Casey Handmer: Terraform Industries and a Carbon-Neutral Future — Manifold #57

 

Casey Handmer (PhD Caltech, general relativity) is the founder of Terraform Industries. He is one of the most capable and ambitious geo-engineers on planet Earth! 

Terraform Industries is scaling technology to produce cheap natural gas with sunlight and air. Using solar energy, they extract carbon from the air and synthesize natural gas, all at the same site. 

March 2024: "Terraform completes the end to end demo, successfully producing fossil carbon free pipeline grade natural gas from sunlight and air. We also achieved green hydrogen at <$2.50/kg-H2 and DAC CO2 at <$250/T-CO2, two incredible milestones." 

Links: 

Casey Handmer’s website: https://www.caseyhandmer.com/ 

Terraform Industries: https://terraformindustries.com/ 

Nerds on Patrol [Episode 3] - Terraform Industries: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k3dHFJPEU 

Steve and Casey discuss: 

0:00 Introduction 

00:31 Casey's early life and background, from Australia to Caltech 

07:55 The academic path and transition to tech entrepreneurship 10:40 Terraform Industries 

15:21 Solar costs, efficiency, and global Impact 

24:25 A world powered by Terraform methane 

31:27 The entrepreneurial journey: challenges and insights 

35:01 Investor dynamics and strategic decisions for Terraform 

41:28 The hard Reality of manufacturing and innovation 

44:11 Navigating intellectual property and strategic partnerships 

45:49 The moral and technical challenges of carbon neutrality 

55:48 Looking ahead: Terraform's next milestones and the solar revolution

Transcript and Audio-only version:

https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/casey-handmer-terraform-industries-and-a-carbon-neutral-future-57

Certainties and Uncertainties in our Energy and Climate Futures: Steve Koonin

This is a recent (2019) talk which gives a good overview of current climate science. Speaker is Steve Koonin, formerly Undersecretary for Science, US Department of Energy (Obama administration), Caltech Provost and theoretical physicist.

See earlier post Epistemic Caution and Climate Change (including comments).

My own views (consistent, as far as I can tell, with what Steve says in the talk):

1. Evidence for recent warming (~1 degree C) is strong.

2. There exist previous eras of natural (non-anthropogenic) global temperature change of similar magnitude to what is happening now.

3. However, it is plausible that at least part of the recent temperature rise is due to increase of atmospheric CO2 due to human activity.

4. Climate models still have significant uncertainties. While the direct effect of CO2 IR absorption is well understood, second order effects like clouds, distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere, etc. are not under good control. The increase in temperature from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is still uncertain to a factor of 2-3 and at the low range (e.g., 1.5 degree C) is not catastrophic. The direct effect of CO2 absorption is modest and at the low range (~1 degree C) of current consensus model predictions. Potentially catastrophic outcomes are due to second order effects that are not under good theoretical or computational control.

5. Even if a catastrophic outcome is only a low probability tail risk, it is prudent to explore technologies that reduce greenhouse gas production.

6. A Red Team exercise, properly done, would clarify what is certain and uncertain in climate science.

Simply stating these views can get you attacked by crazy people.

Please tell me what is implausible about the following scenario: IPCC latest report has as its central projection a ~1.5 degree C warming over the next decades, assuming CO2 production continues at current levels. During those decades, battery technology could improve by an order of magnitude, due to intense R&D efforts. Solar energy cost and efficiency could also improve significantly over the same period. If these technological advances are realized by, e.g., 2040, we could substantially decrease our carbon footprint without wholesale dislocation of the world economy. It seems that huge R&D investment (nevertheless totally negligible relative to GDP or, e.g., military spending) in alternative energy and storage technologies is a no brainer...

Koonin rebuts some criticisms of his talk.

Off the Grid in British Columbia

Who wouldn't trade their stressful modern lifestyle for an off grid homestead in British Columbia? Lovely family, beautiful locale.

Solar + Li batteries + old school technologies allow sustainable living without discomfort.

Nordhaus on global warming

Yale economist William Nordhaus, who has studied cost-benefit aspects of potential policy responses to global warming, responds to this recent editorial.

I don't find Nordhaus completely convincing (in fact his discussion of the performance of climate models, point 2, alarmingly misses the point), but the article is worth reading.

NYBooks: ... Then, I saw an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal of January 27, 2012, by a group of sixteen scientists, entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” This is useful because it contains many of the standard criticisms in a succinct statement. The basic message of the article is that the globe is not warming, that dissident voices are being suppressed, and that delaying policies to slow climate change for fifty years will have no serious economic or environment consequences.

