How Reducing Gas Flaring Is Making Computing Greener

While hiking in the Colorado Rockies in 2018 two high school friends in their 30s – one an heir to an oil and gas company who had his consciousness raised about climate change while at university, the other a graduate of MIT and Stanford with expertise in finance, computer science and AI – came up with a business plan. Their novel idea? Recuperate the wasted gas that oil and gas producers burn each year – contributing to global warming- and use that energy to mine cryptocurrency, power AI’s huge energy needs, and offer cheaper, cleaner Cloud services to customers.

Fast forward five years and Crusoe Energy Systems, the company Cully Cavness and Chase Lochmiller co-founded, counts oil producers ExxonMobil and Devon Energy as well as AI startups and research organizations among its customers. The Colorado-based startup has raised over $500 million, giving the company a valuation of $1.75 billion in its last funding round. Top Silicon Valley venture firms, the sovereign wealth funds of Oman and Abu Dhabi, as well Japanese trading house Mitsui & Co. are among its backers.

Crusoe’s Digital Flare Mitigation (DFM) technology is deployed directly to oil well sites to convert stranded gas, which would otherwise be wasted and flared, into electricity to power modular data centers housed in 40-foot shipping containers. “Moving gas and power is more difficult than moving data so we bring the equipment necessary to process intensive computing workloads to the source,” says Lochmiller. The scale-up’s data centers support high-performance computing including cryptocurrency transaction processing (mining) as well as CrusoeCloud, a cloud computing platform for computational biology, artificial intelligence and 3D rendering.

The draw for oil producers is that they generate some revenue from gas that would otherwise go to waste while reducing their environmental footprint. The advantage for companies that need a lot of processing power, such as AI startups, is that they can buy greener energy at a steep discount.

Crusoe says its deployed fleet of flare-eliminating data centers have a capacity to reduce CO2-equivalent emissions estimated at 650,000 metric tons per year, comparable to removing approximately 140,000 cars from the road.

“We are proud of the energy story and the way we have been able to make this all work,” says Lochmiller.

Cruscoe Energy’s innovation is an example of how young companies can work with legacy players to abate climate change and help solve the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Up In Smoke

Natural gas flaring is the controlled combustion of volatile hydrocarbons (hydrocarbons in a gas phase) that are released as a byproduct of oil production. The practice originated in the 1800s as a safety precaution to avoid the accumulation of combustible gasses at ground level where sparks could create a fire or explosion. Flaring’s use steadily expanded globally wherever oil is produced in places without sufficient or timely natural gas transportation infrastructure such as pipelines, gas processing plants, compressor stations and related systems. Because the value of natural gas is minimal compared to that of oil, if the oil company doesn’t have access to a pipeline or if the gas volumes are too small to justify infrastructure investment, then it is often cheapest and easiest for the oil producer to burn its associated gas in a flare.

According to the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Tracker Report, 144 billion cubic meters of natural gas was flared in 2021. That much gas could have generated 1,800 Terawatt hours (TWh) of energy – or almost two-thirds of the European Union’s net domestic electricity generation. Instead, it was burned away with no discernible value.

The Global Impact of Flaring

But the biggest problem with flaring is actually the methane that is not fully combusted. A recent study led by scientists at the University of Michigan and published in the journal Science found that in the U.S., flares only effectively destroyed 91.1% of methane, with the rest escaping into the atmosphere. This finding, based on surveys of more than 300 flares across the United States, indicates that the oil industry is producing nearly five times more methane emissions from flaring than prior EPA estimates, which have long-assumed a 98% combustion efficiency for flares. over a 20-year timeframe, methane is over 80x more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, meaning the escaped methane significantly contributes to climate change, especially over the short-term period most relevant to mid-century climate goals and pledges.

The good news is that “if we fix flaring issues, the payoff is huge: the equivalent of removing three million cars from the roads,” according to a University of Michigan article.

