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IN SEARCH OF THE METAVERSE

My office isn’t the most inspiring. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s not the peaceful lakeshore cabin conducive to creative thought and productivity that I’d like. If only it were socially acceptable to don my virtual reality (VR) headset and immerse myself in a futuristic cityscape or tropical haven and get all my work done. I want to pretend I’m floating among the stars on a spacecraft while replying to emails and writing my stories.

LISTEN TO THE DEEP DIVE

Jamie Gilpin, CMO at social media management tool Sprout Social, tells me that what I actually want is the metaverse. Sprout is one of many companies that have transitioned to a remote-first approach for its workers.

“Going to work in the metaverse may sound far-fetched but it may hold the answer to engaging workers in a virtual workspace. If your dream workspace is a beach, you might run into issues with sand getting into your keyboard,” she says. “The metaverse makes it possible to work wherever you want, without the limitations of the space. Allowing yourself to work in the environment where you feel most productive can yield incredible results.”

I had been thinking of VR, plain and simple. Is Gilpin right in saying the metaverse is the answer? What even is the metaverse?

As analysts for McKinsey and Co. wrote in a 2022 think piece, “if you’ve ever done a Google search for the term ‘metaverse,’ you’re not alone.”
Who hasn’t heard of the metaverse?

“The metaverse [was] the buzzword of 2022 in the same way that NFT was the buzzword of 2021,” says QuHarrison Terry, author of “The Metaverse Handbook: Innovating for the Internet’s Next Tectonic Shift.” “The metaverse is a fictional place imagined long before our current consumer-tech obsessions that has manifested into real progress. While the metaverse is far from a finished destination, there are thousands of people building it every second of every day.”

Herbert B. Dixon Jr. retired from the Washington, D.C., Superior Court in 2014. Before his retirement, he was overseeing the U.S. courthouse’s most modern prototype courtroom: high-def TV screens and all. Now, he’s a regular contributor to the American Bar Association’s Judges’ Journal and wrote in 2023: “The metaverse is a rapidly evolving idea. Describing the metaverse in 2023 is akin to explaining air or space travel to residents of the horse and buggy era. Every year, we see new technological advancements that a decade before would have seemed like science fiction.

“The metaverse makes it possible to work wherever you want, without the limitations of the space.”

— Jamie Gilpin, CMO at Sprout Social

“The metaverse has been referred to as the three-dimensional internet and the future of the internet. My description of the future metaverse involves a digital universe (which may be real-world or imagined images) that your avatar enters to interact with other avatars.”

I don’t necessarily want an online representation of myself; I just want to pretend I’m working somewhere inspiring and quiet. But should I want to remain in my beautiful digital workspace, I’ll need an avatar to collaborate with my colleagues. They need a visible object in their digital environment that they can call “Jade” and I’ll need their avatars too. Yes, OK, online meeting platforms exist and I can change my background there and pretend I’m somewhere exotic but I want full immersion here.

Mariapina Trunfio, associate professor of economics and business management at the University of Naples, says the metaverse “defines a collective, persistent and interactive parallel reality created by synthesizing virtual worlds where people can use personal avatars to work, play and communicate with each other.”

In her 2022 Virtual Worlds paper, Trunfio explains that virtual technologies enhance the perceived immersion with the character realness of the avatars and residents: “Usually networked and situated with intelligent agents, they allow users to interact with virtual objects and intelligent agents freely, and to communicate with each other. In multiple forms, these worlds can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an unlimited number of users.”

I like the concepts of persistence and perceived immersion in Trunfio’s definition.

The McKinsey think piece also highlights that the metaverse means different things to different people:

“Some believe it’s a digital playground for friends. Others think it has the potential to be a commercial space for companies and customers. We believe both interpretations are correct. We believe the metaverse is best characterized as an evolution of today’s internet — something we are deeply immersed in, rather than something we primarily look at.”

In other words, as per the consultancy group’s working definition: “The metaverse is the emerging 3D-enabled digital space that uses virtual reality, augmented reality, and other advanced internet and semiconductor technology to allow people to have lifelike personal and business experiences online.”

ACCESS POINTS

To access the metaverse, says former-judge Dixon, the user needs “a computer programmed to access the computer-generated environment, a head-mounted visual display or goggles to see the virtual environment, an audio headset, and hand- and body-tracking, motion-detecting controllers and sensors to provide a sense of touch and feel while traveling within the environment.”

Ernesto Damiani is the senior director of the Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute and director of the Center for Cyber Physical Systems at Khalifa University. His definition of the metaverse focuses the most on the technology needed to access the metaverse: “The metaverse is a digital, virtual space that humans wearing haptic interfaces (like helmets, gloves and visors) can enter and roam by projecting their presence as avatars. The metaverse puts together virtual reality, augmented reality and low-latency multi-party communication technology to allow people to have lifelike interactive experiences through their avatars.”

GRAPHICS: Abjad Design

I own a (VR) headset. I mostly use it for gaming. The virtual reality offers me that escape from the real world — again, picture my peaceful and inspiring work-environment goals. This total immersion isn’t the only feature of the metaverse though, and it’s not entirely practical for going about your everyday life. Enter augmented reality (AR).

