Welcome to the Age of Gas: New Report Says Natural Gas Is Becominga "Focal Point" of Global Energy Supply and Demand

A century ago, Edison’s electric light bulb switched off millions of gas lamps illuminating streets, squares and railway stations around the world, and put gas works effectively out of business. But a new GE study titled the Age of Gas says that gas is back and becoming a focal point of global energy supply and demand. “Natural gas… is positioned to rival coal consumption as well as take share from oil on the global stage,” say the study’s authors Peter C. Evans and Michael F. Farina. They write that gas will also increasingly complement wind and other renewable energy sources in power generation.

Evans and Farina say that utilities, global businesses, homes and also trains, trucks and other means of transportation have already embraced natural gas. The analysts expect that gas consumption will grow by more than a third from its current level by 2025. They estimate that international trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG) will increase by 70 percent in this decade alone.

Natural gas will account for 26 percent of primary global energy production by 2025, up from 20 percent in 1990.

The authors point out that natural gas has “significantly lower environmental emissions relative to other fossil fuels.” The "flexibility" of natural gas power plants - they can start up is less that 30 minutes and increase power output at 100 megawatts per minute - can also help utilities incorporate wind and solar power in the grid, which vary with the weather.

The latest flexible combined cycle power plants are reaching thermal efficiencies in excess of 61 percent. That means almost two-thirds of the energy in the natural gas is converted into electricity. The Department of Energy has reportedly likened such efficiency to running a four-minute mile. “The future of gas is not going to be the same as the past,” Evans and Farina write.

In the Middle East, the share of natural gas in power generation already stands at 60 percent. (It is 28 percent in the U.S. and 20 percent in Europe.)

Land-based gas pipelines transport 89 percent of the gas consumed today. They authors say that gas network growth, innovation and new supply options like shale gas are helping create greater gas network density and resilience, and improve economics. “Denser networks contribute to making energy systems more robust and therefore more resilient to disruption and less likely to exhibit extreme price volatility,” they say.

Evans and Farina write that “gas networks, which are often underground, in contrast to road and power grids, can often provide stable service during severe weather events. In this way, gas can contribute broadly to economic resiliency by providing diversification, redundancy, and backup systems.”

The advantages of such distributed power came to light last year during Hurricane Sandy. While large parts of the Northeast were in the dark, a gas turbine located at Princeton University kept the campus lit and warm.

The authors write that innovations like floating LNG technologies and small gas gathering, conversion and transportation systems will also have “dramatic impact” on gas network growth. “The new technologies that help integrate and transform small-scale LNG and CNG [compressed natural gas] systems into ‘virtual pipelines’ will be important to the rapid development of new gas markets like the transportation sector,” they write.

They also believe that the Industrial Internet, which links data from machine sensors to people and software, will bring new tools for monitoring, control and analytics of pipelines, generators and other technology.

“One defining characteristic of networks is that they become more valuable with size as more entities join the network,” Evans and Farina write. “These characteristics facilitate the development of adjacent networks, uncovering hidden opportunities to create value as new links are established.”

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The Simple Goals of Complex Systems: Nobel Laureate James E. Rothman Talks About Nanomachines, Cutting Through the Fog, Personalized Medicine and the Benefits of Becoming Fish Wrap

On October 7, biologist James E. Rothman received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine together with colleagues Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof. Rothman is a professor of biomedical sciences at Yale. Over the last decade he has served as a senior advisor to GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY. He is also a former chief scientist at GE Healthcare. GE Reports managing editor Tomas Kellner talked to Rothman last week about his discovery, innovation, and GE.

Nobel laureate James Rothman worked as chief scientist at GE Healthcare. "In the university we talk a lot about collaboration, discovery through bringing together disciplines," he says. "I have never seen it work anywhere as well as at GE Global Research."

The Nobel committee is known in the U.S. for what may be the world’s most exhilarating wake up call. Where were you when you learned the news that you won a Nobel?

I was at home and I was in bed. The phone rang and there was a very pleasant Swedish voice bringing good news. It turned out that I had met the gentleman who was calling, Göran Hansson, at a scientific conference a couple of years ago. He is the Secretary of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

The Nobel committee recognized you and your two colleagues for “solving the mystery” of how cells transport molecules like insulin to the right place in the cell and at the right time. Why is that important?

The body is made up of many different types of cells that make up your muscle, your liver or the nerve cells in your brain. These cells need to communicate with each other, otherwise they get out of synch and the liver won’t function like a liver.