A Practical Alternative

Crusoe’s DFM technology offers oil producers an economic and operationally practical alternative to natural gas flaring. Through a process called stoichiometric combustion Crusoe says its DFM technology achieves a combustion efficiency of 99.9% (versus an average of 91.1% for flares), reducing methane emissions approximately 99% and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by up to 68.6%.

Kraken Resources, a private equity-backed exploration and production oil and gas company formed in 2012 to focus on drilling and development opportunities in the Williston Basin of Montana and North Dakota, primarily in the prolific Bakken formation, is one of Crusoe’s customers. Kraken says it works with its midstream partners to gather and process as much of its natural gas production as possible, but a certain amount is stranded. The company says it recognized in 2018-19 the need for mobile, onsite technologies and started exploring and experimenting with multiple ways to use the stranded gas, including onsite power generation for well use, technology to capture and bring to market the heavier components of the gas stream, and Crusoe’s solution. After a successful initial pilot test in Montana with Crusoe, Kraken subsequently piloted solutions with other providers that offered ways to use the stranded gas to mine cryptocurrency. “Crusoe stood out in their understanding of and dedication to the technology necessary to keep the equipment running and demonstrated intelligence and integrity in their approach,” Kraken Resources President and CEO Bruce Larsen said in a written response to questions from The Innovator. Kraken has been working with Crusoe since the fourth quarter of 2019. During that time frame it has run between one and 25 of Crusoe’s DFM units in its producing fields. These have used over 3,500,000 MCF (3.5 BCF) of gas that would have been otherwise flared, the company said.

Crusoe pays companies like Kraken a fee “far below market price” to capture the waste gas, creating a “greater than zero” revenue stream for the waste gas while helping oil and gas companies reduce their environmental footprint, says Lochmiller

Powering Advanced Computing

While reducing energy waste by creating a beneficial use for the natural gas onsite, Crusoe says it is also able to power advanced computing needs without putting additional demands on the energy grid. Some 60% of electricity in the U.S. is still generated from fossil fuels, so displacing this workload from the grid by using previously wasted energy sources further reduces the environmental impact of its data centers. The scale-up’s tech solution also helps boosts renewables by using excess energy from wind farms that would otherwise go to waste to power some of its modular data centers, says Lochmiller.

Increased demand for digital services means that data centers and data transmission networks each account for about 1% to 1.5% of global electricity use today. The International Energy Agency predicts an 8X increase by 2030, thanks to the expanded application of blockchain, machine learning, AI, and other emerging services and technologies.

Crusoe solution addresses the proliferation of large-scale cryptocurrency mining operations that consume a substantial amount of energy, some of which is generated from fossil fuels. “We have transformed the Bitcoin mining industry by turning the energy appetite of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains into a modular and mobile flare-catcher — preventing more than four billion cubic feet of flaring and hundreds of thousands of cars worth of GHG emissions since we launched in 2018,” co-founder Cavness said in a recent blog post.

Crusoe’s data centers also offer a greener way to handle AI’s consumption of energy at a time when bigger models and larger training sets are requiring exponential increases in processing capability and the consumption of vast amounts of power for both training and inference.

“We are seeing an increase in the demand from AI companies for Large Language Model training and have built a platform that is suited for those customers,” says Lochmiller. “Growing our Cloud business is also a major focus. What we are trying to do for AI and Cloud computing is to show people it can be cheaper to do things in a clean way. Our prices are 50% to 60% cheaper, so we are talking about meaningful cost savings. There is tremendous interest,” he says.

Unlocking An Environmental Opportunity

While Crusoe has focused on the U.S. market up to now it is expanding internationally to address the growing need for countries and companies to fulfill their pledges to reduce methane consumption, which the IEA says is responsible for around 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution. At COP27, the United States and European Union announced that more than 150 governments have now signed on to the Global Methane Pledge—about 50 more than when the initiative was introduced last year. More than 50 countries have also adopted methane action plans or are working to develop one. The goal is to take collective action to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30 percent by 2030. To that end Oman’s sovereign wealth fund has invested in Crusoe and the scaleup has signed a commercial agreement to start setting up data centers in Oman, the 10th largest flaring country in the world, Lochmiller says. The scaleup’s first project in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale field is expected to go live later this year.



