The Google parent’s moonshot factory X this week officially unveiled Project Bellwether, its latest bid to apply technology to some of our biggest problems.
Here that means using AI tools to identify natural disasters like wildfire and flooding as quickly as possible.
“Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” the Guard’s Col. Brian McGarry notes.
Google has been exploring the use of machine learning models and AI to predict natural disasters for some time now.
Project Bellwether’s partnership with the National Guard could well prove an important validation of that work.
The modern world is dependent on a vast network for extracting, processing, transporting and ultimately consuming hydrocarbons like crude oil and natural gas.
Instead of reducing humanity’s dependence on hydrocarbons — which is impossible or undesirable or both, depending on who you ask — Terraform Industries’ solution is to produce this resource, using electricity and air, via a system it calls the Terraformer.
Today, the startup is announcing that it has commissioned a demonstrator Terraformer and produced synthetic natural gas for the first time.
Roughly the size of two shipping containers, the Terraformer consists of three subsystems: an electrolyzer, which converts solar power into hydrogen; a direct air capture system that captures CO2; and a chemical reactor that ingests both these inputs to produce pipeline-grade synthetic natural gas.
The startup says that improvements are already in the works to bring these prices down even further to ensure that its synthetic natural gas hits cost parity with conventionally sourced liquified natural gas.
But then there’s methane, which has driven about 30% of climate change, according to the IEA.
Leaks are one of the main sources, both from aging natural gas infrastructure and oil and gas fields.
The company has been able to observe a significant portion of estimated oil and gas methane emissions in the U.S., the IEA said in a report released Wednesday.
Huppertz and co-founder Jack Angela have developed a suite of algorithms to detect methane emissions using freely available satellite data.
“And so making sure that methane and natural gas stays within infrastructure and does not leak into the atmosphere will always be a crucial point until the last drop of natural gas is used.”
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