Leslie Shannon likes the AR side of things. She authored “Interconnected Realities: How the Metaverse Will Transform Our Relationship With Technology Forever.” For her, the metaverse is a partly or fully digital experience that brings together people, places and information in real time in a way that transcends that which is possible in the physical world alone. She wants the metaverse to solve our problems — to be useful, not just entertaining.

“The problem is that smartphones and computers have done too well at solving the problem of delivering information and entertainment to us, exactly when and where we want it. To get this spectacular convenience, we’re prepared to pay a surprisingly high cost in terms of our connection to the people, places and things physically around us, and it’s a cost that we’re paying quite thoughtlessly today. You can probably name an incident in your own life within just the past week in which looking at a screen, rather than being present in your immediate surroundings, created a situation that caught you out socially, or made you neglect someone, or was even potentially dangerous. We’re all complicit in this one.”

How could an immersive digital world be the answer, Shannon asks. It’s not. But: “If we start thinking about a spectrum of experience, in which the far-left-hand side is 100 percent physical experiences, and the far-right-hand side is 100 percent digital experiences, then there also exists a middle point that is 50 percent physical and 50 percent digital, and sliding proportions of digital/physical mixes on either side of that middle point.”

Shannon says it’s the digital/physical mixes that deserve our attention. She calls this “interconnected realities.”

IMAGE: Abjad Design
Making the ‘metaversity’

By: Suzanne Condie Lambert

Khalifa University thinks the metaverse will be vital to the way students learn in the future. That’s why it teamed with Microsoft UAE and Hevolus Innovation for the 2023 Metaversity Hackathon, inviting student teams to create metaverse classrooms to remove physical barriers, making immersive, engaging and collaborative experiences inclusive and accessible. “One day we will have a university that is fully in the metaverse,” says Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Khalifa’s executive vice president and KUST Review’s editor-in-chief. “Students will get the best education in the world wherever they are.” Read more›››

KU wants to be in the vanguard, and the hackathon, he adds, is a first step to getting there. Higher institutions would benefit as well, requiring fewer physical resources. Al Hammadi points to the example of medical school cadavers, which are expensive and may pose ethical concerns.

Schools are already using interactive 2D screens to reduce the number of cadavers required to teach anatomy, he says. A 3D metaverse could be the next leap forward. There are downsides, Al Hammadi says. Cheating is harder to detect. The physical experience of labs and experiments can’t yet be fully replicated. And distance learning doesn’t offer the same social life as on-campus classes.

But Al Hammadi says that as models improve, students will eventually be able to get much of the same experience in the metaverse. Hadi Otrok, a KU professor of electrical engineering and computer science, sees promise especially in using avatars to free instructors from small tasks, like running tutorials. “The challenge will be,” he says, “how to get the students … engaged with you instead of on the phone.”

It will take courage to take these ideas and create a fully interactive online experience, Al Hammadi says, suggesting that a potential “metaversity” could start with just one degree to prove the concept. And Khalifa University, he says, wants to be on the front end of imagining that future. ‹‹‹ Read less

“This concept of the metaverse is a world in which we can have the compelling, fascinating, relevant content that we currently access on screens, but integrated visually into our physical world in a way that enhances our lives, rather than removing us from them. This concept of the metaverse imagines the digital and physical aspects being incorporated with each other on a constantly sliding scale, so that sometimes we are fully immersed in a digital world, when that serves the purpose of the moment, but it is also possible to spend significant time fully immersed only in the physical world.

“This metaverse of interconnected realities will be a place where we combine digital information or entertainment from the world of the internet with our physical surroundings so that we can be more efficient, more informed, more delighted and more aware than we are today. A simple example of this enhanced future might be a sensor in my oven that connects with my AR glasses and, when the oven is on, displays its current temperature in a visual digital overlay when my gaze lingers on my oven for more than one or two seconds -– useful when I’m on the other side of the kitchen.”

Are we talking about a heads-up display (HUD) fixed permanently in my vision? I’d quite like that. I wear glasses anyway. It would be so helpful if people in real life had little tags above their heads to remind me of their names — facial recognition in VR land. Or a mini-map in the corner of my field of view so I’d never get lost again, video game-style.

After all, HUDs aren’t new. In aviation, they date to the end of the Second World War when rudimentary systems were installed in a few military aircraft.

The modern-day fighter pilot helmet boasts an impressive HUD, and Iron Man had one too. Granted, Iron Man belongs to the realm of fiction, but plenty of technology emerged from the minds of creators and novelists — including the term “metaverse.”

“The term ‘metaverse’ was coined by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel ‘Snow Crash,’” says Matthew Ball, author of “Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionize Everything.” “For all its influence, Stephenson’s book provided no specific definition of the metaverse, but what he described was a persistent virtual world that reached, interacted with, and affected nearly every part of human existence.”

There’s that persistence again.

The “affecting nearly every part of human existence” thing I’m not so keen on.

EVERYONE EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE?

“The metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology,” Wagner James Au says in his book “Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash and Second Life to a Virtual World Worth Fighting For.” He also says, however, that the metaverse is not for everyone:

“Chances are you’ve seen more than several tech evangelists across various media outlets insist that we’ll all soon be in the metaverse. I can tell you from painful — but also amusing — experience that this is unlikely ever to be the case. And, no, you probably won’t wear a VR headset on a regular basis either.