The hard truth is that transitioning to a clean energy economy is going to take time, says a blog posting co-authored by Cavness and Hui Wen Chan, the scale-up’s Senior Director of ESG. In the interim “We need to ensure that we minimize the harmful climate effects of our existing energy production. Flare reduction – including through Crusoe’s DFM technology – can help reduce potent methane emissions and buy more time to reach near- and mid-term climate targets, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Methane is the most potent and lowest-hanging fruit available to us as a climate runway extension tool and Crusoe has scaled an economic and operationally practical system to unlock this environmental opportunity.

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2024 Tech Pioneers Offer Ways For World To Escape Climate Hell

The planet just marked a new milestone: Every single month from June 2023 to May 2024 was the world’s hottest such month on record, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service.

Copernicus released its data on June 5, the same day as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres made an impassioned speech in New York that urged world leaders to swiftly take control of the spiraling climate crisis or face dangerous tipping points. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he said.. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”

The next day, the World Economic Forum provided some potential escape routes. Among the 2024 cohort of Technology Pioneers announced on June 6 were 14 companies working on both established and emerging green technologies in areas such as carbon-negative and circular materials, carbon capture, regenerative agriculture, alternative proteins, nuclear fusion as well as carbon-negative and circular materials.

“The 2024 Technology Pioneers are revolutionizing industries on a global scale,” Verena Kuhn, Head of Innovator Communities, World Economic Forum, said in a statement. “These innovators are leveraging the most advanced technologies to drive the radical changes needed to confront the world’s most urgent challenges.”

Take the case of Captura, which maintains that the ocean is the answer to reducing carbon emissions. Its Direct Ocean Capture system runs with just two ingredients: seawater and renewable electricity. The California-based company uses its proprietary membrane and electrodialysis technology to extract CO2 directly from seawater to be permanently stored or reused ( see the photo.) Once the carbon is removed, the ocean naturally draws down CO2 from the atmosphere to rebalance.

Other companies in the cohort have come up with novel ways to turn industrial waste into useful products.

France’s Dioxycle, for example, has developed a carbon electrolysis technology that transforms industrial emissions into sustainable ethylene, the most used organic chemical globally and integral in many everyday products, using only renewable electricity and water. It says it can produce this carbon-neutral ethylene at equal or lower costs to the fossil equivalent, offering an economically appealing route to decarbonize numerous industrial and commercial sectors. The French company says its sustainable ethylene can be used to make fabrics, piping, pharmaceuticals, solvents, adhesives, fuels, collants, packaging, construction materials, automotive parts, containers, detergents, furniture and more.

Canada’s Carbon Upcycling’s platform uses carbon dioxide emissions from any industry, combined with natural materials or industrial wastes—from coal plants, steel plants, glass manufacturing and more—to unlock new materials with improved performance and lower emissions. Its innovative approach converts waste carbon into a circular asset, addressing the persistent reliance on fossil fuels and promoting material resource independence

The U.S’s Nth Cycle partners with industrial scrap recyclers, miners, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to take a variety of feedstocks, including black mass, primary ore concentrates, and waste streams and refine them into metal products for the domestic clean energy economy. Recently, Nth Cycle announced that it would be the first company in the United States to offer a domestic nickel mixed hydroxide product (Ni MHP), helping the country to meet the goals of establishing a domestic supply of critical metals crucial for the growth of the electric vehicle sector established by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Switzerland’s DePoly focuses on the chemical recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic back to its main components, creating a sustainable circular economy for plastics.

