Two years ago, Casey Handmer quit working on GPS science at NASA JPL to start Terraform Industries, a wild idea backed by visionary investors (including Stripe co-founder and CEO) to bolt our growing solar abundance to growing hydrocarbon scarcity.
His plan? To make the world's cheapest green hydrogen, the world's cheapest direct air capture CO2, and cheap natural gas.
This is my conversation with Casey! It's quite long, but I've detailed the timestamps below, Casey elaborated on many important issues, make sure to give them a listen :)
Recorded on Oct 12th.
And mind the two questions about Mars at the end :)
00:00:28: Casey Handmer's background in science and industry and what led him to found Terraform Industries
00:02:30: Why Hyperloop One, which Casey worked on, didn't work as expected
00:04:38: Why "Terraform Industries" as the company name?
00:09:45: Terraform Industries' philosophy
00:13:20: How Terraform Industries is a fundamental bet on cheap solar PV electricity and why it will get ever cheaper for a long time
00:18:08: What the cost of solar PV electricity needs to be for Terraform Industries' green e-methane to start being competitive with fossil methane
00:20:20: What it needs to be for green e-kerosene to be competitive with fossil kerosene, in order to make aviation carbon-neutral
00:21:30: Casey explains how we may even be able to make food thanks to cheap solar, air and water
00:24:00: Can total cumulative solar PV deployment continue to double at current pace (approx. once every 2 years) long enough to have enough capacity to displace all fossil fuels?
00:30:15: Why has Casey been sharing his plans very openly so far?
00:32:50: Casey shares an interesting analogy with the electric car industry
00:36:00: Can Europe compete with China on the EV market? do tariffs help?
00:37:55: How does Terraform industries work? What are the three subsystems of its first product?
00:41:30: Why does Terraform Industries want low-efficiency systems?
00:46:50: What should the be the cost of solar PV electricity for Terraform Industries' green e-methane to start being competitive?
00:49:00: What could be the market size for such machines? And as they're low tech and will be copied, what minimum market share could Terraform Industries hope to retain ultimately?
00:50:30: Does Terraform Industries intend more on selling the machines or operating the machines and selling green e-hydrocarbons?
00:53:25: Is what Terraform Industries is doing easier than coming up with and industrializing the Haber-Bosch process? (that helps fix nitrogen as ammonia from the air and make fertilizer, letting us feed billions more than if we didn't have it otherwise)
00:58:35: Hear Casey say which percentage of solar arrays, easily, will be used to make synthetic fuel 10 years from now, shocking!
00:58:52: What's the status right now for Terraform Industries? What are the next milestones?
01:01:28: What risks is Terraform Industries facing?
01:04:50: What about methane leaks? Especially as Casey Handmer expects world methane consumption to go up as methane gets cheaper and carbon-neutral
01:07:20: As Terraform Industries actually makes green hydrogen (before reacting it with captured CO2 to make methane CH4), why not stop there and provide hydrogen to the "hydrogen economy" that people see about to boom? For industrial heat, aviation, shipping etc.
01:13:20: Why is Casey Handmer fascinated with airships?
01:19:38: What about nuclear fusion? Could it help do without solar plants? (Helion talks about 1MW fusion plant the size of a container as opposed to 5-10 acres for a 1MW solar PV plant)
01:28:00: Why does Casey Handmer think that ultimately most of solar PV electricity will be used to synthesize green hydrocarbons for aviation (which will hence boom) as opposed to every other use combined.
01:37:00: Can Starhip be a thing when it comes to point-to-point transport on Earth?
01:39:55: Why taxing carbon doesn't work
01:44:00: Why current carbon capture and storage approaches can't scale to any meaningful scale
01:46:20: How does AI progress impact what Terraform Industries is doing? What would AGI do?
01:49:05: Will what Terraform Industries is doing be commoditized? Making it hard to find investors?
01:52:35: Stratospheric Aerosol Injection : one of the two other important things we need to be doing to fix the climate crisis (beyond making all we do carbon-neutral for the atmosphere)
01:57:10: The other thing, "enhanced weathering", the best way to remove legacy CO2 from the atmosphere (possibly at $20/ton of CO2)
02:00:10: Casey Handmer's spiciest takes on energy (why batteries will ultimately bankrupt most long power lines, and also why it won't make sense to build more fission reactors)
02:08:48: What about the interseasonal intermittency problem with solar PV?
02:11:23: Hear Casey say why in the long term even methane pipelines will struggle to operate profitably as methane will be synthesized locally, even in temperate latitudes
02:19:30: Sending humans to Mars means bringing with us our microbes. As Mars could be habitable and inhabited by local microbes, even near the surface, we could ending confusing our search for life there, as Earth and potential Mars life may be related. Isn't that a reason to hold on for now and just send our robots which present much less of a risk?
02:24:24: We make all these plans to settle Mars, but what if Mars gravity is a non-starter for humans? Shouldn't the first thing be for us to build ae a space station that can be spun to recreate Mars gravity so as to test its effect on us, before anything else?
02:28:50: What surprised Casey the most moving from Australia to the US. About California and Texas.
02:32:00: Books recommended by Casey (see below for references)
02:32:45: About Elon Musk
Casey Handmer's blog articles we discussed (highly recommended):
Terraform Industries Whitepaper 2.0 (Jan 2023)
My explainer: Green, On-Demand, Abundant Energy by 2050 is Definitely Possible: Here's the Plan with the direct link to section 2 focussing on what Terraform Industries is doing
Discussed in the conversation:
The Leuna factory in Germany, built by BASF in 1916, that Casey visited and mentioned at 00:54:40
The Zeppelin Hidenburg scene in Indiana Jones and the last crusade (1989)
See on Google Earth an open quarry by the sea, south east of Santa Catalina Island, opposite Los Angeles, mentioned when discussing enhanced weathering as the best solution to scrub the atmosphere of legacy CO2.
Recommanded Books:
Pieces of the Action, by Vannevar Bush (1970)
The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, by Thomas Hager (2009)
Useful resources
About the podcast host Thomas Jestin
I'm the editor of the Future Weekly newsletter: my personal selection of news about some of the most exciting (and sometimes scary) developments in technology summarized as bullet points to help you save time and anticipate the future.
Contact me: futureweekly2050@substack.com
Conversation with Casey Handmer: how Terraform Industries will make the world carbon neutral