My response is primarily designed to correct their misleading description of my own research; but it also is directed more broadly at their attempt to discredit scientists and scientific research on climate change.1 I have identified six key issues that are raised in the article, and I provide commentary about their substance and accuracy. They are:

• Is the planet in fact warming?
• Are human influences an important contributor to warming?
• Is carbon dioxide a pollutant?
• Are we seeing a regime of fear for skeptical climate scientists?
• Are the views of mainstream climate scientists driven primarily by the desire for financial gain?
• Is it true that more carbon dioxide and additional warming will be beneficial?

As I will indicate below, on each of these questions, the sixteen scientists provide incorrect or misleading answers. ...

Laughlin interview

I highly recommend this interview with Bob Laughlin (1998 Nobel for fractional quantum hall effect). Laughlin discusses topics ranging from energy and carbon emissions (topic of his new book) to globalization and innovation (he was President of KAIST for 2 years) to philosophy of science (emergent phenomena, Confucianism, Monism!). He even notes that elite higher education is a signaling racket :-)

[About 1 hour into the podcast. Discusses flash memory, blue diodes, flat screen displays.]

... All I can tell you is that this is playing out now and we'll see. ... Maybe it's true you can do without all that manufacturing capability. However, this is not what we are talking about. What we are talking about is innovation and American innovation. I think American innovation is not nearly as great as the proponents say it is. Because they are not telling the truth.

Shout out to Tiko:

Laughlin Nobel biography: ... A few days after the Nobel Prize announcement I got the following wonderful e-mail from Andrew Tikofsky, one of my best graduate students, who is now on Wall Street:

Hi Bob, Ian McDonald, Steve Strong, and I are getting together for a beer near Grand Central Station this coming Tuesday in honor of your prize. You are cordially invited to attend.

BP oil spill Fermi estimates

This isn't meant to minimize the environmental horror of the BP oil spill, but I can't resist some rough estimates. (I did this quickly, so please correct my errors.)

100 days x 50k barrels/day x 150 liters/barrel = 750 million liters

Call it a billion liters of oil: 10^9 liters

Gulf of Mexico: over 2M cubic kilometers of water, or 2 x 10^18 liters

Suppose the spill is concentrated in 1 percent of the Gulf's area (a region 10% by 10% of the Gulf's linear dimensions - about 50 miles by 100 miles). This would presumably only be the case for a limited amount of time, and concentrations would fall off as the oil disperses further. Of course, if the oil is concentrated on a 2-dimensional surface slick, that would be quite bad for anything in the slick.

Then, assuming uniform dispersal within this sub-region, the oil concentration is about 1 part in ten million, or .1 ppm.

Googling around (e.g., ppm oil toxic), I couldn't find evidence of toxicity at any concentrations lower than 1 ppm.

So, aside from shocks to otherwise already endangered species, it seems the long-run effects of the spill won't be that bad. Don't yell at me -- I'm an environmentalist! But numbers don't lie...

Darwin's Nightmare

This is one of the great documentaries of all time -- it's beautiful and tragic and all too real. The entire 2 hours is available on Google video (click below).

See also this interview with the filmmaker.

Darwin's Nightmare

Some time in the 1960's, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of native fish species. The new fish multiplied so fast that its white fillets are today exported all around the world. Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo… Kalashnikovs and ammunition for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World Bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.

Ecotopia

The Times recalls the 1970s cult novel Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach.

The Novel That Predicted Portland

SOMETIMES a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with “Ecotopia,” a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known.

The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.

White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called “recycle bins” sit on trains, along with “hanging ferns and small plants.” A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.

Note that Callenbach actually lives in Berkeley, where the climate is better :-(

On the other hand, Brad DeLong was impressed by our six kinds of recycling at U Oregon.



It's easy to forget that today's widely accepted environmentalism started as a crazy fringe social movement only 35 years ago. I can clearly remember during my childhood when it suddenly became not OK to just throw trash out the window of your moving car. (Remember the crying Indian chief TV spot? See below!) This development is captured nicely in an episode of the AMC TV series Mad Men (about 1960s Madison Ave. ad men), in which Don Draper and his lovely WASP upper class family have a nice picnic in the woods, and in the final shot leave behind a pile of rubbish and beer cans sitting in the grass. I think this means that there is hope for humanity -- we'll eventually figure out that preserving the environment is in our best interest as a species.





Incidentally, Mad Men is the only thing on TV I watch regularly, aside from ultimate fighting. At a holiday party earlier in the week the show came up in conversation and I found that randomly selected literature and film professors also love it :-) Sadly, I don't know anyone on the faculty who is excited about BJ Penn versus Georges St. Pierre in January.