Terraform Industries, run by Casey Handmer, writes about making natural gas from sunlight and air with solar power and direct carbon capture.
HN commenters hope the company succeeds, calling it the best plan they know for CO2, and link its whitepaper and data center post.
"Incredibly brave post from Peter about the insane regulatory friction our society must endure and which is directly responsible for the premature deaths of the startups attempting to build wealth for our future, as well as millions of people whose emancipation from (inter alia) air pollution is delayed for decades by the same regulations that were intended to drive improvement of the environment.
Peter is brave because, descriptively, the regulatory state functions collectively as a cartel with a monopoly on the veto and can apply it essentially at will with no real accountability. If one of the thousands of officials Peter's companies work with takes a dim view of this post, they could quietly and anonymously kill the company by shadow banning progression of any of hundreds of strands of regulatory approvals needed to obtain permission to operate.
What are Peter's companies trying to do? Crush babies into gold? No, they're finding economic ways to fix air pollution. He's going to spend the better part of a decade of his life fighting some avatar of "the department of improving the environment" for the right to spend his own money improving the environment.
I too have heard, and experienced, insane horror stories.
The US is currently rapidly losing an energy production war with China. We have all the money and natural resources anyone could ever want, and China - a communist dictatorship - is deploying more electricity generation capacity in months than the US has…
TI's thesis is essentially that we are still going to be a carbonised economy, but the carbon source should be renewable (see [0]). So, essentially allowing us to 'hot-swap' our energy source without having to modify all the existing infrastructure.
Ie: can we make the fastest possible switch to just utilising the atmospheric carbon to power our civilisation, which at least means we aren't going to be burning dead dinosaurs anymore?
The Hydrogen gas is the byproduct of electrolysis/feedstock for the generation of carbon neutral methane (or push up the carbon atoms a bit, if you like).
Conceivably, at a later date, if H2 really does become a viable fuel source/the infrastructure exists, you can then cease compiling to Methane and use the Hydrogen directly. Although then you're not removing CO2
[0] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-industries-whitepaper-2-0/
(edit - changed reference)
As a "carbon industry" observer, this is pretty exciting news. I've had my eye on Terraform Industries for a while and love what they're doing; they're one of the few groups that actually seem to understand the implications of what it will take to shift to a carbon-neutral economy, and their core insight about the economics of atmospheric fuel synthesis is one of those "obvious when you hear it" ideas: solar electricity is trending ever-cheaper, so rather than trying to maximize efficiency in an expensive piece of kit you can make cheap 'inefficient' equipment and get lower overall costs, which in turn unlocks scale.
Their recent post on "Terraformer Environmental Calculus" is a great read, if you are interested in this space: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terraformer-environmental-calculus/
Congratulations to the team!
This article is keyword stuffed nonsense.
Take the first sentence.
> As recently discussed on The Carbon Copy with Brian Janous, utilities are seeing major forecasted demand growth for the first time in decades, and almost entirely from data centers.
Utilities aren't seeing major forecasted demand growth for the first time in decades. It isn't entirely from DCs.
The author appears to have a startup, pitching a Power to NatGas plus direct air capture system because "Why not?™" [0]. I'm offended on behalf of chemical engineers everywhere.
[0]https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-terraformer-mark-one/
Agreed: this is the key question. One effort I follow in this direction is Terraform Industries[0] who are building exactly this type of system.
Their approach is PV + DCC (Direct Carbon Capture) and then simple carbohydrate synthesis, with the goal of establishing standalone autonomous systems that can generate valuable resources on their own in remote areas with ample sunlight.
They have a great blog where they go through their motivation for the approach from first principles [1].
[0]: https://terraformindustries.com/ [1]: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/
I very much hope Casey Handmer's Terraform Industries succeeds. It's the best case plan I'm aware of for dealing with CO2. Put carbon capture, electrolyser and sabatier style reactor directly next to solar panels, produce Methane, pipe it directly into normal natural gas pipelines, use it to produce fuel and everything we currently use oil for, so everything that uses this methane is carbon neutral.
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/