That said, it’s also safe to say at least one in four people with Internet connectivity will be part of the metaverse on some level. At a very conservative estimate, over half a billion people worldwide already use one or more variations of a metaverse platform now, from Minecraft and Roblox to Fortnite, VRChat and Second Life. That’s about 1 in 10 of the 5 billion people across the planet who use the internet.”

The majority of Au’s examples are games. Gaming companies are the pioneers in the metaverse space, well known as early adopters and prototype metaverse builders. Minecraft and Fortnite offer virtual worlds where players meet as avatars to play games and chat. They offer in-game payment systems and in-game assets that travel with players across platforms: from PC to console to mobile. They are also social spaces where gamers forge online relationships and communities.

IMAGE: Abjad Design

This gaming-world innovation correlates closely with many working definitions I found of the metaverse concept. Indeed, Ian Khan, author of “Metaverse for Dummies,” says the metaverse refers to virtual reality-based online worlds and notes that many of these worlds are gaming environments or online games. “Others function more as online virtual places where you can do other activities such as meet people, learn new things or simply hang out. And the types of virtual worlds you can find in the metaverse continue to expand and are likely to continue to evolve.”

Many of the experts I found, however, wouldn’t say we have a metaverse yet.

Dixon says the metaverse does not yet exist, but “its ultimate scope is constrained only be the limits of human imagination.”

Aakansha Saxena, assistant professor at the School of Information Technology, AI and Cyber Security, Rashtriya Raksha University, calls the metaverse a “concept”: “It can be understood as an infinite universe where communities of people can collaborate and enjoy the mechanisms of augmented reality, virtual reality, extended reality, online life and much more.”

That sounds like many of these games to me.

Khaled Salah, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Khalifa University, throws a spanner in the works with his definition, saying: “A metaverse is an immersive and 3D virtual world in which people can interact through avatars to carry out their daily interactions, unlocking the potential to communicate, transact and experience new opportunities on a global scale.”

I’m struck by his use of article: “a metaverse” not “the metaverse.” Of all the people I asked, books I read and research articles I consulted, Salah was the only person to raise the question of multiple metaverses. Does each gaming platform or each individual game have its own metaverse?

And if each platform has its own, how can we move seamlessly between them all?

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has the answer. He said on the Lex Fridman Podcast that the metaverse is not a construct of connected virtual places:

“Instead, the metaverse is the point of time when we do and spend large portions of our everyday digital work and leisure in immersive 3D environments with VR and AR glasses.”

Meta, of course, used to be Facebook, and the company changed its name in 2021 to highlight its new direction. The company has since announced a U.S.$2.5 million investment supporting independent academic research across Europe into metaverse technologies because “since no one company will own and operate the metaverse, this will require collaboration and cooperation.”

Terry, author of “The Metaverse Handbook,” sums it up:

“Let me clear the air and first tell you what the metaverse is not. The metaverse is not a single technology. It’s not just a place we’ll visit in VR. It’s not something that can be created and claimed by the next Bezos or Gates. In fact, the metaverse is about as boundless and unownable as the internet, if not more so. Sure, there are entities that have contributed more to the internet than others. Of course, there are innovations that steered the course of the internet and influenced the experience of the web. But we didn’t wake up one day with the internet we see now. It was an ever-evolving thing.”

WHERE ARE WE GOING WITH THIS?

“The metaverse in the early 2020s is the equivalent of the mid-1990s in the development of the internet: Many people are talking about it, a few people are already building it, but no one can really define what it is, or what it will be able to do for us, or even if it will be relevant to anyone at all once it’s here,” Shannon says.

Khan, author of “Metaverse for Dummies,” agrees that in terms of development, the metaverse today is where the internet was in the 1990s:

“The early internet was shaped by new ideas, technologies and ways of doing things. With the right investments, adoption and usage, the internet grew into the internet we know today. Similarly, the metaverse today provides an interesting place for many activities, but many of them are still in the early days of development. The investment and attention put into building the metaverse over the next five to ten years will determine what the metaverse ultimately becomes and the value it creates.”

“The metaverse becomes more real every time we replace a physical habit with a digital equivalent.”

— QuHarrison Terry, author of The Metaverse Handbook: Innovating for the Internet’s Next Tectonic Shift

Per University of Naples’ Trunfio:

“The metaverse, like many innovations, is shrouded in mysticism and skepticism. If many believe it will be revolutionary and fully transform how people work, shop, socialize and play, others are skeptical, and see it as a fad. However, whether or not we think of the metaverse as a technological revolution, it is undeniable that the massive diffusion of this technology will impact on nearly all aspects of life and business in the next decade, allowing interaction in virtual and augmented spaces and a blend of both.”

Whether you’d say the metaverse is here already or well on its way, it’s clear that it’s the next big disruptor, the new place to be for all aspects of life.

After everything I’ve read and all the people I’ve spoken to, I think it’s funny that the definition of metaverse that resonates most with me is much more abstract than the very scientific approaches I’d usually turn to.

