Today's Edition
JESSI AMASON (DUBAI)
As climate change has forced humanity into another paradigmatic shift in approaches to all aspects of life, technological advancements and innovations driven by creative sustainability solutions in all fields are at the forefront of climate action.
Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics has heeded the call for creative sustainability solutions with their robot fleet that helps to prevent ecological catastrophe.
The company’s fleet includes robots with the ability to scale walls, withstand high temperatures, and make complex manoeuvres into areas too inaccessible or risky for human intervention, including one robot resembling a dog called the “Fido”, Gecko Co-Founder and CEO Jake Loosararian told Aletihad on the sidelines of COP28.
The company was born from a dorm room a decade ago with sustainability in mind, Loosararian said, recalling key motivations behind the concept being reducing the amount of time human beings put into dangerous situations during inspections and reducing emissions through increased efficiency and preventing environmentally destructive infrastructural catastrophe.
According to Loosararian, Gecko robots enable software to predict when critical built infrastructure will fail. This includes pipelines, oil tankers, power plants, dams, and ships, preventing the types of disastrous failures that deeply impact the environment.
The CEO added: “The big question is, how do you make the energy sources that we rely on today less emissive? So that's what we focus primarily on, how to reduce the impact of industries that are currently and in the future going to rely on fossil-based fuels. How do you make them less harmful to the environment?”
The company focuses on technology, robotics, sensors, and AI, to address and reduce climate impact for companies that rely on fossil fuels by making them less polluting.
“In particular, how we do that is ensuring that you don't have tanks leaking oil into the ground or into rivers, reducing the number of forced outages that are occurring at power plants, and thus relying on a higher amount of fuel sources to ensure that energy demands are met,” the CEO said.
“There is a recent third-party study that shows that [if] you can reduce forced outages at fossil fuel and natural gas facilities, you could actually impact global emissions by about 5 per cent by 2030. So what we, in particular, focus a lot on is how do you solve environmental problems today, opposed to building technology that may or may not be useful to the climate in 10 to 15 years. So what we focus on is making the fossil industries less harmful to emissions by preventing forced outages,” Loosararian told Aletihad.
Gecko Robotics became connected with the UAE via the NextGenFDI programme spearheaded by His Excellency Dr. Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, Minister of State for Foreign Trade, where it was selected as one of the programme’s flagship companies.
“His Excellency Dr. Thani has done an incredible job at attracting some of the best companies in the world like Gecko to the region. We have offices in Europe and obviously a lot in the US and in the APEC region, but we really see such an incredible leadership from the Middle East, in particular in the UAE, and some of the neighbouring countries,” Loosararian said.
“We believe very much in the UAE and the partners that we have here, as well as the ministers that are leading the way in climate change.”
Regarding the benefits to developing countries and the Loss and Damages Fund, the Gecko CEO said: “It's such an incredible leadership that we continue to see… here in the UAE and in the region to ensure that available access to infrastructure that is able to support and increase the availability of critical industry resources to developing nations is at the forefront of our mission as well.”
He explained that Gecko’s engagements in developing nations typically involve a lack of access to reliable energy and infrastructure, stifling economic prosperity.
“One of the things that we focus on is ensuring that the most important critical assets, whether it be a power plant or a pipeline, a bridge, dam, or a trade vessel, are going to be reliable and work exactly how countries need them to.”
“So in particular, we have initiatives in some of these countries, and specifically are in talks with what was announced yesterday, about rapidly deploying our technology stack into those regions. I think the initiative should help accelerate that,” Loosararian said, referring to President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s announcement of a $30 billion fund for global climate solutions, designed to bridge the climate finance gap, ensuring availability, accessibility, and affordability at scale.
