Syria's Assad wins warm welcome at Arab summit after years of isolation

Story by By Aziz El Yaakoubi and Samia Nakhoul • Yesterday 

Saudi Arabia hosts the Arab League summit in Jeddah© Thomson Reuters

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) -Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was given a warm welcome at an Arab summit on Friday, winning a hug from Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince at a meeting of leaders who had shunned him for years, in a policy shift opposed by the U.S. and other Western powers.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shook hands with a beaming Assad as the summit got underway in Jeddah, turning the page on enmity towards a leader who drew on support from Shi'ite Iran and Russia to beat back his foes in Syria's civil war.


Saudi Arabia hosts the Arab League summit in Jeddah© Thomson Reuters

The summit showcased redoubled Saudi Arabia efforts to exercise sway on the global stage, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in attendance and Crown Prince Mohammed restating Riyadh's readiness to mediate in the war with Russia.


Saudi Arabia hosts Arab League summit, in Jeddah© Thomson Reuters

Oil powerhouse Saudi Arabia, once heavily influenced by the United States, has taken the diplomatic lead in the Arab world in the past year, re-establishing ties with Iran, welcoming Syria back to the fold, and mediating in the Sudan conflict.

With many Arab states hoping Assad will now take steps to distance Syria from Shi'ite Iran, Assad said the country's "past, present, and future is Arabism", but without mentioning Tehran - for decades a close Syrian ally.



Saudi hosts Arab League Summit in Jeddah© Thomson Reuters

In an apparent swipe at Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who has backed Syrian rebels and sent Turkish forces into swathes of northern Syria, Assad noted the "danger of expansionist Ottoman thought", describing it as influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood - an Islamist group seen as a foe by Damascus and many other Arab states.



Jordan's King Abdullah II arrives to attend the Arab League Summit in Jeddah© Thomson Reuters

Crown Prince Mohammed said he hoped Syria's "return to the Arab League leads to the end of its crisis," 12 years after Arab states suspended Syria as it descended into a civil war that has killed more than 350,000 people.

Saudi Arabia would "not allow our region to turn into a field of conflicts", he said, saying the page had been turned on "painful years of struggle".

Washington has objected to any steps towards normalisation with Assad, saying there must first be progress towards a political solution to the conflict.

"The Americans are dismayed. We (Gulf states) are people living in this region, we're trying to solve our problems as much as we can with the tools available to us in our hands," said a Gulf source close to government circles.

Bashar al-Assad in from the cold.

Duration 2:01 View on Watch

WIONGravitas: 

Syria attends Arab League summit | Iran hails Syria's reinstatement

6:20

CNBC

Arab states are trying to 'lure' Syria's Assad away from Iran, analyst says

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France 24

Syria's Assad 'creates a problem but presents himself as a solution,' analyst says

3:44

A Gulf analyst told Reuters that Syria risked becoming a subsidiary of Iran, and asked: "Do we want Syria to be less Arab and more Iranian, or ... to come back to the Arab fold?"

Having welcomed back Assad, Arab states also want him to curb a flourishing Syrian trade in narcotics, which are being produced in Syria and smuggled across the region.

UKRAINE

Addressing the summit, Zelenskiy, who wants to build support for Kyiv's battle against Russian invaders, asked the delegates to support Ukraine's formula for peace and thanked Riyadh for its role in mediating a prisoner release last year.

In a letter to the summit, President Vladimir Putin said Russia attached "great importance to the development of friendly relations and constructive partnership" with regional states.

Gulf states have tried to remain neutral in the Ukraine conflict despite Western pressure on Gulf oil producers to help isolate Russia, a fellow OPEC+ member.

Arab leaders attending included Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who said in 2018 the region could not tolerate "a war criminal" like Assad. Qatar has reluctantly withdrawn its opposition to Riyadh's move to readmit Syria.

