Tuesday, 8 October, 2024 / Edition 28

During these crazy times of hurricanes and natural disasters, we start imagining things that could make our lives better and more resilient. Easy access to aircraft that don’t require jet fuel and can take off vertically seems to fit the bill, as does a way to generate electricity from our everyday activities. I looked at these topics for you all this week, so let’s dig in!

P.S. It’s not too late to register for today’s AI webinar featuring panelists from NVIDIA and ROGII—and moderated by yours truly! If you can't attend, you should still register, and we’ll send you the recording tomorrow.

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Living Like the Jetsons

Joby Aviation

You may recall a time when flying cars were predicted to be a thing of the future.

There’s already self-parking cars and self-driving rideshares. Now, self-driving aircraft are preparing for takeoff.

California-based startup Joby Aviation is working to launch what they call “Electric Aerial Ridesharing.” This is the future, y’all, and I want a part of it!

Driving the news: Toyota recently made a $500-million investment in Joby, and they aren’t the only corporate giants excited about self-flying planes, according to Digital Trends.

• Delta Airlines has partnered with Joby to potentially offer its rideshare services as a passenger perk down the line.

• United Airlines has created a similar partnership with a competing electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (eVTOL) company.

How it works:

• Joby’s aircraft are powered by hydrogen fuel cells, so they’re zero-emission electric vehicles.

• They have vertical landing and takeoff, fueled by six electric engines and several propellers instead of the single propeller working in the average helicopter.

• The aircraft are not completely auto-piloted (yet?). There is space for one pilot and four passengers, and the pilot is “flying” the plane, but the plane is in autopilot essentially the entire duration of the flight.

• Currently, the value proposition is ridesharing to and from big city airports, but Joby hopes to expand its capabilities to rides beyond that.

I could see this coming to the oilfield in a few ways:

• Replacing helicopters to and from offshore rigs, but passenger capacity needs to come up, or costs would need to come down.

• There might not be as many people living onsite in remote locations. If travel time and costs are low enough, you can bet safety and money efficiencies will drive this change.

As excited as I am about this, I see a few challenges to overcome:

• Safety. Some say a hydrogen fuel cell from a car in Ukraine was just turned into a small hydrogen bomb, so it’s not too far a leap to imagine one of these planes potentially being used in a similar way. But it’s unlikely, and Joby is working with the FAA to meet its usual safety criteria.

• Time. I could see it making sense for New York City or Los Angeles, where you could probably walk to the airport faster than sitting on the highway, but all the steps needed to take a flying rideshare to the airport might not make sense in many cities. That being said, Joby has signed a deal with the UAE government to launch its services in Dubai by 2026.

• Cost. I can’t imagine this will be affordable to many people for a while, which means (sadly) maybe no personal flying cars for a while longer.

Overall, this is an exciting step forward for transportation. Clean, semi-private aircraft: coming to a city near you!

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Is There Potential in Kinetic Energy?

Axios Images

A post came across my LinkedIn newsfeed about harnessing piezoelectric and/or kinetic energy to power cities, which led me down a bit of an internet rabbit hole.

There’s a lot of room for potential here, so let me tell you what I found!

We might have learned about kinetic and potential energy in whatever physics class with which our high school or college sought to torture us.

• Piezoelectric energy is the energy some objects emit when they’re subject to mechanical stress, such as vibration.

• A small-scale example of a piezoelectric generator is found in cigarette lighters.

It’s not hard to imagine numerous ways in which we could harness the piezo/kinetic energy in our daily lives. And the big appeal here is the energy sources themselves (cars moving, people running or dancing, etc.) are largely very cheap to operate, if not completely free.

It turns out that collecting kinetic energy is likely much more cost-effective than capturing piezo energy, but companies and researchers are exploring both options.

Key examples: Here are some potential means of harnessing kinetic energy that are currently being tested and/or sold:

• Pavement panels. Roadways that harness cars’ kinetic energy often slow the cars down, but perhaps we could put the harvesting devices near places where cars need to slow down anyway, such as in/near speed bumps or before stop signs.

• One group of researchers sought to increase the density of piezo energy harvesters placed on areas of roadway (doing more gathering in less space).

• Floor tiles. Kinetic energy might have more potential in high-energy areas where losses aren’t consequential, such as playgrounds or dancefloors. In the latter, floor tiles could be used as harvesting devices, and some companies are already producing these tiles.

Efficiency, as usual, is a problem.

• Piezoelectric materials are often expensive, and don’t generate a lot of power.

• Infrastructure and logistics play a huge role here. My mind immediately went to, “Why not turn football stadiums into giant generators using this tech?” and the main reason is likely cost, infrastructure, and safety. It’s the classic predicament of any budding business model: Can we do it? Yes. Can we scale it? Hmmm…. TBD.

Barriers mean opportunity. Materials with better outputs are needed, and us geoscientists specialize in finding all things not grown (cut it out, mineralogists…I know minerals technically “grow.”)

Opportunity requires information, and more on this topic can be found here and here.

A message from AAPG Academy and Enspired

It's not too late to secure your registration to join your Enspired editor, Sarah Compton, along with expert panelists from NVIDIA and ROGII who will answer these questions and more through case studies and real-world examples, happening today at 12pm CDT:

• How soon will AI usage become mainstream within the industry?
• Which AI uses could be right for your company?
• And what would widespread industry use mean for the geoscience community?

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