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…avings onto your customers. That's absolutely essential for synthetic fuels. There's no two ways about it. You cannot run synthetic fuels unless you have the cheapest possible electricity you can get. And you think in a way solar power will get much simpler and dumber where, for example, people used to optimize solar power by having movable panels that track the sun. And again, what happened as the panels became cheaper is, just put more of them down, don't bother having them follow the sun. And yeah, it costs a little bit more in the panel cost, but you save all that money in the super advanced hardware. And you think we have further to go in making the panels simpler. How far does that go? Economically speaking, we should have deleted trackers in 2016— the trackers of the systems that move the panels around. Obviously we're still in 2025 installing trackers. Why? Well, because— But the people who run these projects are smart, and they want to make money. I don't think “people are acting irrationally” tends to be a great explanation. Some amount of irrationality, I think, is involved. And I also think that there are certain participants in this market who are quite happy with cozy oligopolies and whatnot. So there's a lot of—I'd say the area’s ripe for disruption. So that was the first half of the question. The second half was, can panels get cheaper? They certainly can. So if you look at capital flows into solar panel manufacturing facilities in Southeast Asia, or the United States, or Europe or whatever, what assumptions they must be making about the economics in order to justify that investment. They could probably see line of sight to another 2x reduction in cost. So we go from 8 cents a watt down to 4 cents a watt. Just to pause for a second, 4 cents a watt is an absurdly low price. So the electricity that comes out of that is a thousand times cheaper than the cheapest food that humans can digest on a joule-for-joule, calorie-for-calorie basis. The limited physics on how cheap a solar panel can be is at least 10 times cheaper than it currently is. How would you achieve that? A very, very thin layer of structured silicon on some kind of inexpensive plastic backing or something like that. But in terms of, well fundamentally what do you need? You need some kind of transparent diode that creates this foamy-level nonsense that allows the electrons to do their thing as they go around. And in terms of limited physics, that could be the most generic thing imaginable. What was your line? “We're blessed that one of the most abundant elements on the earth squeaks electrons when you shine a light on it.” I don't know if that's my line, but yes, it's certainly the case. Well, it's a line you told me. Maybe you didn't invent it. Okay, so solar panels can get a lot cheaper. Why aren't you working on, why does Terraform not produce really cheap solar panels if you think everyone's doing it wrong? I think that the companies producing cheap solar panels are doing it right. They're doing a fabulous job. It's very competitive. But you just said people are buying expensive solar installs when they should be buying cheap ones. roducing cheap solar panels are doing it right. They're doing a fabulous job. It's very competitive. But you just said people are buying expensive solar installs when they should be buying cheap ones. Well, so you've got the EPCs, which are the companies whose job it is to sell a solar array development to a buyer like a utility. They'll be buying the modules from probably a retailer, probably not directly from the factory, and they'll be buying other various components and doing the engineering and the procurement and the construction. The construction will be subbed out as well. So that model obviously needs to be refined. Why am I not competing in that? Maybe I am. But making modules themselves, I don’t know why you would go into that fight unless you absolutely had to. There's a lesson here. This is what David Senra talks about a lot which is really good businesses are built by commodifying a complement. And the complement being commodified here is, as much as possible, of solar development, which is pretty much reduced to practice and commodified already at this point. And the part that you sit on top of that is the thing that takes that and turns into something useful for the end customer. And then you end up providing that value transformation. You sell a kit. I think your nominal design size is one megawatt, right? Yes. That's what you guys are building for. And one megawatt, for context, is a few hundred homes? Maybe in Europe. Okay, yeah, yeah. In America— 20 or 30 homes here, I think. Oh, okay. 20 or 30 air-conditioned homes with the pool and everything. Ten thousand square feet. Exactly. Like a kitchen on the kitchen on the kitchen. Exactly, yeah. So that's a megawatt. And so you sell a one megawatt kit that, again, captures the solar power and produces the hydrocarbons. Instant oil well. Exactly. When will you have your first customer paying you for hydrocarbons that doesn't want you to turn it off? So not like a demo pilot or something like that. We're in the process right now of attempting to acquire land, which would then result in construction and development of these. All goes well, it could be early next year. I strongly suspect at this point—I’ve got a few bruises—not everything will go well. So we'll see. But potentially next year, you're selling oil? Well, natural gas. Yeah, so actually there's an interesting point there, which is obviously there's been some political shenanigans here. And we've got to the point now where actually we're looking at doing methanol accelerating the methanol pathway as well. The reason for that is that natural gas prices are basically set by the marginal producer, which is not us, and it's pretty cheap. Now, I think that as our export capacity to Europe increases and our fields continue to deplete and so on, we're going to see that price rise quite a bit, but probably not next year. So in the meantime, we can produce methanol and sell that at roughly six times higher revenue per carbon atom handled. Assembling molecules atom by atom is tedious. I'm sorry, where do we use methanol in the economy? me, we can produce methanol and sell that at roughly six times higher revenue per carbon atom handled. Assembling molecules atom by atom is tedious. I'm sorry, where do we use methanol in the economy? Methanol, it's used for all kinds of things, but it's a precursor. So again, this is a somewhat subtle point, but Terraform’s job is to take sunlight, which is intermittent, but it's free. And in the form of solar panels, make electricity that's intermittent and then do a bunch of very scary chemical engineering to turn it into a tangible, storable, off-loadable commodity. So we make hydrogen, but I would never dream of trying to sell that hydrogen as our major product because there's no mechanisms for transporting that to market. No one wants it in bulk. It's an intermediate product, not the final product. We make carbon dioxide, same story. Put them together, now we have something that you can store in a tank. Methanol itself is chemically, in terms of boiling point and so on, it's very similar to water. So you can literally store it in a tank. Then if you want to, you can pipe it across the road to a standard old-school refinery and they can turn it into gasoline or something. I could do that myself. I could build a refinery, but what is Terraform good at? We don’t know much about making large-scale chemical plants and we'd have to go and license the MTG process anyway. Methol a gasoline process. So why not just hand that off to someone who can do that already? And we just focus on the thing that we do really well. The methanol to gasoline process is like a proprietary process that you have to pay— A local development in the seventies. But is it patented? Is it a trade secret? Almost certainly had a patent at this point, but— It's just protected by trade secrets? So the thing is, even if I had all the patents in front of me right now and blueprints of the plant, right? It's just process knowledge. And access to half a dozen expert chemical engineers had done this before and then I went and built it. I promise you it would still not work. It's Walter White's cook. It's just the process. I've not seen that show, but I mean it's the same as brewing beer. I can buy all the pipes, I can make something undrinkable, but— I believe that. Oh yeah, but– I mean you're Australian. It's in your culture. Now, now. I'm American now as well. Fifteen years [on] Sunday. It's a very finicky process. I think it involves blood sacrifice to get it right actually, to be perfectly honest. Okay, so that's methanol. And sorry, you mentioned you could do cement. How does that work? Well, so we use what's called lime calcite cycle to capture CO2. And so that involves calcinating calcium carbonate to make calcium oxide, which is the active ingredient in cement. So that's 60% of the difficulty of making cement there. Then having a shiny demo of something that works but is not commercially viable.…

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