March 29, 2024


Casey Handmer wasn’t intimidated by the very large numbers. trillion acres. Thousands of gigawatts of solar power. billion metric tons of carbon.

his start-up company, Terraform Industrial, designed to operate at these ambitious scales. The company hopes to convert hydrogen and atmospheric carbon into synthetic natural gas at scale. That’s a bit unbelievable, considering the startup is less than two years old, has fewer than 15 employees, and about $11 million in funding. But if the company succeeds in its goal — to replace the vast amounts of carbon released into the atmosphere — it’s the only scale worth operating at.

Terraform Industries has developed a system that captures carbon dioxide (CO2) to make hydrogen from air, all using cheap solar energy. The system, called Terraformer, then combines hydrogen and CO2 Enters the chemical reactor to make natural gas. According to Handmer, the chemical reactor has achieved 94 percent methane purity, which means it is making synthetic natural gas fully compatible with existing distribution pipelines.

Hydrogen and carbon have been combined in various ways before to make synthetic fuels. Historically, such processes have used coal as a carbon input — hardly a carbon-neutral substance. More recently, projects such as Store&Go in Europe have enabled systems to convert atmospheric carbon into synthetic gas, but Handmer says the group has failed to deliver positive economics. Other initiatives have succeeded in producing what is sometimes called “green methane,” but they have been practically limited by the enormous energy demands of such processes and the high upfront capital costs of large industrial projects.

Terraform Industries’ approach is different: Unlike the physically bulky systems of today’s power plants, a single Terraformer is designed to fit in a shipping container. The company is betting that rapidly falling solar costs, along with market subsidies, will create favorable unit economics compared with existing fossil fuel production. Soon, Handmer estimates, it will be cheaper to synthesize natural gas from the sun than to extract it from the ground.

The company’s goals are best seen as “projects for the earth” rather than plans for the moon. “Terraform” is one of the most commonly used words in science fiction to describe the process of greening an alien planet — making it suitable for life. Here’s one way to understand Terraform Industries’ mission: to turn the Earth back into itself.

Handmer, who has a Ph.D. from Caltech, said he became interested in synthetic fuels while working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At some point, he said, he realized that natural gas “maybe the best opportunity we (have) in my lifetime to do something about climate change.”

“I might as well keep letting it happen.”

earth shatter

Terraformer is a simple machine. It consists of three subsystems: one for removing CO2 Extracted from the air using direct air capture; an electrolyzer that produces cheap hydrogen from water; and a chemical reactor, sometimes called a methanation reactor, to make natural gas. All components are designed in-house and all three use solar power. The result is a natural gas product that is fully compatible with systems that use natural gas, such as gas stoves, or can be used as a raw material for the manufacture of plastics, chemicals, fertilizers, paints or fuels.

“It’s completely replaceable,” Handmer explained. “It doesn’t require any opportunities, modifications, new pipelines, new infrastructure.”

It is not the system that is complex. In this case, it’s the business plan. In order to replace a large amount of CO2 To extract and produce enough natural gas from the atmosphere to start replacing fossil fuels extracted from the ground in large quantities, companies will need many, many, many Terraformer.

How many?according to a recent white paper, the company estimates it will need to build 8,000 factories to scale production of Terraformer machines to more than 1 million units per month within the next decade. But it doesn’t end there. “Our civilization will require 30 to 400 million machines, manufactured at a rate of about 60 million per year, which is comparable in quantity, quality and capital flow (fortunately, but uncomplicated!) to the global auto industry,” the white paper explain.

The process is also very energy-intensive — “the energy requirements are astronomical,” the company wrote in a note blog post – So just building Terraformers is not enough. There will also be an incredible need for solar construction around the world. Based on current estimates, Terraform believes humanity will need to increase the annual production of solar panels by around 1,000 times. The white paper suggests that if production continues to grow at the current rate – doubling approximately every 33 months – we will reach this rate in 20-30 years. That much solar power would require about 2 trillion acres of land.

“890 percent of the electricity on Earth will be used for synthetic fuels,” Handmer said. “It’s crazy. Right now, it sounds crazy, but it’s possible.”

Terraform Industries isn’t selling natural gas, it’s selling Terraformers. Handmer expects most of the company’s customers to be solar developers, who he said could commercialize the end product to natural gas buyers. Natural gas can be put directly into a pipeline or onto a truck. In part because of Terraformer’s revenue-generating potential, Handmer believes there will be enough solar capacity. Far from not having enough solar capacity, he estimates that Terraformers will increase solar demand by a factor of about 10. Ultimately, the company hopes to generate enough demand to mass-produce Terraformers—enough to build 50-100 gigatonnes of carbon capture capacity around the world. The idea, in terms of incentivizing solar capacity, is to effectively upend the current system: instead of burning hydrocarbons to generate electricity, it uses electricity to make hydrocarbons.

Combating climate change by producing hydrocarbons is somewhat counterintuitive—and an active distaste for some climate activists proposing humanity’s continued pursuit of hydrocarbons—but Handmer insists that CO2 There is no “moral value”.

“CO is not inherently wrong2,’ he said. “Countries that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide2, generally speaking, the quality of life is good, the poverty rate is low, and the economy is developing well. The problem is CO2 The carbon from the subsurface is now in the atmosphere, and it’s a fairly slow process for life to take carbon from the atmosphere back into the subsurface and back into the subsurface. This imbalance is contributing to climate change. “

The company’s “success condition” is to reduce the flow of purified stone carbon to 10 times the current level. As the white paper puts it, “a decade or so of crazy work on a massive scale has replaced fossil carbon production forever.”

So far, the company has agreements with California utilities SoCalGas and PG&E to sell the syngas into their distribution systems. The company said it has also “engaged with a number of other utilities in the U.S. and Europe, as well as various companies in the oil and gas industry, about potential pilot projects.” and a seed round extension raising about $11 million from investors including Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison. Closed a $6 million seed expansion round last month.

The company has a long — very, very, very long way to go before it can realize its full vision. Handmer is nothing without determination.

“I think, like all startups, my background is one of ignorance and hope triumphing over harsh experiences,” Handmer said. “Very, very few startups are started by people who really fully understand the difficulty, the level of persistence, and just keep trying to keep it up as required.”