Shaan Puri, tech entrepreneur, posted a tweet in 2021 that sums it all up pretty nicely:

“The metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our physical life.”

Or as Terry puts it: “The metaverse is not just a place we’ll visit in VR. It is not a destination. The metaverse is a movement — a movement toward the digital-first livelihood we’ve slowly been adopting year over year, app by app. The metaverse becomes more real every time we replace a physical habit with a digital equivalent. We, the digital citizens of the internet, are manifesting the metaverse by trading time in the physical world for time online.”

I’m OK with this.

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Building blocks of sustainability

Since their discovery in the early 20th century, polymeric materials have revolutionized many aspects of our lives. Perhaps the most recognizable polymers in our daily lives are plastics.

Despite their enormous value, we produce more plastic than we recycle, and this is becoming a major environmental challenge. The figures are staggering: Just 9 percent of the global supply of plastic is recycled. Most plastic produced is incinerated or placed in landfills, leading to pollution. A significant amount of plastic waste is also found in the seas, creating not just an eyesore but damage to aquatic life and marine ecosystems.

At Khalifa University, Sharmarke Mohamed and his team at the Advanced Materials Chemistry Center (AMCC) are developing a new method for recycling post-consumer plastic waste that uses a combination of mechanical force (as part of mechanochemistry), light and catalysts.

The value of this technology is that it uses no corrosive or harmful chemicals.

– Sharmarke Mohamed, Khalifa University

While mechanical methods are common as a means for reducing the size of plastics prior to recycling, it is not possible to apply this for the depolymerization of most plastic waste. Instead, the researchers are looking for ways to perform low-cost recycling using a range of stimuli.

“Despite the enormous environmental challenge posed by plastic waste, we felt a sense of duty to develop these new mechanochemical tools. Most researchers around the world are exploring mechanical force as a means to build new chemicals. In other words, building complexity from simple structures. We decided to use the same principles and use mechanical force as well as light and catalysts to break down complex polymer waste materials into smaller building blocks that can then either be recycled or upcycled,” he says.

“Solar energy is responsible for the photodegradation of plastics in the environment, particularly in the UV region of the electromagnetic spectrum. We also know that some biological catalysts (e.g. enzymes) are adapted to using organic macromolecules such as plastics as fuel sources. So in essence, we are learning from nature as we try to develop a lab-scale protocol that uses these tried-and-tested methods for turning plastic waste into high-value chemicals,” Mohamed says.

“As the UAE declares 2023 to be the Year of Sustainability, our research group is very much leading this effort in a challenging area. But we are motivated by solving the environmental challenges posed by plastic waste,” Mohamed says.

About 380 million metric tons of plastic are produced each year. Of that, only about 9 percent is recycled, Mohamed tells the KUST Review. Some plastics are treated with harsh chemicals, like acid. But most plastic is incinerated, he says.

“But the problem (with incineration) is that it releases carbon dioxide and adds to the global carbon footprint. The other problem is that if you burn the plastic you can’t reuse it. Our group is trying to take the end-user plastic and come up with new low-cost mechanical methods that are able to break down these polymers into their constituent parts.”

Those constituent parts might then be reused to make new plastic products or chemicals for other uses.

Mohamed’s team is working on a three-year project to investigate a three-part process for recycling plastics. This research is supported by AMCC and funded by ASPIRE, the technology program management pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), via the ASPIRE Award for Research Excellence.

The first part involves mechanochemistry: using mechanical energy to induce the chemical depolymerization of the plastic waste.

“Mainly we use ball mills to grind the polymers in the presence of proprietary chemicals we are developing in our lab. This leads to the polymer essentially breaking down and releasing its constituent building blocks, known as the monomers. Preliminary results in our lab suggest this process can be done under ambient conditions in the solid-state with yields of up to about 70 percent or higher,” he says.

We are trying to think outside the box and look at the problem from a non-conventional perspective using a mechanocatalytic approach.

– Zeinab Mohamed Saeed, Khalifa University

The value of this technology is that it uses no corrosive or harmful chemicals, which is important as it makes the entire process much more environmentally friendly than incineration or land-filling the plastic waste.

The next step is to examine the influence of light on the process, followed by experiments with inorganic catalysts (i.e. metal salts) or enzymes to break down the plastics.

“Once we understand each of these processes on their own, we can see how they can be stitched up together to create what we refer to as a photolytic and mechanoenzymatic degradation (PMED) protocol. We envisage the PMED process will be implemented serially as part of a batch process, much like a conveyor belt in a factory. Our long-term goal is to take post-consumer plastic waste and to efficiently produce the chemical building blocks of the plastic waste via our PMED process.”

Different forms of plastic break down in different ways under mechanical force, complicating the process, Mohamed says. But he says the initial work is promising.

Zeinab Mohamed Saeed, a Ph.D. candidate working on the project, says she’s excited by the non-conventional approach to a long-standing problem.

“The field of polymer degradation was there for decades,” she says. “People have been trying to come up with different ways to tackle the issue using their expertise, and now we are trying to think outside the box and look at the problem from a non-conventional perspective using a mechanocatalytic approach. I find this research challenging but exciting, and can’t wait to see what kind of results we will end up with.”

