Ron Beck, the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Aspen Technology Inc. says leading players in the MEA region have devoted significant research funding towards development of unique “green tech”
What are the most pressing environmental challenges facing the MEA region in the context of technology and digitalization?
The environment is really an opportunity more than a challenge for the MEA region. Essentially, a key factor for industry in turning environmental issues into opportunities is taking the long view. MEA is much less tethered to the financial quarterly results world than the rest of the global energy industry. Therein lies a major opportunity.
The leading players in the MEA region understand this well. They have devoted significant research funding towards development of unique “green tech”, including investing in innovative startups globally. This vision has extended towards invention of new sustainable materials that can provide new sustainable long-term markets for the hydrocarbon resources of the region.
At the same time, leading MEA organizations are also currently investing deeply in the development of AI technology that suits their organizations. Industrial AI presents a huge opportunity for the region’s traditional energy business. It equally presents a unique advantage in rapid innovation and scale up of Green Tech.
The opportunity is to become a first mover and global leader in green, circular and sustainable energy, chemicals and other sectors. The challenge is to move beyond R&D investment, innovation and proof of concept, and rapidly move to scale. The answer is embedding digital and industrial AI across the entire innovation lifecycle and value chain of these new businesses. By designing world-scale implementations from the ground up with a comprehensive digital approach in mind, the new technologies will advance faster, and reach scale.
How is the MEA region embracing green tech solutions compared to other global regions?
The MEA region has the regional leadership, the will, and the investment record to position the region well to grow in Green Tech. The region also has developed a record of executing world-scale projects.
There are several trends that currently can work in the region’s favour. The emphasis in the past few years of developing education, technical training and organizational capabilities to execute projects with local talent is crucial in the rapidly moving area of green tech. Also, the region’s focus on AI and marrying industrial AI with Green Tech innovation is a critical ingredient.
The MEA countries will need a few things in place to really take advantage of Green Tech. One will be some form of carbon market, that enables monetizing the value of the region’s unique resources in a standardized auditable way. This should open the door for selling carbon credits and Green Tech credits to organizations such as the Giga Scaler companies who need to offset their power use for their cloud and AI data centres.
Are there any unique regional challenges or opportunities?
MEA has several unique advantages as a Green Tech centre. The first is the availability of a large natural gas resource and production capability. Natural gas is a key driver for provision of blue hydrogen, as well as low carbon electricity for data centres.
The second is the advantaged geography for the rapid development of solar power at a large scale. Solar power is a key enabler of sustainable AI data centres, direct air capture, and green hydrogen production. The third is the availability of target saline reservoirs and produced oil reservoirs for carbon sequestration, which can emerge as an economic opportunity eventually as large as hydrocarbon production.
The fourth is the availability of a workforce with favourable demographics that can be rapidly trained and organized. The fifth is the availability of capital that is needed for investment in green tech R&D and world-scale production.
Right now, AI is the most important technology area that the region should be thinking about. AI in its current form has two major requirements: Capital (to rapidly build infrastructure) and electricity (to support world-scale datacentres). The MEA region has the required capital. The region’s immediate focus should be on the required low carbon power. For that to happen, renewables and blue hydrogen will play a key role.
What role do you see government initiatives playing in driving the adoption of green tech solutions in the MEA region? Can you provide specific examples of successful policies or programs?
Governments across the MEA region are taking proactive steps to integrate sustainability into industrial and energy sectors. Some of the most significant initiatives include:
- UAE’s Green Agenda – 2030 – focusing on sustainable development and making the economy more environment-friendly
- UAE Circular Economy Policy – focus on waste reduction, resource efficiency, and green manufacturing.
- Saudi Arabia’s Circular Carbon Economy (CCE) framework – aims to capture and reuse carbon emissions while investing in clean energy technologies.
- Qatar’s National Vision 2030 – includes sustainability goals centered around renewable energy, recycling, and waste-to-energy initiatives.
These policies encourage private sector investment in digital transformation, energy efficiency, and decarbonization technologies while providing a regulatory framework for implementation.
How are technology providers like you contributing to the development and adoption of green tech solutions in the MEA region?
For this world to achieve its green tech goals, the industry and technology providers need to interact and work together. Co-innovation – which involves a much closer relationship between the industry and the technology providers – will achieve faster, more usable, and more sustainable digital solutions and adoption.
AspenTech and ARAMCO have developed a co-innovation agreement called, “Strategic Planning for Sustainability Pathways”. Recently we have added exciting generative AI capabilities to this solution. Additionally, it will be crucial to scale Green Tech technologies using a whole new way of shrinking the design and execution of projects. At AspenTech we call it – collaborative engineering – and it brings together multiple technologies into a concurrent and accelerated workflow. Companies in Southeast Asia, Korea and Europe are being successful with these tools in the areas of carbon capture today.
Beyond this, companies in the region rapidly adopting digitalization and AI technologies are increasingly concerned about ‘solution sustainment’—how the company retains the value of the digitalization investment over a sustained period. Addressing this will require closer partnerships involving trust between technology providers, technology implementers, and industrial users.
