Terraform Industries wants to solve climate change by making more hydrocarbons

Casey Handmer is not intimidated by very large quantities. Billions of acres. Thousands of gigawatts of solar power. A billion metric tons of carbon.

His startup, Terraform Industries, aims to operate at these ambitious scales. The company wants to turn hydrogen and atmospheric carbon into synthetic natural gas at scale. 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. 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.

Terraform Industries has developed a system that captures carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and creates hydrogen from water, all using cheap solar power. The system, called a Terraformer, then combines the hydrogen and CO2 into a chemical reactor to make natural gas. According to Handmer, the chemical reactor is hitting 94 percent methane purity already, which means that it is making synthetic natural gas fully compatible with existing distribution pipelines.