Adding even more complexity, the different organs need to talk to each other. For example, when you eat a meal, your intestines are digesting the food and producing sugar that goes into the blood. The pancreas is detecting the sugar and secreting insulin to control and distribute the sugar throughout the body. There have to be signals or information flowing between the components of the system in order for it to function in a coherent way. Every electrical engineer will understand this. The work we have done has elucidated how those signals are produced and passed between cells.

It is interesting that you mention engineering. Your Nobel is in physiology and medicine, you studied medicine, but you left medical school and trained as a physicist.

I am not a physicist in any professional sense. But like many people at GE who are engineers, my initial education was in math and physics. I later moved toward molecular biology.

You said in an interview that what attracted you to molecular biology was the opportunity to find simplicity. Can you explain it? Biology seems inherently messy.

I’ve observed that biologists fall into two camps. There are those who seek simplicity and find it, and then there are those who seek complexity and revel in it. I know that sounds a little odd, but I think it’s true.

The goal of a complex system can actually be very simple. Its core function could be almost mechanical, like a little machine. In fact, we found that this is the case. Most of cell biology is carried out by proteins that are very complex on one level, but when you look at them through an electron microscope, they behave just like little nanomachines. So you have something than can be very complex, involving interactions of tens of thousands of atoms in multiple combinations and a complex interface between two proteins, or it can be conceptualized for example as a hammer hitting a nail, because one of the proteins looks like a hammer and the other looks like a nail.

You cannot get a simpler system than that.

If you have orientation to physics, where you always expect some simplicity and generality as distinct from the way biology is usually approached, it’s possible to make better progress in a complex field and cut through the fog more easily.

You could use these simple building blocks to create a much more complex picture and gain a deeper understanding.

That’s exactly right. The very complex behaviors of healthy and diseased organs are now being modeled increasingly using tools similar to what electrical engineers use. This approach extracts the essence and represents a profound simplification. This so called systems biology is becoming an important tool for example in the pharmaceutical industry. It will be an important clinical tool down the road for qualifying patients for treatments.

Such personalized medicine is a goal that GE is also pursuing. When did you start working at GE?

My history with GE goes back to early 2000s when GE acquired Amersham. That company brought to GE a great strength in life sciences. This truly differentiates GE from major industrial companies. I served for several years as chief scientist at GE Healthcare, which was then a new business formed by the combination of Amersham and GE’s imaging unit, GE Medical. I also started working in a high-level advisory role at GE Global Research (GRC). We essentially moved the Amersham research group from New Jersey to GRC and we’ve seen so many rewards from that move over the years.

Why was this move so important?

At first, the biologists were out in the left field and the GRC engineers didn’t really know how to relate to them even. They were working on two completely different sets of projects. But over the years we’ve seen the biology culture infuse and inform almost every aspect of research across the healthcare business. The development of digital pathology is an important example. Ten years ago we were not in digital pathology at all. If you think about it, that’s kind of interesting, because GE is a predominant company in the imaging space.

Can you explain the connection between medical imaging and pathology?

Pathologists use a microscope, rather than an MRI or ultrasound machine, to analyze a large numbers of cells. It’s subjective, it’s not digital, it’s qualitative, it’s all the things that radiology is not. But we were able to develop digital pathology because of the infusion of biology in the engineering.

Is digital pathology a tool that could help us advance personalized medicine?

Digital pathology paves the road for digitizing the pathology department. Once the environment is digital, data are created and stored in an archive in instantly manageable and accessible forms. This creates the platform for personalized medicine.

But this is just the first step. Step two is the development of molecular pathology at GRC, and that still continues. The acquisition of Clarient a few years ago was a major step in this direction. This is a big deal in clinical medicine and, eventually, cancer treatment. While digital pathology purely concerns capturing and storing microscope images of samples like tumor biopsies, molecular pathology images numerous potential cancer causing genes within the tumor, allowing pinpoint diagnoses and targeted treatments.

How often do you visit GRC?

I am usually in Niskayuna two days a month. I work very closely with the scientists and the advanced technology there, particularly John Burczak and Nadeem Ishaque, who are great leaders. I have the privilege of working with a great number of very talented people, including Mike Idelchik [vice president for advanced technologies] and Mark Little [GE senior vice president and chief technology officer], whose leadership is really quite extraordinary.

You have a busy academic career as chair of the cell biology department at Yale. What makes you go back to GRC?

Having had the experience of working with other companies as an adviser, I can tell you that there is no greater company in the world. It is absolutely my privilege to be a part of GE. The value system, the business focus, the innovation that goes on at GRC are all astonishing.