The Syrian state news agency said Sheikh Tamim shook hands with Assad, though Qatari media did not confirm that and Sheikh Tamim abruptly left the gathering as the speeches were getting underway. A regional official said the two did not speak.

Salem Al-Meslit, a prominent figure in the Syrian political opposition to Assad, wrote on Twitter that his attendance was a "free reward for a war criminal".

The war has shattered Syria's economy, demolishing infrastructure, cities and factories. Assad could benefit from Gulf investment in his country, though U.S. sanctions complicate any commercial ties with Damascus.

The Arab rapprochement with Assad gained momentum after China negotiated an agreement in March that saw Riyadh resume diplomatic ties with Iran, which with Russia has helped Assad defeat Sunni rebels and regain control of some major cities.

A large swathe of Syria, however, remains under Turkish-backed rebels and radical Islamist groups as well as a U.S.-backed Kurdish militia.

Finding a political solution to the 12-year-old conflict remains a big dilemma for Arab and Western countries.

According to UNHCR since 2011, more than 14 million Syrians have fled their homes, and about 6.8 million remain displaced in their own country, where 90% of the population live below the poverty line. About 5.5 million Syrian refugees live in neighbouring Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Ahead of the summit, the U.S. State Department reiterated opposition to normalisation of relations with Damascus and said sanctions should not be lifted.

But State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel added that "we have a number of shared objectives" such as bringing home Austin Tice, a former U.S. marine and journalist who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012.

Then U.S. President Donald Trump branded an "animal" for using chemical weapons in 2018 - a weapon he consistently denied using. Assad rarely left Syria after the war began, going only to Iran and Russia until 2022, when he visited the United Arab Emirates - his first trip to an Arab country since 2011.

Assad's return to the Arab fold is part of a wider trend in the Middle East where adversaries have been taking steps to mend ties strained by years of conflict and rivalry.

(Additional reporting by Jana Choukeir, Nayera Abdallah, Clauda Tanios in Dubai; Andrew Mills in Doha; Simon Lewis in Washington; Guy Faulconbridge; Writing by Michael Georgy, Maha El Dahan and Tom Perry; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore, Alex Richardson, William Maclean)

ChatGPT Is Already Obsolete

Story by Matteo Wong • Yesterday 

The Atlantic

ChatGPT Is Already Obsolete© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Last week, at Google’s annual conference dedicated to new products and technologies, the company announced a change to its premier AI product: The Bard chatbot, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, will soon be able to describe images. Although it may seem like a minor update, the enhancement is part of a quiet revolution in how companies, researchers, and consumers develop and use AI—pushing the technology not only beyond remixing written language and into different media, but toward the loftier goal of a rich and thorough comprehension of the world. ChatGPT is six months old, and it’s already starting to look outdated.

That program and its cousins, known as large language models, mime intelligence by predicting what words are statistically likely to follow one another in a sentence. Researchers have trained these models on ever more text—at this point, every book ever and then some—with the premise that force-feeding machines more words in different configurations will yield better predictions and smarter programs. This text-maximalist approach to AI development has been dominant, especially among the most public-facing corporate products, for years.

But language-only models such as the original ChatGPT are now giving way to machines that can also process images, audio, and even sensory data from robots. The new approach might reflect a more human understanding of intelligence, an early attempt to approximate how a child learns by existing in and observing the world. It might also help companies build AI that can do more stuff and therefore be packaged into more products.

GPT-4 and Bard are not the only programs with these expanded capabilities. Also last week, Meta released a program called ImageBind that processes text, images, audio, information about depth, infrared radiation, and information about motion and position. Google’s recent PaLM-E was trained on both language and robot sensory data, and the company has teased a new, more powerful model that moves beyond text. Microsoft has its own model, which was trained on words and images. Text-to-image generators such as DALL-E 2, which captivated the internet last summer, are trained on captioned pictures.