Among the challenges, however, is creating vessels that can hold the material but also allow in light of a certain wavelength. And the enzymes known to break down plastics are expensive.

The hope, however, is to scale up the technology to levels required by industry. That’s still some time off, however.

“Now we can do up to a gram or two. This is fine for feasibility and patenting,” Mohamed says.

The Advanced Materials Chemistry Center (AMCC) was formed in 2022 and combines expertise from different disciplines to tackle major environmental problems. Its methods for treating plastic waste “align with the UAE’s ambitions to transition to a green circular economy and achieve its net-zero targets” Mohamed says.

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Reports of nuclear’s death are
exaggerated

As nations battle rising energy costs and world temperatures, nuclear looks to remain an important part of the clean-energy mix, even in countries that had previously stopped investing in the technology.

Japan, for example, turned against nuclear after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, when a tsunami and earthquake struck, leading to power loss and the failure of cooling systems in three reactors. But the country in 2022 announced that it would restart old plants. extend the life of plants past the 60-year limit and build next-generation reactors.

We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system.

– Elisabeth Svantesson, Swedish finance minister

Other countries are also reinvesting. Many U.S. states with the most vigorous climate goals are putting millions of dollars into nuclear power.

“We are moving expeditiously toward a clean energy mix, but that is going to take a while,” Joe Fiordaliso, president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, says in an article for Pewtrusts.org. “We can’t build renewables fast enough, and people still need energy. Nukes are an important interim part of the mix.”

The U.S.’ first new reactor in 40 years came on line in Georgia in 2023.

Sweden’s parliament in June green-lit plans to build new nuclear reactors. The country plans to build 10 in the next 20 years as part of a target to reach net-zero emissions by 2045. The country 40 years ago voted to phase out nuclear power.

“This creates the conditions for nuclear power,” Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said in parliament per Reuters. “We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system.”

As of May 2022, there were 439 nuclear plants operating in about 30 countries. The United States had the most, with 92.

One of the newest of the world’s plants, however, is the UAE’s Barakah facility, which opened in 2020 and began operating commercially in 2021. Three reactors at the plant are in operation with the fourth expected to go online in 2024.

“Nuclear is really important in the energy portfolio. For the UAE to embark on the nuclear program is important for the country’s energy security mix as well as to reduce carbon emissions,” says Saeed Al Ameri, a professor in Khalifa University’s Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering.

It is … crucial to use cost-effective and proven solutions to provide secure access to 24/7 low-carbon electricity to support socioeconomic development for everyone.

– Henry Preston, World Nuclear Association

Mohamed Ibrahim Al Hammadi, president of the World Association of Nuclear Operators, was also keen on the technology’s future in the UAE when he spoke in 2022 at the opening of the Barakah plant’s third reactor. “The Barakah plant is spearheading the decarbonisation of the power sector, sustainably generating abundant electricity to meet growing demand and power growth,” he said.

Other countries in the MENA region, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are also investing in nuclear, KU’s Al Ameri adds. Egypt began construction on its El Dabaa site on the Mediterranean coast in 2022.

Meanwhile in France, President Emmanuel Macron in 2022 announced six new reactors to come online by 2050.

That year is important, says Henry Preston of the World Nuclear Association.

“Demand for electricity is set to increase at least 50 percent by 2050, with the global population, electrification and access to electricity all projected to increase,” he tells KUST Review. “It is therefore crucial to use cost-effective and proven solutions to provide secure access to 24/7 low-carbon electricity to support socioeconomic development for everyone.”

LOW-CARBON BACKBONE

The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization based in Paris, in a 2019 report called nuclear, along with hydropower, “the backbone of low-carbon energy generation,” providing 75 percent of global low-carbon energy generation.

This has reduced CO2 emissions by more than 70 gigatons over 50 years, Preston says. To put that into perspective, a single gigaton is equivalent to about twice the mass of all humans on Earth. Seventy gigatons also equals nearly two years of global energy-related emissions, Preston says.

We know that nuclear is clean. Operation cost is not expensive. And it continuously supplies energy to the grid.

– Saeed Al Ameri, Khalifa University

And as the U.S. Office of Nuclear Energy points out, reactors have small physical footprints, needing little more than a square mile to operate. The Nuclear Energy Institute says a wind farm producing about the same amount of electricity needs 360 times more land area. Solar farms are slightly more compact, needing about 75 times more space to produce the same amount of electricity.

Land use is one of the issues addressed in Simon Friederich and Maarten Boudry’s 2022 paper in Philosophy & Technology on the ethics of nuclear energy in times of climate change. They conclude that even considering such issues as waste disposal and diminishing uranium reserves, “From the point of view of climate-change mitigation, investments in nuclear energy as part of a broader energy portfolio will be ethically required to minimize the risks of decarbonization failure.”

LOOKING AHEAD

The 2019 International Energy Agency report foresaw risks of steep declines in nuclear’s use in advanced economies. And there are drawbacks to the technology, to be sure: It’s expensive to build and slow to roll out. The power it produces is also expensive, rising 40 percent per kilowatt since 2011 while solar’s price is falling. And what to do with the waste remains an issue. But the World Nuclear Association’s Preston remains enthusiastic.

