One striking number in GE’s third quarter results released today is the size of the company’s record backlog. It stands at $229 billion dollars, up $6 billion from the second quarter. “We have the biggest backlog in the company’s history,” GE Chairman and CEO told Barron’s recently.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
The history of Marshall in East Texas is rich with transportation lore. Several major stagecoach lines stopped there in the 1840s. The crucial Texas & Pacific Railway line originated in Marshall, tied it to major American cities and earned the town its Gateway to Texas sobriquet. But Marshall is still breaking new ground. Last fall the city opened a next-generation compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling station. The system, which was developed by GE, is the first node in a CNG network that could revolutionize transportation and travel, and set the U.S. on a road to energy independence.
Hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—has unlocked vast amounts of oil and natural gas from shale rock in the United States, and has the potential to do the same around the globe (see “Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map”). But fracking also consumes huge quantities of water, which it contaminates with a heady mix of toxic chemicals, a problem that threatens to slow this expansion.
GE says it has a technology that could help—an energy-efficient process that could cut the cost of water treatment in half. The technology could also decrease the chances of toxic waste spills.
A recent study by the consulting firm Booz & Co. found that the number of women in Saudi labor force tripled between 1992 and 2007. That’s progress, but women still make up less than 15 percent of the kingdom’s economically active population of 8.2 million. (In the United States that number is nearly 47 percent.) The Booz authors wrote that women represent “an enormous source of untapped potential for the kingdom, whose labor force currently relies on expatriates.”
GENERAL ELECTRIC will be stepping up its presence in Saudi Arabia’s healthcare, energy and innovation sectors. Saudi Arabia has been a GE partner and customer since 1942, when GE supplied the kingdom with refinery equipment for the processing of newly discovered crude oil. The partnership has since expanded into cancer screening and diagnostics, drinking water, power and aviation, and other business areas. For example, some 500 GE gas turbines, many manufactured by GE’s U.S. workers, are supplying Saudi Arabia with more than half its electricity. GE will invest $1 billion in the kingdom’s booming economy.
