Casey Handmer: Terraform Industries and a carbon-neutral future - #57

Casey Handmer (PhD, Caltech, general relativity) is the founder of Terraform Industries. He is one of the most capable and ambitious geo-engineers on planet Earth!
Terraform Industries is scaling technology to produce cheap natural gas with sunlight and air. Using solar energy, they extract carbon from the air and synthesize natural gas, all at the same site.
March 2024: "Terraform completes the end to end demo, successfully producing fossil carbon free pipeline grade natural gas from sunlight and air. We also achieved green hydrogen at $2.50/kg-H2 and DAC CO2 at $250/T-CO2, two incredible milestones."
Links:
Casey Handmer’s website: www.caseyhandmer.com/
Terraform Industries: terraformindustries.com/
Nerds on Patrol [Episode 3] - Terraform Industries: • Nerds on Patrol [Episo...
Steve and Casey discuss:
0:00 Introduction
00:31 Casey's early life and background, from Australia to Caltech
07:55 The academic path and transition to tech entrepreneurship
10:40 Terraform Industries
15:21 Solar costs, efficiency, and global Impact
24:25 A world powered by Terraform methane
31:27 The entrepreneurial journey: challenges and insights
35:01 Investor dynamics and strategic decisions for Terraform
41:28 The hard Reality of manufacturing and innovation
44:11 Navigating intellectual property and strategic partnerships
45:49 The moral and technical challenges of carbon neutrality
55:48 Looking ahead: Terraform's next milestones and the solar revolution
Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.
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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai., SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU.
Please send any questions or suggestions to [e-mail] or Steve on X @hsu_steve.

[@Renvoxan]

Casey is the GOAT

[@michaelkogan9181]

Make death valley into a massive desalination, hydro generation and pumped hydro storage facility 🫡 Paired with massive solar array, that's terawatt hours worth of energy generation and storage capacity. Also solved water problems at the same time 🤘

[@225asap]

This was very inspiring to listen to. Mans is self made

[@michaelcorey9890]

Really enjoyed the interview. I do have my doubts as to solar, heat pumps etc up here in Alberta. We have such plentifup cheap natural gas and get temperatures that drop to -40c /-40f several times in the winter. Warmer climates I can see it; our road up here is going to be a long one if we go Green while maintaining our standard of living.

[@michaelcorey9890]

He sounded very rational until about 54:00

[@ldm3027]

this is the dumbest scheme imaginable - the conversion efficiency from solar PV to methane (not natural gas) is ~ 25% and that is before the methane is burnt. so the overall process efficiency is just Terrable. It relies on subsidy that will not scale with the tech, which is a fatal flaw. overall a waste of money and effort

[@presidentbarbicane]

This guy's ideas are very interesting, but he has almost no contact with reality. There's no way this will be profitable in a year (unless he has some other product besides methane that he hasn't talked about... Maybe selling the oxygen? doesn't sound very profitable). He's a long way from producing anything useful. It's basically a big science fair project. The fact that he has any investors at all makes me think there's a green technology bubble.