Some of the 2024 Tech Pioneers are decarbonizing in other ways. For example,to ensure that the CO2 stored by trees is permanently locked in, Germany’s Made of Air creates biochar from wood waste by burning it without oxygen. The recyclable material stores around two tons of Co2 for every ton of thermoplastic. Made of Air mixes the biochar with a binder made from sugar cane to create a material that can be melted and molded. The granules can be used in traditional plastic-forming processes such as injection molding and can be processed using the same machinery as regular plastic. The material produced can replace polluting materials like fossil plastic and aluminum. Made of Air spent two years co-creating a version of biochar that car maker Audi could use in the facades of its dealerships to replace aluminum. H&M, another client, has created a limited-edition pair of sunglasses with Made of Air’s biochar material. (For more on this company see The Innovator’s story).

In March the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations announced that 2024 Tech Pioneer Brimstone Energy, a U.S. company specializing in industrial decarbonization, was selected to negotiate a $189 million federal award to finance the construction of the first commercial-scale plant deploying the company’s decarbonized process for producing cement. The first-of-a-kind plant would produce up to 140,000 metric tons per year of industry-standard ordinary portland cement, the cement used in virtually all construction globally, and another core concrete ingredient (supplementary cementitious materials, or SCM)—while avoiding 120,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.

Meanwhile, another U.S. company, Heirloom Carbon, which is harnessing the natural powers of limestone to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air, has been awarded a contract from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstration to establish one of the nation’s first Direct Air Capture (DAC) hubs in Louisiana, as part of a project called Cypress. Cypress is a partnership that involves Heirloom Carbon, Battelle, an independent nonprofit applied science research and development organization and carbon removal technology company Climeworks, a 2020 Forum Tech Pioneer.

Energizing The Fight Against Climate Change

Two of the 2024 Tech Pioneers – India’s Amperehour Solar and the U.S.’s Fourth Power – provide innovate ways of storing renewable energy while three others: Germany’s Marvel Fusion and Proxima Fusion and the U.S.’s Thea Energy are all working on fusion energy. (See The Innovator’s in-depth story about Proxima Fusion and its story about Marvel Fusion). Fusion energy has great potential as a safe, abundant, zero-carbon source of reliable electricity and is recognized as a potential game-changer in addressing climate change and rising global energy demand.

Developing fusion and other new solutions – such as energy storage peer-to-peer energy generation, green hydroge, electric car charging, and carbon management technologies – at scale will require huge amounts of capital as well as new types of collaborations and actions by governments, financial institutions, and large corporates in traditional businesses.

Corporates can, for example, move whole markets by successfully deploying green alternatives and by partnering within and across industries to massively accelerate new technology development and decarbonization, says a January Forum report entitled: Bold Measures To Close The Climate Action Gap: A Call For Systematic Change By Governments And Corporates.

The Forum has created a group called Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, a CEO-led community committed to accelerating the Net Zero transition by setting science-based targets, disclosing emissions and catalyzing decarbonization and partnerships across global value chains.

The 2024 Tech Pioneers will be invited to join Forum meetings and discussions throughout the year, offering them a chance to engage with large corporations and governments. The first event will be the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2024, which takes place in Dalian, China June 25-27.

There is no time to waste, the U.N.’s Guterres reminded the world in his June 5 speech. “We are at a moment of truth,” he said, adding that the battle for a livable planet will be won or lost in this decade.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

U.S. Sets Stage For Anti-Trust Probes Into Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia.

The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have reached a deal that clears the way for potential antitrust investigations into the dominant roles that Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia play in the artificial intelligence sector, according to news reports.The agreement between the two agencies shows regulatory scrutiny is gathering steam amid concerns over concentration in AI. Microsoft and Nvidia not only dominate their industries but are two of the world’s biggest companies by market capitalization. Nvidia’s market value recently surpassed $3 trillion.

Jonathan Kanter, the U.S.’s top antitrust enforcer, said in an interview with the Financial Times that he was examining “monopoly choke points and the competitive landscape” in AI, encompassing everything from computing power and the data used to train large language models, to cloud service providers, engineering talent and access to essential hardware such as graphics processing unit chips. Regulators are concerned that the nascent AI sector is “at the high-water mark of competition, not the floor” and must act “with urgency” to ensure that already dominant tech companies do not control the market, Kanter said.