“Reactors online today can expect to operate for 60-80 years, so I think there is also a growing appreciation that nuclear power plant construction and operation generates thousands of long-term, high-quality jobs, along with substantial socioeconomic benefits into the local, regional and national economies,” Preston says.

KU’s Al Ameri is similarly enthusiastic. “In terms of the technology itself, we know that nuclear is clean. Operation cost is not expensive. And it continuously supplies energy to the grid.”

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Growing a hydrogen economy

The hydrogen economy, it seems, has forever been on the way. But is the time finally here?

The term was coined by John Bockris in a 1970 speech at the General Motors Technical Center to refer to an infrastructure for delivering hydrogen energy to economic sectors that are hard to decarbonize, such as oil refining and manufacturing steel and cement, as well as fueling long-haul transportation on the ground and in the air.

The appeal of hydrogen as a way to decarbonize these industries is apparent: Hydrogen is renewable; it’s easy on the power grid, produced and stored during times of excess of renewable energy and readily available during peak demand; it can reduce pollution (it generates only heat and water when burned); it can be produced locally from a range of materials; and by 2050 it could provide jobs for up to 30 million people with revenues of U.S.$2.5 trillion a year, according to a report from global management consultant McKinsey.

IMAGE: Unsplash
Productions hubs are key

Establishing hydrogen oases, also called hubs, clusters or valleys, is perhaps the most essential aspect of the UAE hydrogen strategy, says Steve Griffiths, senior vice president of Research and Development at Khalifa University. But balancing supply and demand through production clusters is the most significant challenge in scaling hydrogen, Griffiths says. Read more›››

“Clusters allow for clean hydrogen production to be matched with industrial hydrogen off-takers with minimal need for hydrogen storage and transport, both of which can substantially increase the cost of hydrogen for final use,” he says. “Technologies that are proven, or nearly proven, can be deployed into clusters immediately while research and development efforts continue to improve technologies across the hydrogen value chain.”

Griffiths says he expects the top industries using clean hydrogen through 2030 will be refining, chemicals, iron and steel and, in the UAE, aluminum. “Beyond 2030, continued research and development will enable hydrogen to be commercially viable for extended applications, particularly sustainable aviation fuels and maritime shipping fuels,” Griffiths says.

Research and development activities at Khalifa University may also support the overseas export of hydrogen by ammonia and other, more novel, vectors, he says.

“We established the Research and Innovation Center on CO2 and Hydrogen at Khalifa University to make such future innovations possible. That is, we pursue the cutting edge of hydrogen research while supporting development and implementation projects with partners like ADNOC and Emirates Steel Arkan,” Griffiths says.‹‹‹ Read less

But not much has happened to move the technology toward its long-imagined place as a major player in the world’s energy-transition process. That is, until the past five years or so.

“Hydrogen has been produced for a long time for its use in refineries and fertilizers, and technology has evolved to improve the efficiency of them,” explains Lourdes Vega, director of the Research and Innovation Center on CO2 and Hydrogen (RICH Center) at Khalifa University. “What is different now is the interest for using hydrogen as a long term energy storage technology, combined with renewable energy, and for its use to decarbonize hard to abate sectors. This can be accomplished with low carbon hydrogen or green hydrogen and this is where the technology needs to be improved to reduce its cost.”

As countries, businesses and organizations seek to reach the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 C global warming, attention has turned again to the hydrogen-economy model to solve the problems that so far keep the hydrogen economy at bay: finding a reliable way to balance affordability with low greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere.

Hydrogen is an important factor in most strategies devised by at least 75 countries that are seeking to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, according to a paper from academics at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Additionally, hydrogen has been identified by the International Renewable Energy Agency as one of six technological avenues to achieve net-zero by 2050.

‘HUGE GROWTH STORY’

Among countries expressing an interest in hydrogen: A U.K. House of Commons committee issued a report in December 2022 on the future of hydrogen in the country. The report concluded that although hydrogen couldn’t be considered a panacea to the U.K.’s energy issues, it would certainly play a major role in sectors of the economy, becoming a “huge growth story” over the next 30 years.

Areas identified as best suited for hydrogen include those that are hard to electrify, such as parts of the rail network or heavy transportation and uses that don’t require extensive refueling networks, such as local bus services. The benefit to bus services, Vega says, is that vehicles can operate longer than those powered by electric batteries.

The sectors most likely to benefit from hydrogen (aside from such traditional areas as refineries, chemicals and fertilizers) are metallurgy, cement and heavy transportation, Vega says. “In addition, hydrogen can be used in the heat and power sector, replacing natural gas, with a huge potential market.” Furthermore, green hydrogen can be used, combined with CO2, to produce synthetic fuels such as methane or methanol, usually called e-methane or e-methanol.

And the United States in 2021 announced that the first program in its Energy Earthshots Initiative, aiming to accelerate advances in clean-energy technology, would focus on hydrogen. The Hydrogen Shot’s goal is to reduce the price of hydrogen by 80 percent to U.S.$1 per kilogram in a decade.

IMAGE: Freepik/Unsplash
A gift from the sea

Green hydrogen is the “cleanest” form of hydrogen, using renewable energy sources to split water into hydrogen and oxygen without any greenhouse-gas emissions. And a group of Australian researchers in early 2023 said they created it from seawater without expensive pre-treatment processes or catalysts. Read more›››

“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 percent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyzer,” University of Adelaide’s Shizhang Qiao says via the university’s newsroom.