In the university we talk a lot about collaboration, discovery through bringing together disciplines. I have never seen it work anywhere as well as at GRC. The needs of the various business segments way outside of healthcare are appreciated by the people at GRC through the very nature of the lab. That sort of non-quantifiable knowledge has a way of leveraging across the whole of GE.

People who do not really understand GE describe us as a conglomerate. Sure, we are very broadly based. But what I see from the standpoint of GE Global Research is a company that has technology platforms that add enormous value that goes way beyond the conglomerate [label]. I see it every time I am at GRC and it excites me because I learn so much from my colleagues there.

How do you compare university research, or blue-sky research, and the type of research that goes on at GRC, which is looking for commercial applications? Are there benefits to having a product in mind?

Absolutely. GE does that so impressively.

Academia is largely supported by the public because of what you call the blue-sky aspect, with the hope that some of that will translate it into outcomes that benefit the society broadly. That of course happens.

GE Global Research has many, many tentacles and connections into the academia. GRC has labs all over the world and we have excellent relationship with excellent investigators at the top universities. We go to meetings, we publish, and we are understood to be leaders. That’s very important because it gives us visibility and it gives us access. It allows us to be part of the ecosystem in the way that we function, which is synthesizing the blue sky developments, the best of them, that occur anywhere in the world.

We take those developments, the best of them and we infuse them with the shorter term needs of the various businesses. Out of that ferment emerge projects that have perhaps a longer term timeline than what the business would ordinarily be excited about. It’s very powerful. I am not aware of any other large industrial that has the kind of leverage that we have.

Have you started working on your Nobel lecture? Do you have a topic in mind?

That’s a good question. The ceremony is scheduled for early December in Stockholm. I have not started working on my Nobel Lecture, which is a special lecture of more than average importance. This week there has been a lot of interest from the press. I trust that it will go away by next week as we become fish wrap.

I am also trying to get some sleep. I’ve been going on three to four hours of sleep all week. If I conveyed any measure of coherence today, that in itself should be worth of a Nobel Prize.

Thank you for your time.

Curing By Numbers: Taking Cloud Computing to a New Level

American healthcare has by far the most expensive system in the world, but few would argue that it's also the most efficient. A recent study published in the Journal of American Medical Association found that almost 40 percent of patients are misdiagnosed in primary care¹. Another report by the American College of Physicians discovered that unnecessary testing and medical procedures, and extra days in the hospital caused by wrong diagnosis could add up to $800 billion per year². That's close to a third of all U.S. healthcare costs. “There is a lot of waste in the system,” says Jeanine Banks, general manager of marketing at GE Healthcare IT. “We want to help rein in the costs and make the system far more efficient.”

That’s not just talk. Engineers at GE Healthcare IT are developing a new “cloud imaging” solution that will allow doctors to create a professional profile, store patient images and data together in one place, view 3D images from anywhere, and access intuitive analytics. “It’s like LinkedIn professional networking meets diagnostic imaging,” Banks says. “It’s all about virtually limitless computing, storage and collaboration on tough cases to help healthcare teams make more informed decisions.”

A new GE big data system that stores medical information in the cloud could help doctors improve patient diagnosis.

Banks says that the information physicians need to make diagnoses is often fragmented and sits in siloes. The new platform, GE’s Cloud Imaging solution, allows doctors to exchange images and use social digital tools to share cases with each other over a network instead of distributing CDs, as common practice now. “They can open their browser, click on a link and share quickly,” she says.

Banks says that GE intends to give hospitals the flexibility to host the system on their own servers, as a private cloud, or through GE’s public cloud environment. “We are committed to using industry standards to make it easy to connect medical devices, link with existing PACS (picture archiving and communication systems) and EMR (electronic medical records environments), and enable consistent access to a flourishing ecosystem of apps,” she says. “Providers don’t need more silos of data.”

GE’s first Cloud Imaging pilot site is the Kadlec Health System in Washington State. Kadlec is helping evaluate the platform ahead of plans to demonstrate the new solution during the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in December. “It’s an opportunity for them to use it inside their health system and give us feedback,” Banks says.

For Banks, this is the beginning of a new healthcare revolution. “What if together with industry we could help physicians reduce waste?” she asks. “We could process that information, learn from past diagnostic decisions and store the data all in the cloud to inform future decisions. One day, we could tap into knowledge based on cases from around the world.”

That’s just brilliant.

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¹ Journal of American Medical Association 2012
² Reuter’s, citing study by American College of Physicians

A Ticket to Profit: New Cloud Tech Could Make Airlines Richer and Pilots Wiser

No barrier to running a profitable airline looms larger than the cost of jet fuel. U.S. airlines spend more than a third of their operating budgets on fuel, or $50 billion in 2012. Every penny increase in the price per gallon costs the industry $180 million annually.