Note to readers: The Innovator highly recommends a June 7 well-resourced investigative story in The Wall Street Journal about the tactics of a lawyer that has helped tech companies to fend off antitrust suits.

Silicon Valley In Uproar Over California AI Safety Bill

Members of California’s tech sector are protesting against a state bill that would force technology companies to adhere to a strict safety framework including creating a “kill switch” to turn off their powerful AI models, in a growing battle over regulatory control of the cutting-edge technology.The Californian legislature is considering proposals that would introduce new restrictions on tech companies operating in the state, including the three largest AI start-ups OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere as well as large language models run by Big Tech companies such as Meta. The bill, passed by the state’s Senate last month and set for a vote from its general assembly in August, requires AI groups in California to guarantee to a newly created state body that they will not develop models with “a hazardous capability”, such as creating biological or nuclear weapons or aiding cyber security attacks. Developers would be required to report on their safety testing and introduce a so-called kill switch to shut down their models, according to the proposed Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Systems Act.

But the law has become the focus of a backlash from many in Silicon Valley, who claim it will quash innovation and force AI start-ups to leave the state.

BIOMANUFACTURING

Optogenics Startup Aiming To Revolutionize Biomanufacturing Raises Fresh Funding

Prolific Machines—a California-based startup harnessing light-sensitive proteins to control cells used in biomanufacturing raised fresh funding from A-list investors that include Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Mayfield. Founded by stem cell biologist Dr. Deniz Kent (CEO), physicist and biomedical scientist Dr. Max Huisman (CTO), and computer scientist and ML engineer Declan Jones (CIO) in 2020, Prolific Machines introduces light-sensitive proteins to cells that are used to biomanufacture everything from vaccines to high-value ingredients used in infant formula. Rather than controlling cell function by adding expensive growth factors or other molecules to cell culture media, as companies do now, Prolific Machines exposes cells containing light sensitive proteins to light at specific wavelengths, a technique known as optogenetics. This can activate or deactivate certain genes, proteins, or cellular pathways, delivering what the company says is “unprecedented cellular control.

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Key Takeaways From The World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings

Business leaders, policy makers and social organizations gathered in New York City this week to discuss, among other things, how corporates, startups, and new technology can move the needle on sustainable development.

Convening at the same time as the United Nations General Assembly, some 950 business leaders, policy makers and social organizations gathered in New York City for the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings to discuss everything from climate change and the energy transition to food security and the future of transportation.

The Impact Meetings were designed “to get stakeholders to work on concrete proposals and initiatives and move a bit more towards action,” Sarita Nayyar, Chief Operating Officer of the Forum’s U.S. operations and a member of the Forum’s management board, said in an interview with The Innovator. “

As part of its efforts the Forum is “really trying to create market demand for technology solutions to drive hard-to-abate sectors,” she says. Some 50 global innovators in the Forum’s UpLink program were invited to the meeting. The Forum aims to match these innovators with global companies to scale solutions tackling U.N. Sustainable Development Goals such as water shortages, climate change and cleaning up the oceans.

The meetings also included a convening of 120 CEOs of global companies who have already committed to Net Zero to work on “what programs are needed, what actions are needed to maximize impact and to create new partnerships and mechanisms to move things forward,” she says. “The Forum wants to drive the work that we have been doing to the next level,” Nayyer says. “We hope the work will serve as an example to other CEOs.. It is important that full industry sectors get on board.”

During the Impact Meetings the Forum launched the Crypto Sustainability Coalition, which will investigate how Web3, which includes technologies like blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs , can be leveraged to achieve positive climate action.