These are known as multimodal models—text is one modality, images another—and many researchers hope they will bring AI to new heights. The grandest future is one in which AI isn’t limited to writing formulaic essays and assisting people in Slack; it would be able to search the internet without making things up, animate a video, guide a robot, or create a website on its own (as GPT-4 did in a demonstration, based on a loose concept sketched by a human).

[Read: ChatGPT changed everything. Now its follow-up is here.]

A multimodal approach could theoretically solve a central problem with language-only models: Even if they can fluently string words together, they struggle to connect those words to concepts, ideas, objects, or events. “When they talk about a traffic jam, they don’t have any experience of traffic jams beyond what they’ve associated with it from other pieces of language,” Melanie Mitchell, an AI researcher and a cognitive scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, told me—but if an AI’s training data could include videos of traffic jams, “there’s a lot more information that they can glean.” Learning from more types of data could help AI models envision and interact with physical environments, develop something approaching common sense, and even address problems with fabrication. If a model understands the world, it might be less likely to invent things about it.

Related video: Head of ChatGPT Maker Calls for AI Regulation - TaiwanPlus News 

Duration 0:58  View on Watch

India Today  ChatGPT's CEO warns about Artificial Intelligence

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The push for multimodal models is not entirely new; Google, Facebook, and others introduced automated image-captioning systems nearly a decade ago. But a few key changes in AI research have made cross-domain approaches more possible and promising in the past few years, Jing Yu Koh, who studies multimodal AI at Carnegie Mellon, told me. Whereas for decades, computer-science fields such as natural-language processing, computer vision, and robotics used extremely different methods, now they all use a programming method called “deep learning.” As a result, their code and approaches have become more similar, and their models are easier to integrate into one another. And internet giants such as Google and Facebook have curated ever-larger data sets of images and videos, and computers are becoming powerful enough to handle them.

There’s a practical reason for the change too. The internet, no matter how incomprehensibly large it may seem, contains a finite amount of text for AI to be trained on. And there’s a realistic limit to how big and unwieldy these programs can get, as well as how much computing power they can use, Daniel Fried, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, told me. Researchers are “starting to move beyond text to hopefully make models more capable with the data that they can collect.” Indeed, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and, thanks in part to this week’s Senate testimony, a kind of poster boy for the industry, has said that the era of scaling text-based models is likely over—only months after ChatGPT reportedly became the fastest-growing consumer app in history.

How much better multimodal AI will understand the world than ChatGPT, and how much more fluent its language will be, if at all, is up for debate. Although many exhibit better performance over language-only programs—especially in tasks involving images and 3-D scenarios, such as describing photos and envisioning the outcome of a sentence—in other domains, they have not been as stellar. In the technical report accompanying GPT-4, researchers at OpenAI reported almost no improvement on standardized-test performance when they added vision. The model also continues to hallucinate—confidently making false statements that are absurd, subtly wrong, or just plain despicable. Google’s PaLM-E actually did worse on language tasks than the language-only PaLM model, perhaps because adding the robot sensory information traded off with losing some language in its training data and abilities. Still, such research is in its early phases, Fried said, and could improve in years to come.

We remain far from anything that would truly emulate how people think. “Whether these models are going to reach human-level intelligence—I think that’s not likely, given the kinds of architectures that they use right now,” Mitchell told me. Even if a program such as Meta’s ImageBind can process images and sound, humans also learn by interacting with other people, have long-term memory and grow from experience, and are the products of millions of years of evolution—to name only a few ways artificial and organic intelligence don’t align.

[Read: AI search is a disaster]

And just as throwing more textual data at AI models didn’t solve long-standing problems with bias and fabrication, throwing more types of data at the machines won’t necessarily do so either. A program that ingests not only biased text but also biased images will still produce harmful outputs, just across more media. Text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion, for instance, have been shown to perpetuate racist and sexist biases, such as associating Black faces with the word thug. Opaque infrastructures and training data sets make it hard to regulate and audit the software; the possibility of labor and copyright violations might only grow as AI has to vacuum up even more types of data.