The team used seawater as a feedstock without any expensive pre-treatments processes such as reverse osmosis, purification or alkalization, Qiao says. The team in its paper for Nature Energy points to seawater as an “almost infinite resource” for hydrogen generation.

Researchers at Khalifa University led by Faisal Al Marzooqi and TieJun Zhang are also working on techniques to generate hydrogen from industrial wastewater contaminated by heavy metals, wastewater from industrial and domestic laundries and seawater using solar energy.

It’s just a beginning, Al Marzooki cautions. “This research is at its very early stages,” he says. “It may take some time between five to 10 years, if enough resources are given to this area.” ‹‹‹ Read less

That price, as with everything, is critical.

The cost in money — and carbon produced — depends on how that hydrogen is made. (See: “Colors of Hydrogen.”) Greener forms are more expensive and therefore represent a small percentage of total hydrogen currently produced. In fact, most hydrogen produced today is made using fossil fuels (methane) and with no CO2 emissions controls; this “gray hydrogen” accounts for 2 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions. And the International Energy Agency predicts fossil fuels will remain the primary source of hydrogen for the United States, Europe and Japan through 2050.

Vega, however, has a more optimistic view, seeing sectors transition from gray to more blue and blue and green as technologies advance and costs come down.

UAE HAS PLANS

Fossil fuels are key to the UAE’s plans, announced in January 2022, to control 25 percent of the world’s hydrogen market using natural gas with CO2 capture (blue hydrogen) and green hydrogen. The nation’s Hydrogen Leadership Initiative pursues a research-and-development collaboration across industries, according to the Emirates News Agency, the UAE’s official news service. Targeted markets include Japan, South Korea, Germany and India. Emirates Global Aluminium, one of the largest companies in the UAE, joined the initiative in September 2022.

“The UAE sees hydrogen as a promising fuel for the future to achieve carbon neutrality and the UAE Net Zero by 2050 Strategic Initiative. Such partnerships will help accelerate the transition to clean and renewable energy,” UAE Minister of Energy and Infrastructure HE Suhail bin Mohammed Al Mazrouei says.

By 2031, according to the Ministry of Energy & Infrastructure’s UAE Energy Strategy 2050, updated in July 2023, the country plans to:

  • Develop a resilient hydrogen supply chain to support the growth of the local industry
  • Consolidate the UAE’s role as a leading global producer and supplier of low-carbon hydrogen
  • Promote innovation in industrial zones in the UAE
  • And establish a robust hydrogen economy that can support the country’s nationwide decarbonization efforts

Meanwhile, UAE Undersecretary for Energy and Petroleum Affairs H.E. Sharif Al Olama tells Reuters that the country plans to produce 1.4 million tons of hydrogen annually by 2031.

Of that number, UAE clean energy company Masdar is expected to produce 1 million tons of green hydrogen by 2031. The remaining 0.4 million tons will be blue hydrogen, produced using natural gas accompanied by CO2 capture and storage.

IMAGE: Unsplash
Decarbonizing diesel engines

Heavy industry emits about 6 billion tons of CO2 a year, about a sixth of the world’s total output. But a diesel-hydrogen engine from Australia nicknamed “baby number two” could help bring that number down. Read more›››

Engineers at the University of New South Wales say they’ve modified a conventional diesel engine to work on hydrogen and a small amount of diesel, reducing C02 emissions by more than 85 percent.

The key, Shawn Kook tells BBC.com, is to introduce the hydrogen into the fuel mix at the right moment. Otherwise, “it will create something that is explosive that will burn out the whole system.”

The team says diesel trucks and equipment in such industries as mining and agriculture could be retrofitted with the technology relatively quickly.‹‹‹ Read less

Al Olama tells the news agency that the 2031 goals include two “hydrogen oases” or production hubs, located in Ruwais and the Khalifa Industrial Zone Abu Dhabi (KIZAD). There will be five hubs by 2050, he says. This follows the Paris Mission Innovation on Clean Hydrogen’s suggestions to promote hydrogen valleys.

The UAE’s plans for at least a partial fossil-fuels-based hydrogen future seem to align with the low-carbon hydrogen developments that Daryl Wilson, executive director of Belgium-based advisory board the Hydrogen Council, says he expects to see across the globe.

“By low-carbon (hydrogen), we mean fossil-fuel-derived hydrogen with carbon capture and storage. Low-carbon hydrogen will be faster, cheaper and quicker to scale than renewable sources in regions such as North Africa,” says Wilson, whose group is made up of 132 energy, transport, industry and investment companies with an interest in building the hydrogen economy.

BUILDING AN INFRASTRUCTURE

Infrastructure for the hydrogen economy, however, is still in its early stages, Wilson says, adding that disruptions in energy markets brought by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have accelerated regional connection from North Africa to Europe.

“Already pipeline corridors have been proposed with an EU backbone, and routes through the Iberian Peninsula and north through Italy. Port terminal infrastructure is under development as we contemplate moving large quantities of hydrogen and its derivatives from sources in Australia to Japan and Korea,” he tells KUST Review.