The coalition, which comprises 30 partners, is convening working groups to tackle three specific issues:Energy usage – this working group will analyze the crypto industry’s consumption of energy and materials to build a clearer picture of its impacts on climate and nature.
Web3’s potential for climate action – this working group will investigate ways in which web3 innovations could tackle challenges facing the low-carbon transition at the pace required to hit the Paris Agreement’s targets. For example, the decentralized nature of crypto-mining and its ability to operate at off-peak times may provide a new business model for utilities and investors looking to develop renewable energy microgrids.
“On-chain” carbon credits – members of the coalition will explore whether blockchain-based carbon credits could address current flaws in global carbon markets, including: the lack of transparency around carbon offsets for either providers or buyers; the failure of markets to remove carbon emissions at the scale and pace required; and the inability of millions of the world’s smallholder farmers, forest stewards and Indigenous communities to participate in or benefit from carbon credit markets.

The coalition’s wider aim is to foster a broad education campaign on what Web3’s potential and capacity look like, to better inform governments on how they regulate these technologies and incentivize investment and research into their development.

The coalition’s partners include Accenture, Avalanche, Avatree, CC Token, Circle, Climate Collective, Crypto Council for Innovation, Emerge, Energy Web Foundation, eToro, EY, Flowcarbon, Heifer International, KlimaDAO, Lukka, NEAR Foundation, Nori, PlanetWatch, Plastiks, Rainforest Partnership, Recykal, ReSeed, Ripple, Solana, Stellar Development Foundation, STEWARD, Sustainable Bitcoin Standard, The Global Brain, Toucan Protocol, University of Lisbon, and Zero Labs.

The new coalition is part of the Crypto Impact and Sustainability Accelerator (CISA), a grant-funded initiative launched by the Forum in January 2022 with a mission to encourage a greater understanding of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) impacts of crypto technologies.

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GOVTECH

Countries Commit To Sharing Government Technologies As Digital Public Goods

During this week’s United Nations General Assembly high-level representatives from governments, civil society, the private sector, philanthropy, and international organizations agreed to scale up efforts to build digital public infrastructure, according to a press release. Countries from around the world, including Estonia, India, Norway, Peru, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Timor-Leste, Togo, and Ukraine, committed to sharing government technologies as digital public goods, alongside best practices and implementation learnings. Ukraine Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said the country “would like to share the Ukrainian digital government products as digital public goods to the global community” and said the country has a team of “more than 380,000 specialists ready to assist other countries to adopt these solutions, despite the full-scale Russian invasion, via cooperation with the GovStack initiative.” He highlighted the way the digital public infrastructure set up in the country before the war has helped it stand through the war, continuing to deliver public services to citizens and assist the more vulnerable. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $200 million to expand global digital public infrastructure, encompassing tools such as interoperable payment systems, digital ID, data-sharing systems, and civil registry databases.The Kingdom of Norway contributed $50 million and the German government pledged €35 million to advance digital public infrastructure. The EU’s Horn of Africa Initiative committed €10 million to enhance cybersecurity in the region, using the GovStack model.

QUANTUM COMPUTING



Danish Initiative Aims To Develop First Quantum Computer For Life Sciences

The FT reports that Denmark’s Novo Nordisk Foundation is to spend $200 million developing what it says will be the first practical quantum computer for life sciences research, with applications ranging from creating new medicines to finding links between genes, environment and disease. The non-profit foundation, which is the majority owner of the Novo Nordisk pharmaceutical group, joins a crowded field of universities and tech companies seeking to convert the theoretical superpowers of quantum computing into useful devices. But it says its seven-year program, based in Copenhagen, stands out because it will evaluate competing technologies before deciding which one to proceed with. “The other major initiatives globally have already chosen their platforms and are trying to optimize them but we predict that many will run into a dead end,” Peter Krogstrup, who will lead the program from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, told the FT. “We would rather spend seven years finding the platform that offers the greatest opportunity to build a usable quantum computer.

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First Movers Coalition Pledges $12 Billion For Green Tech During COP27

The World Economic Forum and the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate announced the expansion of a coalition of global companies and a commitment to spend $12 billion in 2030 purchase commitments for green tech to decarbonize the cement and concrete industry and other hard-to-abate sectors during the COP27 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt this week.