Multimodal AI might even be more susceptible to certain kinds of manipulations, such as altering key pixels in an image, than models proficient only in language, Mitchell said. Some form of fabrication will likely continue, and perhaps be even more convincing and dangerous because the hallucinations will be visual—imagine AI conjuring a scandal on the scale of fake images of Donald Trump’s arrest. “I don’t think multimodality is a silver bullet or anything for many of these issues,” Koh said.

Intelligence aside, multimodal AI might just be a better business proposition. Language models are already a gold rush for Silicon Valley: Before the corporate boom in multimodality, OpenAI reportedly expected $1 billion in revenue by 2024; multiple recent analyses predicted that ChatGPT will add tens of billions of dollars to Microsoft’s annual revenue in a few years.

Going multimodal could be like searching for El Dorado. Such programs will simply offer more to customers than the plain, text-only ChatGPT, such as describing images and videos, interpreting or even producing diagrams, being more useful personal assistants, and so on. Multimodal AI could help consultants and venture capitalists make better slide decks, improve existing but spotty software that describes images and the environment to visually impaired people, speed the processing of onerous electronic health records, and guide us along streets not as a map, but by observing the buildings around us.

Applications to robotics, self-driving cars, medicine, and more are easy to conjure, even if they never materialize—like a golden city that, even if it proves mythical, still justifies conquest. Multimodality will not need to produce clearly more intelligent machines to take hold. It just needs to make more apparently profitable ones.

Russia bans Greenpeace

Undesirable Organization: Greenpeace was until Friday the last international environmental organization not attacked by repressive authorities in Russia.

Last year, Greenpeace activists blocked a transshipment of 100,000 tonnes of Russian oil between two supertankers at sea in Danish waters. The activists demanded a ban on fossil fuels from Russia in order to stop fuelling the war economy. 

Photo: Kristian Buus / Greenpeace

By Thomas Nilsen    
May 19, 2023
BARENTS OBSERVER

The Prosecutor General’s Office in Moscow on Friday afternoon decided to list Greenpeace as undesirable in the territory of the Russian Federation.

Now every international environmental organization has been banned or severely limited in Russia. Greenpeace in particular had brought attention to Arctic oil spills and wildfires ignored by the authorities.

The procurator’s office says it made a review of materials received about Greenpeace’s activities and concluded that the organization poses a threat to the constitutional order and security of the Russian Federation.

This argumentation is similar to the wording when the Norwegian non-governmental environmental group Bellona last month was declared “undesirable”.

For Greenpeace, the Procurator General added “…. Greenpeace’s environmental activities are actually accompanied by an active promotion of a political position, attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of the state and are aimed at undermining its economic foundations.”

“Greenpeace activists are engaged in anti-Russian propaganda, calling for further economic isolation of our country and tougher sanctions measures,” the ruling says.

Moscow’s crackdown on environmental groups started with the new “foreign agents” laws introduced in 2012. A long list of non-governmental groups working to protect nature and health in Russia were listed, among them Priroda i Molodezh in Murmansk, AETAS in Arkhangelsk and World Wild Life Found.

Greenpeace first established a Russian branch in 1992 and had its main office in Moscow.

Prirazlomnoye action

In 2013, the organization made headlines in the North when activists attempted to scale Gazprom Neft’s Prirazlomnaya drilling rig in the eastern Barents Sea as part of a protest campaign against exploration of oil in the Arctic.

The ship “Arctic Sunrise” was arrested and 28 activists and two freelance journalists were detained in Murmansk for three months. The ship itself was released half a year later.
6 years in jail

The law on undesirable organizations has been expanded several times and can be used to hinder any foreign or international organization that allegedly undermines Russia’s constitutional order, military, or security.

When blacklisted, any “undesirable organization” must cease all activities in Russia or face criminal sanctions.

A 2021 amendment to the law makes it easier to open criminal cases for people affiliated with an undesirable organization. Offenses carry a punishment of up to six years in prison.

