Saving The Oceans With Advanced Transportation Technologies

As discussed  in “Rethinking ESG Targets for companies like Amazon
AMZN
, Apple
AAPL
, and Analog Devices
ADI
,”  sustainability is driven by a carbon pipeline consisting of demand for energy, efficient delivery of energy to the end user, and finally dealing with the consequences of the process in the form of pollution. Virtualization, electrification, sequestration are powerful tools to accelerate the development of sustainable systems. Virtualization and electrification have powerful economic models which drive investment. However, sequestration is the least developed because it deals primarily with pollution.

In economic terms, pollution is often a “third-party” externality. That is, a buyer and a seller can come together on a deal which impacts a third-party without that third party’s consent.  A simple example might be a seller builds a product which produces a great deal of air pollution because it can be done cheaply.  The buyer loves the cheap price, yet all the folks impacted by the pollution had no say in the transaction.  In modern times, this process has been handled by a predictable process which transitions through the following phases:

  1. Disaster. Almost always, the process starts with some unfortunate event or circumstance which invites government intervention.
  2. Research:  Research on understanding of problem and mitigation strategies is required.  
  3. Regulation: Mitigation strategies are encoded into a regulatory structure.
  4. Markets:  Regulation creates the markets which drives the investment to develop products and services.

Sustainability regulation has traditionally focused on using point-of-use or centralized (industrial plants) control to manage environmental issues. A well established ecosystem of utilities, regulators, service providers, and academia form the current ecosystem.  However, the next generation challenges  involve  long-range, cross-boundary, and complex human/environment interactions.  Recent examples of systemic issues include air quality (mostly in Asia), forest fires (mostly in the American West), algae blooms (mostly in the American East), safe drinking water (Flint being the canary in the coal mine), and ocean health (everywhere). Currently, many of these issues are still in the research phase, and critical issues are not fully understood because of the highly distributed structure of the problem.  As an example, how can one get a sense of the realities of the ocean without a monitoring scheme which gathers much more data.  

How can transportation technologies help ?

The critical requirements are to capture data with enough detail and regularity to understand the dynamics of the ocean. The sort of information which is of value includes temperature (surface and at depth), biological health (microbial as well as fish stocks), water quality, and even the discovery of hydrocarbon reserves.   The solution stack very includes:

  1. Advanced Satellite:  Satellites provide excellent coverage and generate a vast amount of data on the earth’s surface. NOAA has a highly honed system of data collection with the STAR group which results in your daily weather forecast. Artificial Intelligence based learning systems similar to the ones used for autonomous vehicles can be employed to analyze this vast amount of data to understand important research issues.
  2. Perception Systems on Ships:  Ships already have significant perception systems similar to autonomous vehicles. Adding some sensors which monitor the ocean at various depths and crowdsourcing this information for cloud analysis would provide a great deal more visibility to the situation on the oceans.
  3. Autonomous Drones (air and submarine):  With AV technology, it is very possible to build large numbers of small autonomous devices which can provide on-demand visibility to any particular region. Further, following the path of advanced agriculture, autonomous systems can scale regenerative farming on land and on the ocean. It should be a little easier since there is no harvesting step.

What is missing ?     With the exception of hydrocarbon exploration, the business models for investment in these methods have not yet matured.  Carbon taxes and offset may offer such a market. Interestingly, the above technology architecture for oceans can also be used with small changes for a wide variety of  distributed monitoring applications such as groundwater, forest fires, or air pollution.

Overall, it would be interesting to see a consortium of electronics technology players, research institutions, NGOs, and governments leverage the technology enabled by transportation to address sustainability issues, and perhaps discover viable business models along the way.

Note: This article is part of a three-part series:

  1. Sustainability, Transportation Electrification And The Importance Of Analog
  2. Rethinking ESG Targets For Companies Like Amazon, Apple And Analog Devices
  3. Saving The Oceans With Advanced Transportation Technologies

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