See https://terraformindustries.com/ and https://twitter.com/TerraformIndies
Terraform Industries is a carbon-capture company that claims to be "a bet on cheap solar, synthetic hydrocarbon supremacy, and hyperscale". Basically, they think solar power will be cheap enough to efficiently turn atmospheric CO2 into methane.
I want to know: will they start to sell anything this year? Including but not limited to methane or a sabatier reactor. I'll also accept anything that seems to be accomplishing their stated goal of carbon capture.
I won't count stock sales, NFT baseball cards, flamethrowers, or anything like that.
Resolves based on any information that's publicly available and/or shared with this market at close time. "Sell" as in "closed a sales contract", they don't need to actually deliver in 2023.
I might change the rules during the first week of this market, if someone makes a good case for doing so. I won't bet in this market.
Update: Check the comments from @Mqrius for evidence of a sales contract with socalgas. I think this matches a literal interpretation of the rules, so this market will probably resolve YES. Team NO has until 12 March to give me a good counterargument.
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@Mqrius Well, that seems good enough to fit. YES on 12 March unless someone tells me why this should not count.
I kinda suspect this contract is "we'll buy as much methane as you want to sell for $/liter". If that's true, then I think my criteria were too loose. I'll make a new market as a follow-up with stronger rules
@citrinitas Yeah I suspect the same, that would make the most sense for a startup in this stage. Being forced to deliver a fixed amount seems like it would be very early at this point, they don't seem to be in the production scaling phase yet. Would you be trying to predict that with the new market?
@Mqrius I want to catch "When do they have v1 ready?" even if the initial version isn't ready to be scaled. Ideally at least a single Sabatier "in production" making methane, in such a way that it excludes a lab test rig and includes a test run with a small solar farm.
Next criteria I'm thinking probably "Operate a sabatier reactor outside of lab conditions" but I'm sure that also has gotchas, so I'll take the week to ponder.
@citrinitas Yeah I'm not sure how you could capture that in a robust way, or if the concept of a v1 is something they'll really have at all. An unattended "for-production" setup would be the closest, but also any v1 would necessarily also still be experimental
Reading their 2022 whitepaper, they say:
Strategy
De-risk CO2 concentration by building development plants at up to 500 kg/day scale, with an initial cost target of $100/T-year.
Build a low cost development green hydrogen plant.
Synthesize methane, qualify end-to-end production and assay process.
Execute large scale plant including the solar farm with colocated machinery, proximal to existing natural gas distribution pipeline, and with customer agreements.
Scale plant production by all available means. Target commissioning of one MT-scale plant per day within five years of market entry.
I guess what you're trying to capture is step 4, as before that it's all development and not commercial. Step 1 I think is only about CO2 concentrators, not about methane generation.
@Mqrius I want to capture "have they started to commercialize?" in whatever form that takes, and step 4 is close but not exactly it. If they operate their own sabatier in test conditions in a solar field somewhere, I'd still count that as primarily R&D. If they sell a plant, even if it's a small trial run with a closely partnered company, that's primarily production and only secondarily R&D.
I also wanted to count if they've decided to sell mass-produced methane directly. But their published plans seem to contradict that, and it introduces a lot of edge cases, so I'll likely leave it out.
@citrinitas I'd expect them to operate plants themselves rather than produce plants for others to operate, at least initially. Not entirely sure about that, but that seems to be a difference in their approach vs Prometheus fuels.