ДРИЛЬ ДЕТСКАЯ ДРИЛЬ*

On remotest Arctic coast lie huge stacks of oil pipes ready for Russia's new monster project

War and sanctions notwithstanding, Russian state oilmen proceed with the development of the Vostok Oil project. It is to produce more than 100 million tons of oil per year and will be paramount for Putin to reach his much-desired ambitions for Arctic shipping.

At least 21 km of oil pipes stacked along the shores of the Yenisey River ready to be assembled as part of pipelines for the Vostok Oil. 

Photo: Vankorneft on VK

By Atle Staalesen
BARENTS OBSERVER
May 19, 2023

The Russian president wants the Northern Sea Route to become a competitive global trade corridor and has commissioned his men in government to do what it takes.

This week, loyal government officials again confirmed to the state leader that everything is proceeding according to plans and that the Northern Sea Route will soon see an unprecedented boost in shipping.

In an online meeting with Putin and top officials, Minister of the Far East and Arctic Aleksei Chekunkov said that infrastructure along the Arctic route is built for shipping to reach 100 million tons of goods in year 2026 and 200 million tons in 2030.

Ship delivers Vostok Oil construction goods to a terminal facility in the sea-ice of the Yenisey River. Photo: Vankorneft on VK

Already in 2024, shipping on the route will exceed 70 million tons, he assured the president. It is all outlined in a federal development plan for the route covering the period until 2035, he explained.

Vladimir Putin might be happy with the affirmative words by Minister Chekunkov. However, ever since the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine and the subsequent massive international sanctions against Moscow there have been growing doubts about Russia’s actual ability to develop its large Arctic projects.

Novatek and its new natural gas project Arctic LNG 2 has experienced serious troubles with replacing technology that originally was to be provided by European and U.S manufacturers, and the projected construction of Arctic-class tankers and carriers has been hampered by cancelled Western contracts.

Likewise, the export market for many of the projects have vanished.

The sanctions and growing economic troubles notwithstanding, Arctic Minister Chekunkov appears confident about the situation.

The new industrial projects now developed by companies Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, Novatek, Nornickel, Severnaya Zvezda and Baymskaya will alone provide 190 million tons of goods traffic on the Northern Sea Route, he told Putin.

And it is Rosneft’s Vostok Oil project that is the by far biggest of the Russian Arctic adventures. When fully developed, the far northern oil project will have an annual output of more than 100 million per year.

All of it is to be transported by a new network of pipelines built across the tundra of the Taymyr Peninsula and to the project terminal of Sever Bay on coast of the Kara Sea.

Since project development started in 2022, ships loaded with construction materials have been shuttling to the Yenisey River. According to Rosneft, a total of 71 shipments have been made since the start of 2023 and 570,000 tons of various construction materials brought to project development sites.

Photos shared by Rosneft subsidiary Vankorneft show a major number of oil pipes stacked in the area ready to be assembled as part of the new pipelines.

Visual estimates indicate that the pipes have a total length of at least 21 kilometres. It is only be minor share of the total number of pipes needed. According to Rosneft leader Igor Sechin, the Vostok Oil will include the building of as much as 800 km of pipelines. That includes a 7 km long pipeline under the Yenisey river.

The state-owned Russian oil company is now hectically lobbying the project to potential partners in India and China. And Vostok Oil can easily be developed without western tech, the company argues.

According to Vladimir Chernov, the Vostok Oil General Director, as much as 98 percent of all the project’s materials and equipment will be produced domestically in Russia.

*DRILL BABY, DRILL

Chances Of World Reaching Net-Zero By 2050 Unlikely: Exxon

By Julianne Geiger - May 18, 2023

The likelihood of the world reaching net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is remote, Exxon said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission communication.

The IEA's 2050 Net Zero Emissions does not "meet the level of likelihood required to be considered in our financial statements," Exxon said, adding that the world is not on its way toward achieving net zero by 2050. Exxon also cautioned that cutting energy production to levels that fall below consumption would push energy prices higher, like in Europe.