Vega, however, sees the changes coming more as a result of accelerating consciousness about the need for independent energy sources that can be produced using local resources in a sustainable manner.

But while materials may be new, the infrastructure will be similar to what the energy industry has used in the past. And that’s good news, says the Hydrogen Council’s Wilson.

The policies should apply on a more global level to truly develop and implement the hydrogen economy. Clear policies will help investors and hence, industry to move.

Lourdes Vega

“Ammonia, e-kerosene and methanol will make a contribution as carriers with seaborne trade. From a technical point of view, there are many points of commonality with natural-gas-pipeline development, (liquefied natural gas) cryogenic transport and bulk carrier development for the sea,” Wilson says. “The scale in hydrogen is new ground, but the underlying engineering is not new to industry.”

Well, yes and no, says KU’s Vega.

“Hydrogen and natural gas are both known to industry, but they are not exactly the same, neither the technologies and infrastructure to produce, transportation and storage,” she says.

Governments, however, play a critical role in developing the hydrogen future, Wilson says, “funding the green premium during the transition, providing a clear stable policy regime to support long-term investment decisions, and developing the tradable standards platforms.”

Development goes even beyond individual countries, Vega adds. “The policies should apply on a more global level to truly develop and implement the hydrogen economy. Clear policies will help investors and hence, industry to move.”

And when that hydrogen future finally arrives, it might not be visible to members of the public, who may ride on hydrogen-fueled buses oblivious to the infrastructure that supports them. But “they will experience the benefit of long-term stable cost and security of supply from local renewable energy sources – a very different feeling than the vulnerable uncertainty of our current sources of fossil-fuel energy,” Wilson says.

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Innovation at the forefront

For the United Arab Emirates to continue to be the leader in its region and beyond in information and communications technology, it needs to invest in advanced intelligence ICT, next-generation networks (NGN) and NGN-enabled ICT applications and services.

This is why Khalifa University, with partners e& and BT Plc, created the Emirates ICT Innovation Center (EBTIC), supported by the Telecommunication & Digital Government Authority’s (TDRA) ICT Fund.

IMAGE: Khalifa University
Nawaf Almoosa

Nawaf Almoosa is an EECS faculty member at Khalifa University with a joint appointment as the director of the Emirates ICT Innovate Center (EBTIC). His research interests include high-performance heterogeneous computing and distributed optimization and control with applications to computing, telecommunication and robotic systems.

EBTIC aims to be an international center of excellence for applied artificial intelligence and intelligent ICT systems research and innovation, driven by strong industry-academia and government partnership promoting world-class research, technology transfer, research training and open innovation in areas of strategic importance for its founding partners and the UAE.

BENEFITS TO THE COMMUNITY

EBTIC collaborates with its partners and other UAE government entities, delivering more than 40 strategically important projects each year. EBTIC has strong capabilities in machine learning, optimization, natural language processing, cooperative intelligence and big data analytics, as well as network architectures and cybersecurity.

Much of what it delivers drives new revenue or cost-savings opportunities for its partners. For instance, more recent leading-edge projects provide intelligent building solutions, such as machinery-fault prediction, smart-metering analytics and Wi-Fi sensing. Also, power-usage forecasting and optimization helps companies significantly reduce their energy requirements, reducing costs and their carbon footprints.

Recently, EBTIC has been working closely with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA) to predict food-import levels and forecast local food-production quantities. This work helps give ADAFSA a clear understanding of food supply in and out of the UAE and helps them maintain a robust and safe food market.

EYES ON COMMERCE

EBTIC also aims to commercially exploit the most promising of its research projects by looking to spin out start-ups into the UAE and global economy. Among projects in development is 10Folds.

10Folds will be the region’s first machine-learning data-labeling solution provider for the Arabic market.

There is no Arabic-language labeling solution that considers the different dialects in the marketplace, creating a real problem for the development of AI solutions in the region.

To train a machine learning-based model to correctly identify Arabic requires humans to examine data and manually assign labels for the model to learn from. Arabic words take different meanings based on the dialect. With data tagging completed by Arabic speakers, 10Folds aims to guarantee quality assurance of tagging, leading to a more accurate machine-learning model being trained.

RESPONSE TO COVID

EBTIC leveraged its capabilities in machine learning to support the response to the COVID pandemic through the development of COVID spread models driven by digital infrastructure data, and applying accurate multilingual text analytics and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to social media to gauge the public discussion and sentiment about the ensuing pandemic.

Recently honored as the UAEs most inventive center at the Department of Economic Development’s Abu Dhabi Awards for Intellectual Property, EBTIC has more than 80 inventions patented or being filed, and 64 patents already granted. One major facet of EBTIC’s continued success is in its knowledge-transfer ambitions. EBTIC has so far trained more than 400 UAE students, including supervising 50 Ph.D. or Master of Science students, and trained over 300 UAE-based professionals in big data-related competencies.

This mix of achieving scientific excellence; tackling national and societal challenges; and building core AI skills in the UAE is central to EBTIC’s mission, and there is much more to come from our collaboration with industry, universities and governmental organizations that will further help the UAE cement its place as an ICT leader in the global economy.