Unlike cars, ships and other, less lofty means of transportation, planes can’t tap alternative sources of energy like natural gas and electricity. With profits margins running at mere 2 percent of operating expenses, flying more fuel efficient planes is often the ticket to profit. “The good news is that there are always better ways to operate and save fuel,” says Giovanni Spitale, general manager at GE’s Flight Efficiency Services (FES) business.

GE launched FES to help airlines improve operations and save fuel. “With the combination of historical and current information, we can make optimized decisions about flight plans and fuel load,” Spitale says. “Planes don’t have to carry all that extra fuel weight if they don’t need it. But you have to present the pilot with enough information to make that decision based on science and good data. He ultimately carries the responsibility for the plane.”

“With the combination of historical and current information, we can make optimized decisions about flight plans and fuel load,” says Giovanni Spitale, general manager at GE’s Flight Efficiency Services.

FES engineers have built a new big data system that can gather and analyze real-time data generated by aircraft, crunch historical information about flight plans and fuel loads, digest internal policies and procedures, and combine it with airspace maps obtained from aviation authorities. “We have the data science expertise to tease out the relevant information,” Spitale says. “But we also build jet engines and understand the physical aspect of aviation. We can scale the two and help improve fuel management, navigation, flight analytics, and fleet synchronization.”

Spitale says the system can also help fine tune internal policies. An airline can instruct pilots to reduce gas-guzzling take-off thrust at 1,500 feet. “We can measure when and where that’s appropriate and whether pilots are following the plan,” he says.

Airlines like Taiwan’s EVA Airways and Garuda Indonesia have signed up to use FES to manage fuel. GE is already working with Brazil’s GOL Airlines on reducing annual fuel costs by as much as 2 percent, or $90 million over the next five years. GE is also helping 10 Brazilian airports and aviation authorities ease air traffic congestion.

FES was among the 14 Industrial Internet technologies released by GE at the Minds and Machines summit in Chicago yesterday. “Very small changes drive very high outcomes for our customers,” GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said at the summit. “This is the future of our service business.”

Turning Profit: How the Wind and the Cloud Make it Rain

Ever since GE wind turbines started popping up around the world a decade ago, engineers kept adding hardware and upgrading software to make them more productive. Andy Holt, general manager for projects and services at GE Renewable Energy, says that the advent of big data and the secure industrial cloud now allow engineers to take the next step.

New wind farm software and hardware technology from GE called PowerUp will let customers monitor wind farm performance in real time and boost power output by as much as 5 percent per turbine. This can translate to a 20 percent increase in profit. “That’s huge,” says Holt. “PowerUp gives us a bunch of dials and levers that let us tune the different elements of the wind turbine to make it operate at an optimal level.”

These dials and levers use turbine data to manage the drivetrain speed and torque, the pitch of the blades and the yaw of the nacelle. They also monitor aerodynamics and other turbine controls helping the farm produce reliable power.

The software is continuously "tuning" the turbine and locks in the best settings. For example, the speed and the torque of the turbine affect generator voltage and blade noise. The yaw of the nacelle has influence on the energy yield and mechanical loads.

There are 22,000 GE wind turbines installed around the world.

PowerUp was among 14 new Industrial Internet technologies that GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt unveiled during yesterday’s Minds and Machines summit in Chicago.

The platform joins other Industrial Internet wind farm technologies like GE's PulsePOINT. That system monitors the condition of equipment and uses algorithms to detect anomalies like unusual vibrations, hot bearings, and low power production. “The turbines are aware of themselves and check with their neighbors to see if they are underperforming,” Holt says. “If they are, they put in a work order and call us, saying, ‘Hey, I’m making 1.4 megawatts of power and my neighbor is making 1.5. I have a lot of vibration on this bearing. Come fix me!’”

The PowerUp platform uses a suite of performance dials and levers to fine tune a wind turbine’s operation and help enhance its energy production. Through a detailed loads, reliability and performance analysis utilizing historical SCADA data, a turbine will lock in the best settings from an iterative tuning process. Based upon a turbine’s specific wind regime and characteristics, the end result will be a customized PowerUp that seeks to maximize annual energy production.

14 New GE Industrial Internet Technologies Move Machines Closer to Zero Unplanned Downtime

There is more than one way to fly a plane. When the weather is good and the skies are open at the destination airport, pilots can cut costs by loading less fuel and shedding the extra weight. But they need good information to make the call.

