Casey Handmer says solar power is changing the economics of energy
Large-scale production of synthetic fuel is now feasible, argues the founder of Terraform Industries
By Casey Handmer, founder of Terraform Industries
What if we could make cheap fuel out of thin air? For more than a century, a bewildering variety of methods has been attempted to make drop-in replacements for fossil fuels. Such synthetic fuels could be used with existing energy, transport and industrial infrastructure, collectively worth over $100trn.
Petrol, diesel, kerosene, propane, oil, natural gas and rocket fuel are all hydrocarbons. Synthetic fuel therefore needs sources of hydrogen (from water) and carbon (from atmospheric carbon dioxide). Nature has used this recipe to make living things, including humans, for billions of years. Before the Industrial Revolution, plants were our primary source of fuel. But plants do not use solar energy efficiently enough to make replacements for fossil fuels. Is there another way to use water and air to make huge amounts of cheap fuel?
Whatever process we use will require vast quantities of energy. Synthetic fuel is made by converting electrical energy into chemical energy. But ripping water and carbon-dioxide molecules apart to make fuel requires as much energy as is subsequently released via combustion, and more besides. If done using electricity obtained from the grid, powered by combustion of coal or natural gas, fuel synthesis cannot be cost-competitive with fuel-mining. We need new energy sources that are abundant, cheap and less environmentally harmful than fossil fuels.
And what is the cheapest, most scalable source of energy humanity has ever known? Solar photovoltaics. Carbon-free, zero moving parts, no uranium enrichment, and no specialised labour required. Solar cells are panes of glass that print wealth. We should deploy them accordingly.
It turns out that converting between chemical and electrical energy is about 35% efficient in either direction. Conventionally, burning fuel to make electricity has been the natural economic flow. But once solar energy costs less than 10% of the price of grid power, the economics favour the conversion of electricity into carbon-neutral chemical fuel. This is just a few years away. Solar is getting 15-20% cheaper every year as manufacturing becomes more efficient. Solar synthetic fuel will soon be cheaper than conventional fuel in some markets, and by about 2040 it will be cheaper everywhere.
I noticed this trend four years ago, and resolved to make this vision—of unconditional energy abundance—a reality. I quit my job writing software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founded Terraform Industries. I raised seed funding from investors who shared my forward-looking optimism, hired the smartest engineers I knew, and got to work. At Terraform, we’re now making cheap, synthetic natural gas from sunlight, water and air.
Our “Terraformer” system is a compact chemical plant designed to integrate directly with a one-megawatt solar array in the field—so there are no electricity-transmission costs. It contains an electrolyser (to make hydrogen from water), a carbon-capture system (to extract carbon dioxide from air) and a Sabatier reactor that combines the two to make synthetic natural gas (methane). The whole thing is powered by solar energy.
So far we’ve shown that we can produce hydrogen for less than $2.50 per kg, carbon dioxide for less than $250 per tonne, and pipeline-grade synthetic natural gas for $35 per thousand cubic feet (MCF). This puts us in economic contention in many markets that rely on imported fuel.
We won’t rest until we’ve saturated the global market for any hydrocarbon at a price cheaper than fracking. We have significant further cost reductions on the way, and a pathway for developing liquid fuels from methanol. In 2025 we expect to be able to produce hydrogen for well below $2/kg. Our full-scale Terraformer, which we will demonstrate in the next few months, will produce 2,300 MCF of natural gas per year. (A typical home uses about 70 MCF a year for heating and cooking.) We need to deploy millions of these over the next couple of decades to meet global demand.
Cheap and abundant solar power, directly from the array, will transform dozens of industries beyond fuel production. It can be used for desalination, cement production, to provide industrial heat and to make fertiliser. Solar power unlocks incredible material wealth for all of humanity with a mere fraction of Earth’s land area under panels. And, of course, moving beyond finite fossil fuels to abundant solar energy solves the carbon-emissions problem—in addition to supercharging global economic growth.
No comments:
Post a Comment