Terraform Industries
@TerraformIndies
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We make cheap natural gas from sunlight and air
Los Angeles, CA
Joined July 2021
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Announcing first end-to-end production of pipeline grade natural gas from sunlight and air.
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We made methane today. It wasn't very exciting. We knew the machine would work, we turned it on and it worked.
This must be how SpaceX feels when it lands yet another rocket. Wow, such suspense!
And yet... Another step toward limitless carbon neutral oil and gas.
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Product announcement is now live:
This is how we complete the industrial revolution.
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Here's a blog with more details:
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Congratulations to the reactor team for reaching operational status!
We can now convert H2 and CO2 directly into natural gas. Look at that fat yellow flame!
Now to copy+paste a few million of these...
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Let's talk about how cheap electricity changes our economy in the future.
#SpeculativeFuturism
We've already established that solar is on a trajectory to make electricity the cheapest energy we've ever had, but what does it mean?
What is going to change?
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Here are two sample containers. Fossil carbon free, made in the USA.
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This agreement is a huge credit to the Terraform team, 15 farsighted visionaries who bring future knowledge into the present.
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We have also made tremendous progress towards transformatively cheap green hydrogen (<$2.50/kg) and DAC CO2 (<$250/T). We think we can cut these in half again without any miracles.
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We are hiring, we have open positions on our website. The single most important attribute you must have is evidence of execution capacity.
No-one has the time to tell you what to do, you are expected to be able to intuitively understand and rapidly, automatically execute the
We made methane today. It wasn't very exciting. We knew the machine would work, we turned it on and it worked.
This must be how SpaceX feels when it lands yet another rocket. Wow, such suspense!
And yet... Another step toward limitless carbon neutral oil and gas.
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It's hard to believe but in a year we've filled this enormous bay with tools and machinery.
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There's a problem facing the climate industry.
For every deep tech hardware startup trying to solve energy, fuel, fusion, batteries, manufacturing, there are about 10 software-only web3/Blockchain/database saas carbon markets, and about 100 pre-seed small check climate funds.
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Funny you should mention that...
The 'in-situ resource utilization' technology Starship needs to get off Mars involves autonomous factories that can create limitless methane from just carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight. Forget Mars; anyone who got it working on Earth would be a trillionaire.
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We'll be speaking next Wednesday at
#CERAWeek
about cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air.
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We just received our first ever consignment of solar panels. We're going to use these to show that direct coupling of PV cells and electrolysis cells is not only possible, it's natural. Our unique approach reduces cost and complexity, savings we pass on to our customers.
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Terraform Industries is pleased to announce we have raised a $5m seed round from
@natfriedman
and
@patrickc
to profitably deliver industrial scale atmospheric hydrocarbon synthesis and drive down net flux of crustal carbon into the atmosphere.
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We're excited for the today's design review for the Gen 3 Sabatier reactor!
Our reactor converts CO2 and H2 into CH4, sustainable cheap carbon neutral natural gas.
Critically, it is also cheap and easy to manufacture!
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Terraform Industries is raising Series A.
Why?
We believe humanity should survive climate change. Our civilization is dependent on fossil hydrocarbons. If we don't use them, we starve. If we do, we will melt the icecaps and drown our cities and farms, and starve.
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Terraform Industries is hiring! We've opened up three Mechanical Engineer roles covering a range of experience levels, in addition to open roles for a Senior Electrical Design Engineer and skilled Mechanical Technicians.
At Terraform, we're making cheap natural gas from sunlight
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Two years ago
@CJHandmer
quit working on GPS science at NASA JPL to start Terraform Industries, a wild idea backed by visionary investors (
@patrickc
@collision
@natfriedman
@danielgross
) to bolt our growing solar abundance to growing hydrocarbon scarcity.
Today we're 15 people
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How Terraform navigated the idea maze!
We want to increase the supply of cheap, energy intensive materials that are foundational to our civilization.
The most polluting industries are coal, oil, natural gas, concrete, and steel.
Product must compete on cost.
Go to cheapest
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How to produce green hydrogen for $1/kg.
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Stoicism teaches us to distinguish between what we can control and to accept things we cannot change.
The problem is that mining stars is clearly not forbidden by the laws of physics.
On a long enough time line, the set of things we cannot yet do will shrink to nothing.
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Congratulations to
@lucie_nurdin
and Arun Johnson for successfully activating our Gen 2 Sabatier reactor! It converts hydrogen and CO2 into natural gas.
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How Terraformers deliver copious cheap energy and help the environment.