GE just made the decision easier. The company's Flight Efficiency Services system (FES) is one of 14 big data technologies released today to help airlines, energy companies, hospitals and other customers cut downtime, improve productivity, and reduce emissions.

GE software engineers are using a "first-of-its-kind" industrial-strength software development platform called Predix to build the applications. The platform provides a standard and secure way to create apps for any machine or device connected to the Industrial Internet, a digital network that links machines, sensors generating data, people and the cloud. “Industrial data is not only big, it’s the most critical and complex type of big data,” says Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO. “Our greatest challenge and opportunity is to manage and analyze this data in a highly secure way to deliver better outcomes for customers and society.”

GE has also partnered with AT&T, Cisco and Intel to improve data flow and boost wired and wireless connectivity.

Immelt is speaking today at GE’s Minds and Machines conference in Chicago.

"Standing next to a blowout preventer, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt opened the Minds and Machines conference in Chicago today. New GE Industrial Internet technology called Drilling iBox gathers and analyzes industrial data from the subsea machine, and allows drilling rig crews to minimize unplanned downtime."

Immelt says that GE is developing predictive software and hardware systems and industrial sensors that constantly measure machine performance, identify productivity gains and reduce unplanned downtime. “Observing, predicting and changing performance is how the Industrial Internet will help airlines, railroads and power plants operate at peak efficiency,” he says.

Brazil’s Gol Airlines, for example, is using GE's FES software to analyze and track its flight routes and optimize fuel consumption. The airline predicts that the system will save $90 million over the next five years. St. Luke’s Medical Center is using GE software to manage and analyze patient and equipment data. The system has already helped the hospital shave 51 minutes from bed turnaround time and reduce patient wait times.

GE launched the first 10 Industrial Internet products last year. The products have brought in $290 million in revenues and another $400 million in orders to date. The company said that it plans to leverage its high-margin $160 billion services backlog to develop more predictive technologies, grow software sales, and help customers become even more efficient.

Depth of Knowledge: New Industrial Internet System Can Monitor Deep Sea Drilling Equipment

Blowout preventers, or BOPs, are among the biggest and most complex machines that most of us will never see. These 50,000-pound 60-foot-tall safety valves made from 70,000 component parts sit on top of pressurized oil and gas wells thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean. They serve as the last line of defense if something in the well goes wrong.

Many BOP parts have different lifespans and the massive machines have to be periodically pulled up and serviced. Workers perform much of the maintenance on a BOP at set time intervals because real-time information about the condition of the parts and usage is sparse. That information gap got a team of GE oil and gas engineers and software developers thinking: “We need to move from the ‘break-fix’ model to a maintenance model where we can advise customers to service a component based on measurements of its performance,” says Bob Judge, director of product management at GE Oil & Gas. “What if you had technology gathering BOP data so that the next time you pull it out, you know exactly what needs to be replaced and have the replacement parts available on the drilling rig? This information could save millions of dollars in unplanned downtime, adding substantial value for our customers and for their customers.”

BOPs are 50,000-pound 60-foot-tall safety valves made from 70,000 component parts. They serve as the last line of defense if something in the well goes wrong.

The team spent the last couple of years studying data from existing BOP controls systems and came up with the Drilling iBox solution. This combination of software and hardware sensors allows drilling rig crews to gather data about valve positions, pressures, temperatures and well bore conditions and turn it into useful information. “The screen of the D-iBox is showing the workers the health of the BOP components, how many cycles they have gone through, and what needs to be fixed and when,” Judge says. “When there is a problem, the drilling contractor will know within seconds.”

Judge said that he had an epiphany when he saw a demonstration of myEngines, an Industrial Internet application for GE’s Aviation business. It allows airlines to remotely monitor the status of their engine fleet and streamline scheduling, maintenance and repair. “I thought if we could substitute “BOP” for “engine”, we could use the same model to benefit the drilling industry that has been proven to work for jet engines,” Judge says.

The first D-iBox pilot will start this fall and two others by the first quarter of 2014. . Only drilling contractors and owners will have access to data collected by the system. But Judge points out that there are significant advantages to encouraging data-sharing with GE. “Gathering data across different users will accelerate the types of predictive rules our software engineers can create,” he says.

Judge says that "everyone benefits when we can advise replacement or maintenance intervals based on the widest universe of user data possible. We can also see this type of operational data as an important piece of the whole cradle-to-grave genealogy of the components of a BOP system."

"Telling a customer what to fix after it has failed is relatively easy," he says. "Telling them to fix something before it costs them money is the magic.”