The IEA has said that all new oil exploration would have to have stopped in 2021 in order to reach the 2050 target, and countries would have to ditch fossil fuels in favor of renewables.

"It is highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA NZE," Exxon said, pointing out that by the IEA's own assessment, Net Zero 2050 is unlikely.

The statements were made in response to an Exxon shareholder proposal that would request a report on how much it would cost to abandon projects. The proposal is set to be voted on at the end of this month.

"The requested report clearly would not provide new, decision-useful information," Exxon said.

The proposal is also asking for Exxon to evaluate the ramifications of a worst-case oil spill offshore Guyana.

Despite the pushback from Exxon on the shareholder proposal and the IEA's zeal for its Net Zero scenario, Exxon's CEO Darren Woods said in March that the company's Low Carbon business has the potential to outperform its legacy oil and natural gas business within a decade, generating hundreds of billions in revenues.

Nevertheless, ExxonMobil scrapped its 14-year-old algae biofuels project in the same month due to the project's lack of economic viability.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

SCI FI TEK

Consortium Of Japanese Companies To Back Promising Fusion Startup

By ZeroHedge - May 18, 2023, 

• 16 companies in Japan, including Mitsubishi Corp. and Kansai Electric Power Co. are investing in a new nuclear fusion startup.
• 
  
• Funds from the investment are going to be put toward "enabling stable operation of a fusion reactor",
• 
  
• The goal is to have a small-sized reactor built in Japan by 2024.

16 companies in Japan, including Mitsubishi Corp., Kansai Electric Power Co. and one government affiliated fund, are readying a $73.6 million investment in a startup working to commercialize fusion power. 

Tokyo-based Kyoto Fusioneering was founded in 2019 by researchers from Kyoto University, according to Nikkei, who calls the company "the most successful startup in Japan working with fusion-related technology."

The ultimate goal is to move toward implementing and developing fusion, which makes heat by combining hydrogen atoms to make helium. Fuels that can be used for fusion can be drawn from seawater and are "practically inexhaustible", the report says. 

This means that if fusion can be perfected, it could be a large step to moving the planet to a carbon-free future. The startup uses "plasma-heating equipment called gyrotrons" which help create nuclear fusion reactions.

Source: Nikkei

Kyoto Fusioneering is seen as the world leader in the development of gyrotrons. 

Nikkei notes that Mitsui & Co., J-Power, Inpex and 10 other companies, including MUFG Bank and JIC Venture Growth Investments, a government-affiliated fund have also all invested with the company. 

Funds from the investment are going to be put toward "enabling stable operation of a fusion reactor", with goals of having a small scale reactor built in Japan by 2024. The company also plans on bolstering its engineers and furthering testing on its gyrotrons to see if they can perform over extended periods. 

The company hopes to be the first to commercialize such a process, the report says. Recall, the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the U.S. said in 2022 that they had also succeeded in creating a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed, the report says. 

Even U.S. companies like Microsoft are already starting to secure contracts with fusion energy companies for power. Microsoft's contract is with a company called Helion Energy and starts in 2028. 

By Zerohedge.com

How A Cactus Inspired Scientists To Make Cheaper Hydrogen

By Brian Westenhaus - May 18, 2023

• University of Texas scientists have proposed a new material as a catalyst to split water molecules.
• 
  
• The durability and unique design of prickly pear cactus in desert environments by adsorbing moisture through its extensive surface and ability to bear fruits at the edges of leaves inspired this study to adopt a similar 3D architecture.
• 
  
• Nickel may be a much cheaper catalyst than platinum, but it is not as quick and effective at breaking down water into hydrogen.

Engineers at The University of Texas at El Paso have proposed a low-cost, nickel-based material as a catalyst to help split water more cheaply and efficiently. Their inspiration? A desert succulent known as the prickly pear cactus.

