James

MV#1 — Mining the Air — Casey Handmer

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Hydrocarbons are not bad. Over the last three hundred years they have propelled global growth and technology. Steel, trains, planes, plastics, and processors owe a historical debt to the energy that we have readily extracted from coal, oil and gas. 

The way we get hydrocarbons is bad. In taking them from the ground and burning them we transport carbon from the crust to the air. The deleterious consequences of this on our climate are well known. Furthermore, the inhomogeneity in their distribution has led to global iniquities, indeed reserves of such natural resources continue to prop up unsavory regimes, even eliciting deference from other powers that profess to uphold more democratic principles.

Casey Handmer, founder and CEO of Terraform Industries (TI) joined me on the inaugural episode of the Multiverses podcast. He has a plan to create a cleaner, fairer hydrocarbon economy:

  • Extract hydrocarbons from the air. Keeping the atmospheric balance intact — even improving it. 
  • Make this work almost 
  • everywhere. By relying on more equitably distributed resources: sunshine and air 
  • Do this more cheaply than drilling. 

Casey has Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics and has worked at NASA’s JPL and at Hyperloop One. 

The technology behind the plan is old: scrub carbon from the air (like plants!), use water to create Hydrogen (electrolysis — discovered ~1800), combine the hydrogen and carbon using the Sabatier process (discovered ~1900) to produce methane. Methane, or natural gas, is the gateway hydrocarbon — CH4 — easy to transport and can be used as the basis for more complex synthetic fuels.

The economics that makes this work is new. It requires copious, low-cost energy from solar PV for this process to undercut crust-mined methane. That energy is used to turn the fans that churn through the air, electrolyse the water and run the Sabatier process. Using projections of solar energy costs, Casey estimates that in the mid-2030s it will be cheaper in most inhabited places to generate hydrocarbons this way than by drilling.

Because TI is confident that solar power will continue to fall, its efforts are focused on building something that can quickly get mass adoption — that means building cheap machines rather than ones using expensive components that could operate at higher efficiency. When PV is super cheap, we can be wasteful of it if it means a faster transition to net zero. We don’t need highly efficient processes to create fuels, we just need a lot of solar. 

If the TI thesis plays out, it will enable a phase change in solar adoption. In many cases it does not currently make sense to connect more solar to grids — it only adds to generation at hours that are already well covered. More storage solutions and HVDC to move energy between time zones will change that. Even then, it’s hard to connect new solar farms — it can require years of permits to get the grid interconnections laid. If it becomes cheaper to produce methane from the air then the grid constraints are bypassed, a solar farm can be constructed anywhere with access for trucks and the methane produced can be stored in the mundane ways (tanks).

I hope it happens.

Questions I’d ask if I had this conversation again

Is there a floor to solar costs?  A couple of reasons to think there might be:

  • It uses up some natural resources and the cost of these has floor. Does plywood installation display a learning rate? Perhaps slightly, but it’s masked by resource costs.
  • Solar needs land area, another constrained resource. 

What about air-to-food? Startups like solar foods are following a similar model in turning energy from the sun into hydrocarbons. Could there be any advantages to colocating facilities for food an methane production? Will the prices of food and fuel equalize in terms of $ per joule? The cheapest food is currently about 18MJ Joule per dollar (see https://efficiencyiseverything.com/calorie-per-dollar-list/) whereas gasoline is more like 60MJ per dollar — so it’s about three times as cheap. Will food become relatively cheap compared to gas? Even with gas coming down in price. More good news?!

Update — Casey got back to me by email with some comments on these:

  • Cost floor: Might get as low as $30k/MW. Land cost becomes important at that level without severe regulatory assistance! [JR: for ref, the turnkey installed cost is $900k per MW at the low end currently — so the floor is a long way down]
  • Air-to-food: Food is actually about 100x more expensive than gasoline per usable unit of mechanical energy. Probably better to collocate synthetic food factories (if any) with centers of demand, as food is less transportable than natural gas through existing natural gas pipelines!

