Energy, defense and transportation will be hot segments in a softening global economy.
2022 was a busy year engineering, with important firsts recorded in space exploration, commercial aviation and energy. What’s in store for 2023? Engineering.com expects that the far-reaching impact of the war in Ukraine, combined with political pressure to decarbonize will result in acceleration in the shift away from fossil fuels. But in the interim, pipeline and LNG gas supply chains will be developed quickly. Electric vehicles will dominate the ground transportation space again, and with the supply chain crunch easing, EV production rates will ramp significantly in 2023. The delivery of the Tesla semi will shift some attention toward commercial vehicles, with adoption constrained by availability of battery materials and charging infrastructure.
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Episode Transcript:
2022 was a busy year engineering, with important firsts recorded in space exploration, commercial aviation and energy. What’s in store for 2023? Here at engineering.com, we expect energy, defence and transportation to dominate, in an uncertain environment. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has produced some dramatic developments that may change the defense industries, particularly aviation, forever.
Three quarters of a century after the debut of combat drones, the conflict has demonstrated that remote control and autonomous pilotless aircraft can effectively perform reconnaissance and attack roles that have been traditionally reserved for crewed aircraft for over a century. While the technology has been around since World War II, the use of low cost commercially available electronics has solved the problem of high costs in expendable platforms and has created a new challenge for air defence technology: coping with swarms of hundreds or potentially thousands of low cost drones. Missile systems are too expensive to use for this application, and we expect a renewed emphasis in directed energy weapons like lasers to cope with this threat.
The Ukraine war has had another consequence, the disruption of global energy markets. The resulting high costs for fossil fuels, combined with increased emphasis on decarbonization, is boosting the electric vehicle sector, with most manufacturers now offering at least one electric vehicle. Electric commercial vehicles are now widely available worldwide, and with the high-profile delivery of the first Tesla Semi, many experts predict that American fleet operators may be ready for electric trucks on local delivery and line haul routes. With the Biden Administration prepared to subsidize the necessary charging infrastructure as well as lecture vehicle purchases, expect EVs to become mainstream in 2023, with Tesla in particular increasing production while losing market share in a broadening sector.
The European war has also supercharged efforts in that continent to switch to alternate supplies and renewables for baseload energy needs, and from an engineering perspective the shift away from Russian natural gas toward tanker carried LNG plus new pipeline development from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, will mean major development in the energy transportation sectors, including re-gasification infrastructure to handle the LNG. In 2023, fossil fuels will still be very important. High diesel costs may signal the death knell for compression ignition internal combustion engines, at least in light-duty vehicles.
And with the recent announcement of scientific breakeven at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, expect a renewed emphasis on nuclear energy in 2023, although not specifically involving laser ignition forms of fusion. Small modular reactors and the need to keep old fission plants going to backfill the gas shortage in Europe will mean that fission engineering will be hotter than ever in 2023. Both literally and figuratively.
Defense, transportation and energy. Plenty of work for engineers in 2023.