Originally published 26 June 2023.
Terraform Industries is proud to publicly announce the Terraformer, our product designed to produce cheap natural gas from sunlight and air. The Terraformer is a carbon-neutral drop-in successor to drilling for fossil fuels.
The Terraformer is designed to integrate directly with a standard 1 MW solar array. No grid connection, no interconnection queue. The Terraformer gets solar energy to market as energy dense, clean, cheap, carbon neutral synthetic natural gas.
The Terraformer produces 1000 cubic feet of natural gas per hour of operation. It is optimized for 25% utilization, typical for utility scale solar arrays, and in this configuration produces 6000 cubic feet/day.
Operating the equivalent of 2190 hours per year, one Terraformer produces over 2 million cubic feet of natural gas. At $10/Mcf sale price and $54/Mcf for IRA PTCs (45V, 45Q, 45E) each unit produces up to $150,000 of annual revenue.
A gigawatt-scale solar array integrated with 1000 Terraformers will produce enough natural gas to supply 20,000 homes.
A self-funding global fleet of 400 million Terraformers, rolled out over the next two decades, will provide all of humanity with permanent unconditional energy abundance for the first time in history, completing the mission of the industrial revolution.
Production starts Q2 2024.
Work with us!
sales@terraformindustries.com
hiring@terraformindustries.com
Casey Handmer's blog 
So, 84% of projected revenues, and possibly several hundred percent of the projected profit, consists entirely of subsidies? Carbon indulgences paid for by federal borrowing, and subject to being cut off as soon as early 2025?
OK, this probably looks economically sensible if you draw a line around the system owner, and resolutely don’t look outside it. But I question whether it makes sense once you take into account where that 84% of revenue is coming from…
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That, plus the gas price per Mcf is currently about $4. Very optimistic to forecast revenue of $150,000 per year. No ongoing maintenance costs either? No need to purchase thousands of liters of water per day? You might get around $10k profit a year if you were lucky, so that’s 10 years to pay off the installation cost. How long does a terraformer last for before it needs replacing?
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It is subsidized for the very good reason that fuel it delivers displaces mined gas, oil, and coal. Albeit, not 1-for-1, because declining price drives increased consumption, but increased consumption drives increased productivity, and most of the societal cost of CO2 from mined carbon is not being counted.
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You have your reasons for subsidizing it, but it’s still a subsidy, and an absurdly large one at that: 84% of anticipated revenues: The economic viability of this proposal isn’t being boosted by the subsidy, it is entirely a creation of the subsidy. Without the subsidy, it’s a huge money loser.
And it’s a subsidy which is liable to vanish after the next election, because support for it is limited to one party.
That being the case, how rational is the business plan? The payback time would have to be about a year to get anybody but true believers to buy.
I doubt they’ll even be delivering units before the subsidy evaporates.
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So ignore the revenue from the subsidy, and look at the unsubsidized version. It’s still a 23%/year return on investment, if you’ve got solar capacity overbuilt for reliability and you’re just looking for something to use the electricity for. (More if you build it in a place where a reliable source of gas is at a premium.) Or you can say it pays for itself in four and a quarter years.
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Cool; now do the same calculation for fossil fuels. I see estimates of $20bn/year in oil & gas subsidies for the US and $5.9tn/year globally. Subsidies aren’t intrinsically evil; in this case they’re being used to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere. As a society, this is a Good that we should pay for. And paying for it in long term loans is the morally correct thing to do as more of the benefit accrues to the future, which is when the bills will be paid.
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Why solar over say nuclear ? With billions of acres needed, we’re talking 60%+ of the US land consumed by solar panels?
(Let’s ignore nuclear political nonsense in this theoretical to keep it simple).
I assume a few dozen nuclear plants could handle the power requirements? (And hey maybe fusion is available in 20 years! )
Not sure on how the scale balances, but I’d assume the sheer scale of manufacturing waste / byproducts / environmental harm from solar panel manufacturing is on par with what those would be for nuclear power generation, especially if you are including the battery manufacturing process as well? Unless the plan was to not have some sort of energy storage fabric? With nuclear you can toss out that layer and just full bore your power plants.
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Twenty years away? We already got a perfectly serviceable gravitational-confinement fusion reactor ignited, output exceeding input long long ago, virtually spotless safety record for the past 160+ years, and recently worked out a staggeringly cost-effective way to tap it for more electricity than we know what to do with. It’s called the sun, and solar panels. Necessary land area will probably amount to less than is currently being squandered on biodiesel plus unwanted dairy products. Unlike crops or cattle, panels aren’t constrained by ongoing water supply or soil quality.
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400 million 1MW plants would be 400TW, assume nuclear is 4x higher capacity factor, that’s 100TW of nuclear, or 100,000 new nuclear plants. We would run out of U235 before they were finished.
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Gas was traditionally a waste product from extraction of liquid crude oil. The wellhead price tends to be closer to $2 per thousand cubic feet than $10. If you need to assume $10, you’re looking at a niche market, replacing trucked or shipped gas in locations where transportation dominates the cost. How far do you expect the cost to fall in later versions?
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