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☀️☀️➡️🪟🪟🪟🪟➡️⛽️
Take the cheapest, most abundant energy there is. Capture carbon from the atmosphere, convert it to fuel. Displace drilling, leave carbon in the deep crust. Solve energy insecurity. Make fuel cheaper, clean, green. Build supersonic passenger planes.
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Solar is more useful than you might think. Solar people are probably accustomed to looking at maps like this. (Here's a cool online one: )
This map appears to show that hot sunny deserts have solar power, and the rest of the world is marginal. Not true!
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By far the craziest thing is that if power is cheap enough, the best way to get new raw materials is by recycling waste streams, not by separating plastic, metal, and paper, but by converting the stream to plasma and sorting it atom by atom with a gigantic mass spectrometer.
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Learn our super secret plan to produce infinite carbon-neutral fuel!
Hydrocarbons are good, actually.
Especially when
@CJHandmer
can conjure them out of thin air (+ water).
Here's how Terraform Industries approaches gigascale atmospheric hydrocarbon synthesis:
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If all we do is increase hydrocarbon supply so every man, woman, and child on Earth can enjoy the freedom and privilege of US levels of energy consumption at US prices, we will double the size of the global economy. By 2042.
But that is just the beginning.
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It is hard to convey how exciting our work is. Just yesterday two engineering colleagues and I spent 3 hours double checking numbers in a giant spreadsheet. It appears we are still not crazy. This is going to work.
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Today Terraform Industries is one year old! 🎂
We've come a long way. Funding, team, facility, first CO2, first H2, first CH4, first sales agreement.
We have a long road ahead of us. First integrated system, first revenue, first production facility, first factory.
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We're going to need a lot of solar panels!
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We're here to put rocks out of business. Ending the stone age. Limitless cheap energy from sunlight and air.
Since 1973, energy scarcity has driven stagnation—but now “expanding growth of solar is putting our civilization permanently back on track to increased productivity, longevity, prosperity, and happiness”
Radical Energy Abundance, by
@CJHandmer
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Today we completed a 1:200 model of a 1 MW synthetic gas production unit. It's mostly solar with our modular chemical plant taking the place of the usual inverter.
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At around $10/MWh, which is imminent, it will be cheaper to synthesize hydrocarbons from CO2 and water than to bother drilling them out of the ground. We're working on that!
Unlimited local production of arbitrary HC fractions changes a lot, but there's more.
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New whitepaper.
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This is our gas chromatograph. It is an electronic nose that can determine precisely which gases and other chemicals are in a sample.
With methane synthesis it is absolutely essential to know if we're hitting design specs. Lots of gases burn without being useful.
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Lots of exciting technical progress at Terraform! Here's a video of a recent electrolyzer test article splitting lots of water.
Our ultra-low capex electrolyzer is matched to intermittent ultra-low cost solar PV electricity to produce the cheapest possible green hydrogen.
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I think people generally underestimate how much solar power will continue to change as the tech develops.
Leading indicators such as polysilicon production set to quadruple in the next 3-4 years, crossing 1 TW/year and still gaining steam.
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Happy New Year from Terraform Industries. In 2022, we captured CO2, generated hydrogen, and synthesized methane. In 2023, we put them all together at scale.
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Assemble nucleons. Build the Venusian orbital. Defeat death. Build machines for ever deeper thought. Increment Kardashev index. Touch grass.
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What's it like to work at Terraform?
Here's a unicycle steadycam view of our main office/fabrication space. We've got electrolyzers by
@risknc
, CO2 capture by
@RyanOkerson
, and methanation chemical reactors by
@lucie_nurdin
. Fabrication tools. 2 MW of electricity. 35,000 sqft.
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Despite literally every graph ever showing renewables getting cheap faster and faster, I only ever get asked "What if solar is too expensive?" And never "What if solar gets too cheap?"
Only one of these questions keeps me up at night.
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Visiting the Leuna chemical plant near Leipzig today. This is where Haber Bosch was first commercialized, a harbinger of a future of radical abundance where our wealth comes not from minerals but from the unlimited sky.
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Solar is getting cheaper at an accelerating rate.
This fact is not widely known or understood.
Let's talk about why.
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It is hard to overstate the economic impacts of cheap solar power. We're using it to generate a torrent of cheap fuel that happens to be carbon neutral, but we expect to see numerous parallel industries spring up. In addition to DAC->hydrocarbons, what will we see?
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Proud to announce we're one of the 111 recipients under this program, which will help us validate life cycle analysis of our technology, making our innovations more legible to customers and governments.
We just announced the new $27.5M Voucher Program in which
@ENERGY
's new partner, ENERGYWERX, will help businesses and other organizations access the services they need to further their energy technology.
