Building Giga Scale To Last Forever

One projection has it that megaprojects (in excess of $1 billion) will constitute 24 percent (up from 8 percent) of global GDP by 2027, by building global infrastructure, space industries, ocean industries, bridge-tunnel projects, extreme physics challenges (terraforming, mass energy storage) or controlling extreme weather (Frey, 2017). Going forward, it is not inconceivable that many future giga-projects (in excess of $10 billion) will deal with upgrading infrastructure to meet the challenges of climate change, or indeed will be climate adaptation projects. One of the largest ongoing projects, China’s South-North Water Transfer Scheme was projected to cost $62B with planned completion in 2050 (WaterTechnologyNet, 2003). It has already cost more than that (Fessenden, 2014). That project is not without its critics and has not solved China’s water problems (Akhtar, 2022). It has, however, displaced millions of people, and caused massive land use disputes. Infrastructure is politics. Gigaprojects typically also cause significant loss of life at some stage.

Reducing Risks By Going Modular

To fix many of these cost and risk issues, it would be necessary to make the projects more modular (Flyvbjerg, 2021). I would add that any gigaproject should really be discussed in the United Nations and should not merely be a national concern. There are more than 1,400 semiconductor chip fabs worldwide (SEMI, 2022). Yet, the world has a shortage of advanced microchips. The challenge is that high end semiconductor chip fabs cost between $10 billion and $20 billion (Farshchi, 2022). The world has two world-class ones, one in Taiwan (TSMC) and one in South Korea (Samsung). Three more are being built in the US. Intel
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is building in Ohio and TSMC is building in Arizona. Samsung is planning to build in Texas (Farshchi, 2022). The EU has earmarked money for chipfabs as well (Amaro, 2022). Africa is also in the race. There is a small-scale chip fab in Kenya but with inferior technology (Wanjala, 2021). Building chip fabs in local markets will decrease supply chain costs but will increase salary and production costs. Such fabs have a huge carbon footprint. TSMC uses 5 percent of Taiwan’s electricity and 63M tons of water, has a polluting production process, and produces massive amounts of waste (Belton, 2021). On the plus side, advanced giga-factories bring with them associated benefits for local talent, local manufacturing supply chains, as well as spillover effects from the technology and innovation involved. There is obviously also a national security aspect. Chipfabs are part of most advanced regions’ future.

Nuclear Infrastructure Must Last Forever

There are 450 nuclear plants today spread in 30 countries (WorldNuclear, 2022). Those facilities require monitoring for thousands of years. As nuclear energy increasingly becomes a part of the energy mix, what guarantees do we have for the long-term regenerative effects? It doesn’t help much that newer facilities are small-scale and modular if we cannot guarantee long term governance of those 30 countries (and counting) and have protection against natural disasters as well as war damage. Perhaps the regulatory process needs to look at that? Or, better, we need to address the root causes that make countries unstable. With instability comes risk. Too much risk in the case of nuclear energy.

Are Giga Benefits Just Greenwashing?

Which other industrial areas need such investments? Northvolt’s battery gigafactory in Sweden. Tesla’s
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gigafactory in Texas will run 100 percent on renewable energy. Elon Musk claims 100 Tesla Gigafactories could “power the entire world” (Gohd, 2017). The $500 billion Saudi giga-project NEOM is another. A futuristic smart city with an area larger than Israel, would feature miles-long buildings. But is it, so far in the process, also greenwashing? (Thomas and Venema, 2022). For sure, NEOM would have to rely on AI, vertical farming, water production (smart irrigation, leak detection, desalination), green hydrogen, wind energy, cooling systems, and a host of other technology breakthroughs (Burbano, 2022). The project is also caught in the MENA-region’s aging metaverse hype which is dying down elsewhere (El Yaakoubi, 2022). NEOM would have to face unprecedented manufacturing scale-up challenges and skyrocketing running costs. The NEOM area is also earthquake prone (Al Saud, 2020). This will not be an easy project to undertake.

Giga Space Tech

Space tech is a big contributor to giga-infrastructure. The International Space Station (ISS) and its future replacements, as well as the future settlements on the Moon and on Mars also come to mind. In the case of space, “giga” is often the only scale possible due to the cost and constraints of the space environment. Feeding the Mars outpost with cyanobacteria is one strategy (Verseux et al., 2016) but more holistic approaches will be needed. NASA’s description of its strategy so far lends me to believe a traditional industrial extraction strategy still will shape the early exploration of Mars (Warner, 2020). Worst case, the materials used, apart from Mars specific materials, will be some version of the extractive materials concrete and steel. Let’s instead use the Mars experience to transform materials chemistry both in space and on Earth (Savage, 2018).

Space might be the ultimate frontier, but it is also a space where we, from a humanity governance perspective would want to avoid both no regulation or overregulation. The stakes are high, despite the vast space available, mistakes could be costly, both immediately and ultimately. Asteroid mining is fascinating, but using telescopes to keep Earth safe makes a lot of sense, too. The use cases of space tech and, eventually, space manufacturing, might become many, and it’s hard to envision exactly when which of them will come into play.

This is an abridged excerpt (with permission from the publisher) from a recently published book written by Trond Undheim, entitled Eco Tech: Investing in Regenerative Futures (Routledge, 2023).