References:

https://terraformindustries.com/

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363529984_Empirically_grounded_technology_forecasts_and_the_energy_transition — Rupert Way et al on why renewable costs will continue to come down (the “learning rate”) 

https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2023/04/05/adding-capacity-to-the-electricity-grid-is-not-a-simple-task Technology Quarterly from The Economist (paywall) on electricity grids

Do not disturb

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Do not disturb

On my phone there is a button: do not disturb.

So I press it. 

Yet immediately my son comes to prod me and inform me of an immediate requirement of ice cream, then bursts into incredulous tears when I explain there is none left, that he himself ate the last morsel the previous evenings when we had resorted to luring him into the bath with said treat. He saw the empty punnet with his own tearful eyes.

I suppose there is a problem with my phone. Either that or my son, but he is more or less perfect. 

Perhaps a software update will fix it.

Vessel, Cargo, Atom, Planet

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Vessel, Cargo, Atom, Planet

These words came in longships and in barques, they were dragged over logs, carted among wines, olives, and figs, bundled up and slung across the backs of soldiers and cradled by the hands of children. 

These words carry the atoms which fled Democritus’ lungs and the photons that lit the visions of Horace. Within their inflection, there is the curve of a bison’s flank, the curve of the walls of the earth.

These words were quarried in Istria, felled in Palearctic forests, picked from Lydian vines, and harvested from wheatfields that drink from the Elbe.

 Sometimes a sword is unearthed. Half consumed by the mud, its blade rusted away, of no use in any hand. Still, it is proudly displayed, its survival is seen as a thing of wonder.

Yet the words that traveled with that sword and spilled out of its scabbard retain the power to cut creation into the smallest pieces. 

To be carried, to carry, to dismantle, to compose.

What are you thinking of right now?

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Or, a sketch of a proof of the infinity of thought

No worries of rain. Only an idea, a notion, or even less, a word. The beginnings of a word. Something that is not yet, yet is, is a thing, but not a thing that is. This sort of thing. The sort of this that does not have a word, no name, there are words around it, but none of those words are its name. And without a name, we do not yet know its character, and a name will change its character. If we name it, we destroy it. We fill the space between the words, and that space is its body.

No worries of rain. No images of oceans or what is within oceans. Nothing that is liquid or solid or gas or plasma is what I am thinking of right now. Neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral. No real pattern. What I am thinking of is at an angle to all these things and to every item in every lexicon. Orthogonal, or — better — diagonal.

And if you should think of some new thing that is none of the things of which I am not thinking, I can tell you already, I am not thinking of that either, it is equally oblique to and untouched by that.

That’s what I’m thinking of right now. 

I trust that makes things clear.

Next Day Delivery

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Next Day Delivery

Or what to make of all the pieces of time that come in the post

Don’t get upset, it is the postal service’s function to deliver these to you.

Don’t leave them around where young children might swallow them.

Don’t leave them to be crushed by their own weight. 

Unpack them.

Don’t forget to piece them together.

There is nothing worse than to leave them separate. 

The one thing worse than leaving them separate is to put them together in the wrong order.

Do that don’t.

The one thing worse than putting them in the wrong order is to assemble them in no order at all. Or to stack them instead of spreading them in a line as the instructions instruct.

The instructions are simple. Follow them. Put one after the other, put the next one directly after the one that comes before, do not be tempted to try to put them the other way round. 

Do this. Don’t stop doing this. Don’t stop doing this. Don’t stop doing this. Don’t stop doing this. And repeat.

A Parable I am holding in reserve in case I am ever asked to give a commencement address, or such like

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A man walks into a gallery one afternoon.  Of all the works on the wall, there is one that captivates him especially – a luminous circle depicting almost perfectly the timbre of the autumn as he is experiencing it. A tree that has half shed its gilded leaves, the poised light. So simple, so apparently … Read more