Speaker unverified: evaluation

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…uired for a class?” And they're like, “Why would I do that?” And I'm like, “I don’t know, because you just spent four years of your life deciding to specialize in this particular field of all fields?” So if you interpret Henry Kaiser, Howard Hughes, Elon Musk, they decide that their circle of competence is not rockets or roads or what have you, but is engineering. And that engineering competence can be broadly applied to many potential domains. I associate this trait with you. Maybe for the listeners who are not familiar, summarize what Terraform is building. Terraform is building a machine that connects to a standard quantized solar array and produces natural gas. It’s a pretty neat trick. Yeah, explain it for people who remember their high school chemistry. Okay, sure. The philosophy of what this is doing is very strange because normally we would burn gas to make electricity, but the solar has gotten so cheap that you can actually kind of do the reverse process and it makes financial sense, increasingly so over time. In terms of the chemistry—hydrocarbons are made of hydrogen and carbon, it's not very complicated. So the source of carbon is like carbon dioxide in the air. Actually this beautiful table is made of a biopolymer, which was also extracted from water and CO2 that ultimately came from the air. We also make hydrogen from water, and unlike this poor tree, we don't have to use Rubisco to do that. We can just electrolyze stuff at a couple hundred degrees Celsius and then feed that into a high-pressure, high-temperature reactor of the sort that were pioneered in Germany in 1905. And then out comes natural gas. It's a very neat trick. Okay, so you take electricity from solar panels. You take carbon from the atmosphere. You take the hydrogen from water, and then you use those to produce, currently short chain, in future longer chain, hydrocarbons. And the reason that you get carbon emissions when you burn gasoline is we're taking carbon that was sequestered in the ground. We had it stored away through all the many, many years of breakdown there. Dinosaur stuff. Exactly. t carbon emissions when you burn gasoline is we're taking carbon that was sequestered in the ground. We had it stored away through all the many, many years of breakdown there. Dinosaur stuff. Exactly. So actually that carbon was originally atmosphere too, but it's been stored underground and it would stay there forever essentially. And so when you burn gasoline or kerosene, you're participating in this broad industrial scale, civilizational scale effort to pump carbon out of the crust and put it into the atmosphere, with many positive side effects of that process. In our process, the carbon comes from the atmosphere and is reused. So it's actually a burning wood, which is technically carbon-neutral. So that helps on the climate front in that you can create an economic forcing function around going and sourcing our entire civilization’s carbon from the air rather than from the crust. It also helps from an energy abundance front, which is to say if you need sun, you go outside. But if you need oil, you have to be friends with Saudi Arabia or one of the handful of other places on earth that are generally uninhabitable but have oil. But everywhere pretty much that people live has enough sun that you can grow enough food to survive. And if you can grow enough food to survive, you can synthesize enough fuel to run your modern industrial economy. Plants are great, even this plastic one here, but their net throughput efficiency is about a hundred times lower than a synthetic process like the one we're using in terms of area of land into reduced carbon fuel. There are people who think that we should all be flying less because of the carbon impact, whereas you think, “Hey, this is just a tech problem, we should all be flying much more”. And you can make zero-carbon flying… The fact that flying is one of the places where it's really useful to have hydrocarbons, but you can just produce zero-carbon jet fuel and then you can fly as much as you want in a closed system that is not emitting net new carbon. Yeah, I mean would you disagree that flying is awesome? No, but I'm probably not unbiased. bon jet fuel and then you can fly as much as you want in a closed system that is not emitting net new carbon. Yeah, I mean would you disagree that flying is awesome? No, but I'm probably not unbiased. Yeah. One school of thought here would hold that flying aircraft accounts for about 2% of emissions and it's almost all relatively wealthy people who are doing it. And therefore it's like this moral valence to it in that we're screwing up the planet on behalf of the 10 million richest people on earth. And so what we should do in order to disincentivize this behavior is tax aviation fuel and then feed the money into something to try and solve that social problem. And that will make aviation more expensive and less accessible. That's actually super regressive because people like you and I will still be able to afford to fly. We're not super price sensitive when it comes to flying United, but actually it's the people on the margin who could… It makes a difference between them flying, say once in their life and five times in their life. It makes a big difference to have access to those opportunities and those privileges. So my radical point of view is, I want to find ways to make aviation fuel cheaper and to build hypersonic magnesium aircraft that use liquified natural gas as their fuel and go much faster. And I want to expand the access to this privilege to everyone, not just the 10 or 15 million richest people on earth. If you say you want to avoid carbon emitting use cases, and so you want to avoid having carbon emitting flights or carbon emitting cars, there are two ways we can achieve that. One is we substitute a lot of internal combustion cars with battery-powered cars. And that's one way where you just stop—you eliminate the hydrocarbons altogether, or you could start using zero-carbon, zero net new carbon— Synthetics. Yeah, exactly. Synthetic fuels. Where do you think the world goes? Which things go towards electrification and just removing the hydrocarbons altogether and which things do we go to using clean hydrocarbons? Yeah, I mean I have opinions on this. At the end of the day, the market will decide. Sure, but what are your predictions? My predictions? You watch this market. Electric cars are really great and that— We just had RJ from Rivian and it's a great product. Yeah, exactly. And that over time we will see more other successful, hopefully Western, electric car manufacturers that can compete with Tesla, and Tesla can continue to grow its market share and so on. And it would not surprise me if when we are like crusty old men sitting here, let's say in our late eighties, that pretty much all the cars and all the trucks were electric, all the ground-based transport was electric. But at the same time, wouldn't it be amazing if aviation by that point had grown by 20x or 50x and so instead of 50 million people flying planes more or less, occasionally it was 500 million or a billion people flying planes, getting to fly in planes. And just that by itself would more than use all the oil that humanity currently uses. So I think the really energy-intense, high-speed transportation stuff will stay fuel. Rockets, obviously, will stay fuel.…

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