minimal impact on marine life.

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In his annual letter to CEOs, investment heavyweight BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, addressed decarbonization as a major driving force in investment strategy going forward. But notably, he identified the problem of cost. Alternate energy is too expensive, and as long as it remains that way, the transition to green energy will be glacially slow. The solution, according to Fink, is investment in a new generation of alternate energy startups, similar to the manner in which Silicon Valley launched the modern software industry. The pooled investment capital available is at historic highs, and fund managers like Fink appear ready to write the check. All that’s missing are the engineering entrepreneurs to kickstart the revolution.

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Episode Transcript:

This man is not an engineer. Or a scientist. Or politician.  

He’s Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, one of the world’s biggest investment firms, currently managing 9,4 trillion dollars in assets. Control of that kind of wealth has economic and political implications, and Fink’s annual letter to CEOs is watched carefully. 

His last annual letter, entitled The Power of Capitalism, was the traditional celebration of capitalism as an engine of economic growth, but in it he also described a sea change in the economy which will have profound implications for engineering.  

According to Fink, who naturally has an investment view of economic evolution, startups and high-growth innovation companies have access to capital that has never been seen before. Global financial assets now total 400 trillion dollars. Young people with a good idea who want to build something have access to investment capital in ways and amounts that would have been unimaginable even 20 years ago.  

Absurdly low interest rates were a factor until recently, and frankly, massive government deficit spending in most of the world’s industrialized nations is a factor too. But regardless, there’s never been a better time for an innovator to start a company.  

The other factor, he notes, is the changing nature of those startups, and the money that finances them. According to Fink, the next 1,000 “unicorns” won’t be search-engines or social media companies, they’ll be startups that will drive decarbonization. He also mentions the elephant in the room, which is refreshing: that the green premium—the extra cost of green energy—has to come down before a meaningful transition can be made.  

As it stands now, that transition is going to take three or four decades at best. Maybe longer, for the simple reason that most of the world’s population cannot afford to pay more for energy. Which means substantial investment in the existing petroleum-based energy infrastructure for at least half a century, as significant demand for fossil fuels will likely be a reality for decades, barring some dramatic technological breakthrough. 

Larry Fink is not an engineer, but he is addressing with some clarity the issues that most engineers understand about sustainability going forward—the issues that politicians won’t talk about and that many environmentalists intentionally obfuscate. 

Going green is not about politics. It’s not about regulations. It’s about developing a set of technologies that deliver the same benefits that petroleum does, at equal or lower cost. This is an engineering problem. 

But developing a workable technical solution is only the first phase. Scaling those solutions in mass production requires capital, and Larry Fink is sending a signal that the global investment community has dollars to invest, like they did with the original software startups in Silicon Valley.  

If so, we’re about to see a couple of decades of radical technological innovation. But cash is king. To take my home off grid with solar would cost approximately $50,000. Which isn’t going to happened in this space-time continuum. But what if it cost $15,000? I’d do it tomorrow. So, Fink describes it simply, like Field of Dreams: build it, at lower cost, and they will come. 

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