The latest expansion of the First Movers Coalition – made up of 65 companies with a collective market value of approximately $8 trillion – focuses on cleaning up one of the world’s most carbon-intensive industry sectors through purchasing commitments for low-carbon technology. From construction and engineering to real estate and developers, newly announced First Mover companies have committed to purchasing at least 10% near-zero cement and concrete per year by 2030.

The news comes at the same time as the Rockefeller Foundation released a first-of-its kind analysis and aggregation of climate finance globally, revealing a formidable gap. The new report, What Gets Measured Gets Financed: Climate Finance Funding Flows and Opportunities, developed in coordination with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), found that only about 16% of climate finance needs are currently being met.

To achieve net zero, public and private sector entities across the globe will need approximately $3.8 trillion in annual investment flows through 2025 but only a fraction of this capital is currently being deployed, according to the report. It says that emerging technologies and markets are experiencing the most severe financing shortfalls. Critical decarbonization levers such as carbon capture and sequestration and fuel cell technology are significantly underfunded, with only approximately 5% of needs met.

According to experts, the critical climate target of 1.5ºC can only be reached if new decarbonizing technologies are quickly developed. Demand signals today for innovative green technologies by 2030 are needed to ensure that innovative green solutions are invested in and scaled in this decade.

There is widespread agreement that large traditional companies have an important role to play in helping scale-up emerging green tech technologies by partnering with the young companies developing them. The First Movers Coalition is doing just that. Since the Coalition’s launch in 2021, companies in the Coalition have made advance purchase commitments by 2030 for near-zero carbon steel, aluminum, shipping, trucking, aviation, carbon dioxide removal solutions and now cement and concrete.

During COP27 Kerry announced the expansion of the First Movers Coalition alongside Brad Smith, President and Vice-Chair of Microsoft, Mads Nipper, Chief Executive Officer of Ørsted, and Fernando González, Chief Executive Officer of CEMEX. Founding coalition members of the cement and concrete sector are General Motors, Vattenfall, ETEX, Ørsted and RMZ Corporation.

Other companies that have recently joined the First Movers Coalition include Autodesk (aviation), Bang & Olufsen (aluminum), Constellium (aluminum), Emirates Global Aluminium (carbon removal technologies),), Hoegh Autoliners (shipping), PepsiCo (aluminium, trucking) and Rio Tinto (aviation, shipping and trucking).

IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK

HEALTH

Sanofi Signs Research Tie-Up With Hong Kong Biotech Firm To Accelerate AI-Powered Drug Discovery

Sanofi has signed a strategic research collaboration with Hong Kong-based biotech firm Insilico Medicine in a deal worth up to $1.2 billion, to leverage artificial intelligence to speed up its drug-discovery process.The French healthcare company will put up as much as $21.5 million in upfront payment and target nomination fees to Insilico, which could rise to $1.2 billion subject to hitting certain undisclosed research, development and sales milestones, according to Insilico.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

JP Morgan And Mastercard Unveil Pay-By-Bank Service

JP Morgan is teaming up with Mastercard on a service that uses open banking to let customers make payments using their bank account information instead of a card. The Pay-by-Bank service offers ACH payments that use open banking so that customers can permission their financial data to be shared between trusted parties to let them pay bills directly from their bank account. This means that customers do not need to type in routing and account numbers each time they need to pay a bill. For billers and merchants, it automates consumer on-boarding and reduces the risk and cost of storing bank account information. JP Morgan says the offering will be particularly beneficial for recurring payments. Pay-by-Bank is currently being piloted with a few billers and merchants before an expansion next year.