#DOE
#EnergyInnovation
#CleanEnergy
Learn more:
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Lots of activity at Terraform as we put together next gen electrolyzer and direct air carbon capture prototypes. Our unique design and approach enables twin holy grails in climate tech: <$1/kg green hydrogen and <$100/T pure CO2 from the atmosphere.
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Since about 1973 oil has been scarce. For 50 years our civilization has found growth in computation and services, and now we are going back to energy intensity.
Unconditional open-ended energy abundance changes everything. A new industrial revolution, and the biggest yet.
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Not making a decision is still enforcing a version of reality. Our civilizational default is emitting 100 million tonnes of CO2 per DAY.
We can choose to not even run experiments on solar geoengineering or ocean iron fertilization or enhanced weathering, and that is a choice.
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Filling the kiln with 1200 lbs of carbonate for the first flow test.
It's a vacuum but we prefer the more refined term "pneumatic transport".
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If you think solar is growing and decosting quickly now, wait until it unlocks serving hydrocarbon demand.
If, like me, you toss and turn of an evening wondering what the solar PV cost curve fit would look like if it was weighted by production, wonder no more.
It doesn't make much sense to equally weight production of a few MW of solar in the 1970s, given that the major cost drivers
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Think about it this way. If you wanted to bet on solar power getting really cheap, what would you do?
Develop a really power intensive industry with fast scaling and low capital costs that can transform the energy into some other form to be dumped into a bottomless market.
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Jigar is right. We need to gradually move towards supersonic VTOL personal jets.
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Over the last 18 months, we've developed some heuristics to help us assess our progress and the general capability of any system or set of systems that can address the climate crisis. Read on!
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Looks like cost parity for our process may come quicker than I thought. Looking into ways to accelerate market entry. Come work with us!
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We're hiring! Are you an innovative, ambitious, technically minded maker who loves to execute, wants to work on fixing the industrial revolution, and likes working in castles? We're looking to grow our team on electrolyzer, reactor, DAC, and business.
Lots of exciting technical progress at Terraform! Here's a video of a recent electrolyzer test article splitting lots of water.
Our ultra-low capex electrolyzer is matched to intermittent ultra-low cost solar PV electricity to produce the cheapest possible green hydrogen.
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Unexpected job candidate walked in this afternoon. Said they were nuts about engineering. I said we liked acorny joke.
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New thread documenting solar price decreases.
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Total weight: 2T. Deployment time: 10 minutes, fully automated. Total cost: <$10k. Power cost: <$1/MWh, 20x cheaper than today.
We won't get there overnight but this vision is physically possible and manufacturable - early versions already exist.
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There's almost 1g of CO2 in every cubic meter of air, just sitting there. You have to drill through lots of very hard rock to get to oil and gas. It's time to make atmospheric carbon the preferred source.
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Cheap fuel = lowering poverty. Carbon-neutral synthetic fuel removes moral ambiguity on economic development and fuel use. Aggressive poverty reduction accelerates CO2 sequestration, so cheap solar aligns these incentives.
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One of our favorite charts, also a poster in the office, shows photovoltaic power potential. Sunny places are good - no surprise there. But the green areas are less than 2x worse than Death Valley.
Current solar cost improvements will cover that gap in only 6 years.
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Key takeaways for us:
- can make CH4 from CO2 and H2O (as we will on Mars)
- CH4 better transport fuel than H2
- Green heat for industry
- 30 TW of solar is not a scary number
- batteries are hard for ships and planes
- transition significant source of economic advantage
We believe a sustainable energy economy can be achieved with the following changes—led by both Tesla & other companies
- Replacing the existing fleet of combustion vehicles on the road with EVs
- Using heat pumps in homes/businesses & industry
- Implementing high-temp heat
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We don't always load our reactor, but when we do, it's solarpunk af.
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This is a thread of fun, counter-intuitive ideas we've encountered while working out how to build out a synthetic hydrocarbon supply chain on Earth.
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Terraform Industries is breaking electrolyser learning curves, and in a right direction. Join us! We can build a better future, together.
The exponential cost decrease in electrolyzer technology is proof that once again, when it matters, human ingenuity comes through.
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Here's a fun show talking about synthetic fuels and energy.
Check our latest ep with
@CJHandmer
, one of our most DER-pilled guests ever. Will the grid go the way of the railroad lines as DERs take over like he says?
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In the sunniest places with the most expensive oil/gas, solar is now cheap enough that chemically synthesizing gas from air and sunlight is marginally cheaper than importing it.