The durability and unique design of prickly pear cactus in desert environments by adsorbing moisture through its extensive surface and ability to bear fruits at the edges of leaves inspired this study to adopt a similar 3D architecture. Image Credit: University of Texas at El Paso. Click the study paper link for more information.

The material is described in a new paper in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

More than 100 years ago, scientists discovered how to turn water into hydrogen gas – a highly desired green energy that’s been nicknamed “the fuel of the future.” Despite that breakthrough, hydrogen has not latched on as a dominant fuel source. Breaking down water into hydrogen can be inefficient and costly and the transformation process, called electrolysis, remains unperfected.UTEP Mechanical Engineering Professor Ramana Chintalapalle, Ph.D., who led the study said, “This is nature-inspired design in the laboratory. You have this plant with an extensive surface that can absorb moisture and survive in extreme environments. We thought, ‘How can we incorporate this into our research?’”

The Hydrogen Problem

Electrolysis is the process of splitting water with electricity and an electrocatalyst – a material that speeds up any chemical reaction. Current techniques to split water rely heavily on platinum as a catalyst, which has its drawbacks.

“Platinum is the dominant material used to help split water, but it is very expensive – more expensive than gold – and it’s just not feasible to use it on a large scale because of its price,” Chintalapalle explained. “We need a catalyst that’s more economically viable so every country can reasonably adopt hydrogen.”

A Prickly Solution

Navid Attarzadeh first noticed the prickly pear cactus while walking to UTEP’s Center for Advanced Materials Research lab. The team had been exploring nickel as a catalytic replacement for platinum, a metal that is abundant on Earth and 1,000 times cheaper than platinum.

Nickel, however, is not as quick and effective at breaking down water into hydrogen.

Attarzadeh said, “Every day, I passed this same plant. And I started connecting it to our catalyst problem. What caught my attention was how big the leaves and fruits were compared to other desert plants; the prickly pear has an extraordinary surface area.”

That’s when the Attarzadeh had an idea. What if they designed a 3D nickel-based catalyst in the shape of the prickly pear cactus? The larger surface area could accommodate more electrochemical reactions – creating more hydrogen than nickel typically can.

The team quickly designed the nano-scale structure – invisible to the human eye – and put it to the test.

“We tested the catalyst’s ability to split water repeatedly and had good results,” Chintalapalle said. He added that this is a fundamental discovery and the process needs further refinement, but it’s a step in the right direction.

“Hydrogen gas can transform energy technology for our country – without generating greenhouse gas emissions,” Chintalapalle said. “Our carbon footprint could be eliminated; we need to keep pursuing this.”

***

Sounds great and probably is. But there remains the raw efficiency of the electricity needed to perform the electrolysis. There isn’t a huge gain – it closer to just a push. Then there is the storage matter. Hydrogen and di-hydrogen are the smallest atom and molecule and slip away through – practically anything.

Ask a metallurgist or just check. The effect of hydrogen on steels isn’t a good thing at all. Nature did a really good thing on earth locking hydrogen away in water. There is a lot of the Universe’s fuel right here.

We’re still a long way off from pumping some distilled water into the car for fuel and driving away. There is a lot yet to discover and learn.

Someday its going to get figured out.

By Brian Westenhaus via NewEnergyandfuel

China Is Still Critical To America’s Clean Energy Boom

By Haley Zaremba - May 18, 2023

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dramatically highlighted the importance of energy security and pushed countries to implement protectionist energy trade policies in order to ensure supply.
• 
  
• As the West revaluates supply chains, attention is being drawn to how dependent the clean energy industry is on China.
• 
  
• Recent attempts by the U.S. to counter Chinese dominance in clean energy have been criticized as being counter-productive, but a more comprehensive approach could eventually work.
• 
  

On the global stage, we are seeing a swift shift in geopolitical strategy away from free market trading toward protectionist policies and “friend-shoring” as a direct response to last year’s European energy crisis. Years of a free market approach to energy trading had left Russia with enormous influence over European energy markets. In 2021, countries in the European Union sourced 45% of their total gas imports – about 155 billion cubic meters (bcm) – from Russia alone. Then, Russia illegally invaded Ukraine and all hell broke loose. 