UBS And Julius Baer Grapple With Offering Financial Advice In The Metaverse

Two of the world’s biggest wealth managers are experimenting with switching client meetings from oak-paneled boardrooms to the metaverse, but have struggled to overcome data security and motion sickness. UBS and Julius Baer, Swiss banks that specialize in providing white-glove financial advice to billionaires, have each trialed the use of clunky headsets and pixelated avatars to interact with clients, according to people interviewed by the Financial Times. But neither bank is close to rolling out a virtual reality offering to their ultra-rich customers after the experiments caused concern over the technology’s ease of use and the ability to share documents securely. “The technology is not there yet — frankly it looks like Atari graphics at the moment and people who have tried it have had feelings of motion sickness,” one bank executive involved in the trials was quoted as saying. “We also have a lot of issues with confidential and sensitive data security.”

MOBILITY

Renault and Google Are Teaming To Create A Software Defined Vehicle

A new pact, which expands on a previous collaboration between the two firms, will see Renault commit to making what it calls a “software defined” vehicle using technology from Google’s Cloud division. Using artificial intelligence, the two companies plan to create a “digital twin” of a new vehicle. Digital twins aim to replicate physical objects in a virtual setting so that they can be tested and monitored before real-world deployment.The deal will help Renault develop new onboard and off-board applications, the companies said. Renault will use data analytics to detect and resolve any failures in how the vehicle functions, and personalize users’ experience to adapt to often-used destinations, such as electric vehicle charging stations.

QUANTUM COMPUTING

Bosch, IBM Join Forces To Use Quantum Computing To Find Alternatives To Rare Minerals Needed For EVs

Germany’s Bosch has formed a partnership with IBM to use quantum computing and simulation technology to find alternatives to the rare earths and metals needed for electric vehicles.The minerals used in magnets in electric motors, membranes in fuel cells for hydrogen technology as well as in aerospace and defence are expensive and often mined in unsustainable ways. China supplies 98% of European Union demand for magnets made from rare earths, and battery minerals lithium, nickel and cobalt are also almost entirely imported from abroad. The research cooperation will use quantum computing to explore which different materials could partially or fully replace those currently used, Bosch’s corporate research and development chief Thomas Kropf told Reuters. The aim is to achieve results within a decade.

ROBOTICS

Amazon Debuts New Warehouse Robot That Can Do Human Jobs

Amazon has debuted a warehouse robot that can pick up and sort millions of individual unpackaged products, in a move that will automate more jobs as the U.S. e-commerce giant faces pressure to significantly cut logistics costs. The group said the robot, named Sparrow, is its first one with the capability to “detect, select, and handle individual products in our inventory”, a task that had previously been the exclusive domain of Amazon’s warehouse employees. Sparrow, a robotic arm that harnesses computer vision technology to identify and pick up small products, was unveiled at an event in Boston on November 10.

CYBERSECURITY

S. Korean University Announces 5G-Enabled AI-Based Malware Detection And Classification System for IIoT

While the Industrial Internet of Things has many advantages, it also comes with security threats that can create high risk situations. A team at S. Korea’s Incheon National University has developed a new AI-based design, based on a multi-layer deep learning approach, for a security system that can not only detect malware attacks in IIoT systems, but also classify them. Compared to conventional system architectures, the university says the new design showed an improved accuracy that reached 97% on the benchmark data set. The hope is that this new malware classification system can be used to secure real-time connectivity applications such as smart cities and autonomous vehicle and provides solid groundwork for the development of advanced security systems that can curb a wide range of cyber crime activities.

SUSTAINABILITY

DB Schenker Launches Global C02- Neutral Air Freight Offer



DB Schenker announced an offer that lets customers choose Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) for their air transport to anywhere in the world and independent of the type of aircraft or airline used. Via virtual allocation of the biofuel, the company says in a press release that it is possible to avoid up to 100% of CO2 emissions. Currently, SAF is 3-5 times more expensive than regular fossil-based fuel. For their ESG reporting, customers that decide to pay the premium for virtual allocation of SAF for an air freight shipment receive certification for the exact amount of greenhouse gases avoided. While the actual physical insertion of SAF might occur on different flights, the exact CO2 emissions of a flight or shipment with conventional kerosene are avoided, according to DB Schenker This process is called a “virtual application” and can also be exercised for upstream emissions originating from the production and transport of the biofuel itself.


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