Good for those places, but in 5 years, that will be true most places, and by a good margin.
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Welcome to Shefali and Jasmin, the first two summer interns!
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Our industry underestimates the vital importance of low capex machines for solving the climate crisis. Whether CCS, DAC, or synfuels, all need to find ongoing exceptional growth to have a hope of making a dent.
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We're turning atmospheric CO2 into CH4, or natural gas. Isn't the problem that we have too much hydrocarbon fuel?
CO2 emissions alone are a good proxy for wealth and economic activity. Lower oil prices are good for poverty.
The problem is carbon escaping the crust.
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All four of our summer interns are here at last! Welcome Jasmin, Shefali, Ava, Swetha!
A couple of sneaky Sabatier reactors visible in the background too.
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Blog post coming soon on where we see the trajectory of solar production and costs going.
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Check out this recent interview with
@weareclimatenow
about how we can increase energy consumption to solve the climate challenge!
🎧🎙️ NEW EPISODE!
Hydrocarbons are important to modern society, so how can we ensure that they do not become our downfall?
We chat with
@CJHandmer
of
@TerraformIndies
, a startup combining solar with direct air capture to produce synthetic hydrocarbons
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Congrats to our MechE Graham for completing the first successful traverse of the break room as part of our extreme hangboarding training regime.
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What does solar look like in the limit?
Something like a sheet of black polypropylene plastic rolled out along the ground and staked down at regular intervals to stop it blowing away. At 100 um thickness, 1 MW can fit on a pickup truck, and deploy in minutes.
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It was fun to show off our machinery! It wasn't that long ago but it feels like it - we're several generations further advanced already.
Thanks so much to
@CJHandmer
,
@lucie_nurdin
, and the rest of the
@TerraformIndies
team for having us! I learned so much! Everyone check out the awesome sauce they are working on!
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Terraform is pioneering the tech that will enable humanity to quickly step beyond fossil carbon forever. As a side benefit we'll also generate substantial flows of oxygen and liquid water, electricity and purified air. Probably enough lime to run the cement industry too.
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It's better than nothing but the successful companies that can actually move the needle at gigaton-CO2 scale will consume >~ $100m before turning a profit. Tesla consumed many billions.
I don't know if the answer is hardware boot camps for SE founders, that seems a bit radical.
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We will use more electricity for more things. We will expect to see solar+batteries rapidly take over primary electricity generation both behind the meter and on the grid. This will favor local generation over grid development, with improvements in resiliency.
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Pay attention to the scale bar at the bottom. The range of solar PV potential in places where most people live () varies by less than a factor of 2.
When it comes to energy availability, we can work with a factor of 2!
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Terraform Industries is hiring! We need more people with skills in mechanical and electrical engineering, chemistry, data science, and business functions. Send your one-pager to hiring
@terraformindustries
.com and help us displace fossil fuel production.
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Writing a grant application I had to write a couple of pages on why our team can do a thing, and am thereby forced to reflect on the fact that every day I get to come and work with a football team of badasses.
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Saudi Arabia and Texas have a lot of oil. If your country had only half as much oil as Saudi Arabia, that would still be a lot of oil!
We know why solar capacity is relatively uniform wherever people live. People need to eat food and most cities are built where plants grow.
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Cheap solar + DAC = backwards compatible natural gas, cheaper, cleaner, and aligned with universal prosperity.
No alien technology, no unobtainium, no 50 year ROI.
Just a fuel machine that is more lucrative for frackers than drilling a hole.
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Back to cheap electricity. Electricity is high grade energy because it can readily be converted to heat or mechanical force, both of which are useful in mining. We'll see microwave-enhanced autonomous tunnel boring machines with integrated mineral processing. Zero impact mining!
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A beautiful fall day in LA after rain, crisp, I can see mountains all around the basin.
Our machines will filter and de-smog 350 million cubic feet per second (~250 km^3/day), so our sky can be crisp every day.
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This report is on the right track. The IRA *significantly* decreases the number and timing sensitivity of minor miracles needed for solar synthetic fuel to swiftly prevail.
By our numbers, we will be profitable even in the pre-production, prototyping phase.
A new report from
@CreditSuisse
says the
#InflationReductionAct
is an even bigger deal for the U.S. economy than Congress (or CBO) thinks, and is likely to spur explosive growth in American clean energy industries.
@robinsonmeyer
has the details
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I ran the numbers today on ramping synthetic natural gas to the whole world. I can safely say at this point that with only 10% cost decreases per year we'll be done by the 2040s, and that solar PV manufacturers will be unable to saturate demand no matter how hard they try.
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