Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries, a startup that produces synthetic fuels by combining CO2 captured from the air with renewable hydrogen.

Fossil fuels are responsible for ~75% of anthropogenic emissions and we need to reduce their consumption as fast as possible. Yet, even under the most optimistic decarbonization scenario, natural gas and oil will still play an important role in our energy systems in 2030-40.

Terraform aims to decarbonize this residual fuel consumption by producing synthetic fuels more cheaply than by drilling the Earth. In this episode, we talk with Casey about:

• how his early career at Hyperloop & NASA led him to look at fuel sources on Mars to then found a ClimateTech startup
• what are synthetic fuels and why they have a role to play in the energy transition
• how falling cost of solar power can make synthetic fuels cheaper than fossil fuel extracted from the Earth
• how to rapidly scale production to replace significant fossil fuel quantities in the near term

Enjoy the show!

To learn more about Terraform Industries and synthetic fuels:

• Terraform whitepaper (~15mn read)
• Terraform website (for HTML enthusiasts) and Prometheus website (for a more visual version)