After the invasion in February of last year, a political scuffle turned into an all-out energy war between Brussels and the Kremlin, causing a crisis in European energy markets that reverberated around the world. Europe condemned Russia’s actions with a mix of actual and threatened economic sanctions; Russia responded by cutting off gas supplies overnight to flex its leverage over European markets; and thus, the relative danger and vulnerability of relying on one (particularly volatile) source for a significant portion of the bloc’s energy mix was thrown into stark relief. 

As a result, leaders in the West have swiftly changed their trade strategy. United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has openly called for a shift of strategy away from free market trading to the concept of “friend-shoring”, in which countries shift supply chains to “trusted countries” with similar values and political allegiances – that is to say, away from Russia and China. The Euro­pean Commission’s Strategic Foresight Report 2022, too, has called for a similar reconfiguration of trade networks. “Staking out spheres of influence and assessing the reliability and trustworthiness of suppliers and countries is the order of the day,” read a recent analysis from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, the German Institute of International and Security Affairs. 

In addition to trying to break economic ties with Russia as the war in Ukraine drags on, increasing attention is being called to the global dependence on China for clean energy supply chains, and to strategies to break that dependence and decrease supply chain vulnerability before history repeats itself. According to the International Energy Agency’s Energy Technology Perspectives 2023 report, “China is the leading global supplier of clean energy technologies today and a net exporter for many of them. China holds at least 60% of the world’s manufacturing capacity for most mass-manufactured technologies (e.g. solar PV, wind systems and batteries), and 40% of electrolyser manufacturing.” 

Experts have argued that after years of neglecting the domestic clean energy industry, the United States will have to make an assertive and accelerated effort to build up domestic production and manufacturing capacity to have any chance of competing with China on the global market. According to a recent study from Cornell University, it would also be essential for meeting national decarbonization targets (and therefore global targets, as the United States is the second largest greenhouse gas emitter after China). The study found that nationalizing United States solar energy supply chains would greatly reduce their carbon footprint and energy use. 

Just this month, in an attempt to shift the balance of clean energy power away from China, the United States treasury department released new guidance limiting clean energy tax credits to U.S.-based solar developers that produce their photovoltaic cells domestically. However, clean energy experts have warned that this approach will backfire spectacularly, as the United States has negligible extant solar panel production capacity. Instead of breaking the United States’ dependence on Chinese solar panel imports, the requirement would simply prevent virtually all existing U.S. developers from accessing the credit. 

“Directly and indirectly, the US will rely on supply from China,” Pol Lezcano, a senior associate at BloombergNEF, was recently quoted by the Financial Times. “This guidance may encourage more cell manufacturing to take place in the US, but most of the cells used in US solar projects will continue to come from . . . factories in south-east Asia, most of them owned by Chinese companies.”

While this specific policy approach may be misguided, the intent behind it is spot-on, and many experts argue that it actually does not go far enough. Solar cells are only one small part of a very long supply chain that will have to be reconfigured from top to bottom in order to diversify clean energy markets. Primary materials will also become increasingly important in clean energy markets and geopolitics in general as demand for finite rare earth materials skyrockets. Currently, China has a chokehold on these supplies as well, but the U.S is scrambling to build up its own lithium operations and to forge new trade agreements in South America – though this will present its own challenges.

In short, increasing clean energy production in the West without also increasing cash flow to China will be very, very difficult to pull off. Piecemeal policy measures such as the one introduced by the Treasury last week are doomed to fail without system-level coordination. In fact, as solar panel manufacturers are currently finding out, inadequate measures designed to support local supply chains can – and will – make matters even worse. 

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com