Terraform Industries’ approach is different: Instead of physically massive systems, similar to today’s power plants, a single Terraformer is designed to fit into a shipping container. Other initiatives have successfully generated “green methane,” as it’s sometimes called, but they’ve been effectively kneecapped by the enormous energy demands of such processes and the high upfront capital costs of large-scale industrial projects. More recently, projects such as Store&Go in Europe achieved an atmospheric carbon to synthetic gas system, but Handmer said the group failed to hit positive economics. Historically, such processes used coal as the carbon input - hardly a carbon neutral substance. According to Handmer, the chemical reactor is hitting 94% methane purity already, which means that it is making synthetic natural gas fully compatible with existing distribution pipelines.Ĭombining hydrogen and carbon to make synthetic fuel has been done in various ways before. The system, called a Terraformer, then combines the hydrogen and CO 2 into a chemical reactor to make natural gas. Terraform Industries has developed a system that captures carbon dioxide (CO 2) from the air and creates hydrogen from water, all using cheap solar power. But if the company succeeds in its goal - displacing a huge amount of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere - it’s the only scale worth operating in. It’s more than a little mind-boggling, given that the startup is scarcely two years old, with fewer than 15 people on payroll and around $11 million in funding. The company wants to turn hydrogen and atmospheric carbon into synthetic natural gas at scale. His startup, Terraform Industries, aims to operate at these ambitious scales. Casey Handmer is not intimidated by very large quantities.
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