Tag Archives: technology

GaaS – Geothermal as a Service

Posted on October 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

I’m always interested in new applications of sustainable technologies. It’s partly because I’m interested in innovations themselves — how to start up, how to make a startup successful, in fact, even the definition of success for a startup. Not all startup ideas need to wind up as IPOs or free-standing private firms. Nor do they always need to make a lot of money for a few.

In the article below we see a partnership that makes geothermal energy a reality for a whole complex of residents. It’s on a rather small scale, but reduces costs greatly for the families that live in the development.

The essence is to create underground sources near the project and put in the plumbing so that every home can have heating and cooling through the shared geothermal system. It’s installed in advance of occupancy, so the process becomes part of the construction of the site.

It’s taking place in Vermont. That’s a state with a serious heating problem in the winter. And like many US places, summers can occasionally require air conditioning.

Here, geothermal thermal developer Dandelion Energy and utility Vermont Gas Services (VGS) are teaming up to deliver geothermal capacity through newly drilled infrastructure to serve the Riggs Meadow addition planned in Hinesburg, which will include 44 townhomes and apartments designed for low- and moderate-income renters and owners.

The business model is somewhat like the “energy-as-service” provided by microgrid developers, in which they bear the upfront and long-term operations cost and responsibilities of the geothermal infrastructure and energy delivery. Each building will have its own geothermal heat pump and ground loop exchanger. The heat pumps will be electric, not gas powered.

Vermont Gas Services CEO Neale F. Lunderville said the utility will finance, own and maintain the underground geothermal infrastructure as a utility asset. Customers will simply pay for the service monthly.

It’s a novel approach for the troubled area of low-to-middle income apartments, which are often built with minimum investment because rents will be capped relative to more luxury accommodations.

This is a simple plan using well-understood technology, and should be a guidepost for others to follow.

Rod Walton, EnergyTech Managing Editor, Oct. 13, 2026

https://mymaritimeblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php

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Posted in entrepreneurship, Logistics, Sustainability

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Offshore Carbon Capture and Storage

Posted on September 19, 2026 by | Leave a comment

If carbon capture technology is ever to be useful, there have to be places to store the captured carbon. One place is deep in the earth, in abandoned oil wells. We’re seeing somewhat more interest in carbon capture in maritime, and also in manufacturing areas. Maritime is more of an issue, because the captured carbon must be stored onboard, and offloaded periodically.

One option is to sell the compressed cold carbon to industrial users. But there’s not enough demand if most ships were producing captured carbon. Already, onshore carbon capture can supply a good deal of the commercial need for CO2.

Reuse of carbon in this way is simply circular; it does not actually remove carbon from the natural environment, it simply recycles it. And many onshore facilities like power plants and cement processes could rather easily capture their carbon emissions.

All this carbon can’t simply be recycled; there must be a place to put it. It’s odd that there has not been more investment in places to sequester the captured carbon.

That’s why the INEOS announcement in the article below is interesting. INEOS is an international chemical company with headquarters in many countries. (They also co-own and operate Manchester United, a Premier League football club).

They have designed a complete system to sequester the carbon in the North Sea, called Greensand. The full value chain will be established. The captured CO2 will come from Danish biomethane plants.

Once captured, CO2 is liquefied, delivered by truck to a dedicated CO2 terminal at Port Esbjerg, shipped aboard Carbon Destroyer 1, the EU’s first purpose-built CO2 carrier, and injected into the Nini West reservoir in the Danish part of the North Sea, a depleted oil field some 250 km offshore, approximately 1,800 m beneath the seabed.

Currently the project can store 400000 tonnes annually, but plans to expand to between 4 and 8 million tonnes annually.

There are still institutional barriers limiting capture of CO2 at scale — regulations, infrastructure, and investment. Since we’re not going green on energy anytime soon, it’s time to start investing big time in carbon capture — technology and infrastructure.

Logo of Splash247, featuring the word 'Splash' in bold black letters with a blue underline and '247.com' in smaller text.

Bojan Lepic September 18, 2026

https://splash247.com/ineos-opens-eus-first-full-scale-offshore-ccs-project

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Posted in Logistics, Shipping, Sustainability

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AI use growing, but cost…?

Posted on September 5, 2026 by | Leave a comment

This report by McKinsey, the global consulting firm, sheds some light on what’s happening in the commercial realm with AI. It’s based on an online survey taken in May and June 2026, with 1,719 participants in 97 nations, spread across a full range of regions, industries, company sizes, and functional specialties. 36% of respondents work for companies with more than $1B USD in annual revenue.

The heat map below, from the report, shows the relation of AI use that has passed beyond R&D into scaling phase by industry type and business function. The entries are the percent of respondents who say their firm is into the scaling phase. The business function rows are ranked by total percent.

What stands out?

  • How low are supply chain and manufacturing functions!! You would think there would be a lot of applications in these business functions. But, NO! Maybe it’s just because these functions are typically cost-conscious and slow to choose new technology.
  • But in advanced manufacturing, industry use in supply chains and manufacturing is close to the highest at 14%.
  • IT, knowledge management and software engineering are high. That’s what one expects when a technology such as AI emerges. We saw the same thing with the coming of the internet in the late 1990s.
  • Media is high!! What a surprise! The AI engines train on large quantities of media output. If they just operate as a grandiose search engine, they already add value of a kind we can appreciate.

One of the fascinating tidbits from the report is that chatbots are the most frequently employed form of AI. We guess that already, if we use the internet at all today. Every website seems to have one. And if my experience is any guide, they are mostly useless. They give answers to stupid questions, and can’t handle anything even slightly complicated. The most they do is have a real agent call you, and mostly they don’t do that. They direct you to someplace in the company’s sitemap, which you have probably already read without profit before desperately trying the chat.

I question whether this is the best use of all the energy and other resources consumed searching and re-searching all those tokenized training documents.

We haven’t yet seen the real cost of all these searches, over and over again, of all those training documents. It’s measured in tokens, and currently the tokens are underpriced as a loss leader to get us hooked on using AI instead of the far simpler internet search like Google. We see in daily news how many massive data centers are being built, how much resource they consume (electricity, water, grid capacity). Those costs have to be paid for in a viable business. They have no choice but to charge us for the use.

Just like internet and cell phones and cable TV, and phone service before that, we users will have to pay.

Dan Tinkoff, Lieven van der Veken, Michael Chu, and Tara Balakrishnan, August 2026

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai?stcr=B7127D169FA84AACBEFA3865CA6E04BE&cid=mgp_opr-eml-nsl-mhl-mgp-glb–&hlkid=e3a420bc9bde47dbb2575015d6575ce3&hctky=3107313&hdpid=fa1823b1-7251-41ff-9e79-f07d2fecdb84#/

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Posted in Advanced Computing, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chains, Sustainability

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