Terraform Industries converts electricity, air into synthetic natural gas for first time
THE modern world is dependent on a vast network for extracting, processing, transporting and ultimately consuming hydrocarbons like crude oil and natural gas.
But these resources come with a cost: they’re finite, difficult to extract, and take carbon dioxide out of the ground and release it into the air.
Instead of reducing humanity’s dependence on hydrocarbons — which is impossible or undesirable or both, depending on who you ask — Terraform Industries’ solution is to produce this resource, using electricity and air, via a system it calls the Terraformer. Today, the startup is announcing that it has commissioned a demonstrator Terraformer and produced synthetic natural gas for the first time. Roughly the size of two shipping containers, the Terraformer consists of three subsystems: an electrolyzer, which converts solar power into hydrogen; a direct air capture system that captures CO2; and a chemical reactor that ingests both these inputs to produce pipeline-grade synthetic natural gas. The entire machine is optimized for a one-megawatt solar array.
As CEO Casey Handmer admits, what the company has done is not “super original.” Electrolysis and Sabatier chemical reactors are well understood processes, for example. But the company has been able to innovate on the process, including building its proprietary direct air capture system, and adapting all of it to work with a variable energy source, solar power. So while any particular subsystem can trace its origins to, say, the nineteenth or twentieth century, the entire process is entirely new.