Are cleaner hydrocarbons possible?

James Lawler: [00:00:00] Welcome to Climate Now, I’m James Lawler. Even though the International Energy Agency, IEA, reports that renewables make up an increasingly greater portion of the global energy mix, about three quarters of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels, with nearly 30 percent of that fossil fuel coming from natural gas, according to data from Our World in Data. 

Our guest today has been especially focused on that last portion of the energy mix. Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries, a company that aims to replace fossil gas and hydrocarbons in general with a new carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbons. He’ll explain what that means in a moment. A Caltech graduate with a PhD in theoretical physics, Casey previously worked as an engineer at Hyperloop One  and was a software architect at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL. 

Now, Casey is putting his talents to work at Terraform, where he and his team are developing a technology that can, quite literally, create [00:01:00] carbon-neutral natural gas out of atmospheric air, water, and sunlight. In our conversation today, we’ll discuss the economics, technology, and the science underpinning Terraform’s work to build, and crucially, scale, what Casey calls, “a synthetic hydrocarbon supply chain here on Earth.” 

Welcome Casey to Climate Now. It’s great to talk to you today. Thanks for joining us.  

Casey Handmer: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here.  

James Lawler: So what is a synthetic hydrocarbon supply chain and why are you thinking about that at a time when it seems like everyone else is thinking about how do we move away from hydrocarbons to renewable sources of, of power? Let’s just start there.  

Casey Handmer: Yeah. So I’m going to ask your listeners to bear with me for a second because this is a little bit counterintuitive. So essentially, two thirds to three quarters of the energy that humanity consumes is in the form of hydrocarbons or coal. And much as we would like to, and maybe a moral sense, simply switching that off is not an option.  

It would be a moral and environmental catastrophe just to like, you know, essentially spontaneously [00:02:00] starve most of the world’s population. But it would also be, for that reason, politically impossible as well. So I think we need to think about CO₂ emissions as something which has both a positive side and a negative side.  

And the positive side is, you know, if you’re a NASA satellite looking down at the earth and you’re looking at countries that are emitting a lot of CO₂, they are generally ones where people are having longer, better, more peaceful, more stable, less dangerous lives where their children have a greater chance of survival. And so, you know, but for the fact that CO₂ accumulating in the atmosphere is causing this kind of slow-rolling climate disaster, actually emitting is probably a good thing.  

And so really the problem is not emitting CO₂. The problem is that that CO₂ emission was the carbon that originated in the crust and is now in the atmosphere, and has no way of quickly going back into the crust. It does eventually get back into the crust, but it takes hundreds of years. So, the way we solve this problem is that we turn off the oil wells, right? We turn off the coal mines, but we also continue to burn and consume lots and lots of hydrocarbons as much as you possibly can.  

James Lawler: Now, I want to, I want to just pause you there [00:03:00] for a second. What is it, what’s so magical about hydrocarbons? Why are they such a great option to power civilization? You’ve mentioned one reason, which is, which is the that of inertia, meaning that we’re already, we already rely on them for the, for the success we’ve had so far, but why are they important going forward? 

Casey Handmer: I think people generally underestimate or don’t fully appreciate the ways in which oil and gas and coal come into their lives. And just to give a couple of examples, the Haber-Bosch process was powered by hydrocarbons. And so that essentially technology that allows us to produce nitrate and ammonia-based fertilizers, which essentially underpin the fertility of modern farming. 

James Lawler: So to unpack what you just said there, essentially, just to, just to clarify and make sure that everyone follows what you just said, you’ve got, you know, we have nitrogen that naturally occurs in the air. You use Haber-Bosch to combine that with hydrogen, which comes off of a steam methane reforming process derived from a fossil fuel, namely natural gas. And so that ammonia goes into our food. We eat the food. Ergo, a large percentage of nitrogen in our bodies is [00:04:00] fossil fuel derived.  

Casey Handmer: It’s also the case that before the Haber-Bosch process was invented, the world population was much lower. Farming was much more labor intensive. And starvation was basically a certainty if you lived long enough. And since it was invented, it’s extremity essentially only occurs because of very deep mismanagement and war or other factors. It doesn’t occur naturally. So that’s one example. 

 Then it costs essentially all plastics, glues, resins, and so on are all derived from hydrocarbons. The clothing that I’m wearing is made of hydrocarbons. The computer that we’re using here is made of hydrocarbons. The silicon that’s in it is refined using hydrocarbons. It’s essentially every single industrial process in the entire world, which is responsible for producing tens of millions of basic, fundamental products that our lives depend on is derived from hydrocarbons.  

We live in the age of oil, and it is possible in some cases to electrify these processes or to come up with refining processes that do not rely on hydrocarbons. It is exceptionally unusual for those processes to be superior, that is to say cheaper and deliver more value, than the ones that use hydrocarbons.  

What I would like, you know, if your listeners take one thing away from this interview, it is that I guarantee here, like, that in a [00:05:00] hundred years, a thousand years, 10,000 years, much of what humanity depends on for its fundamental supply chains will still be dependent on hydrocarbons. Those hydrocarbons will no longer come from crust, but they will, they will still be essentially natural gas in its derivatives being used to power all these kinds of things.  

James Lawler: Great. Okay. So that was really important. So now we’ve covered sort of the basic premise here. So we, we know, we accept that we’re going to need not only the amount of hydrocarbons that we currently consume or thereabouts, but probably more because we will be doing more things.  

More people will be using air travel, for example, more people will be consuming products. And so, the demand for hydrocarbons is probably going to increase, but we have to make them in a different way. So enter concept for Terraform Industries. All right. So what is the concept?  

Casey Handmer: The basic idea is we make cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. So let’s unpack that a little bit. Cheap is important, right? There’s no prizes for figuring out a way of making oil and gas; it costs a hundred times more than you can get out of the ground. No one’s going to want it. No one’s going to pay for that. [00:06:00] It’s like morally problematic, to say the least, to assume that making fuel more scarce and more inaccessible to poor people is a good thing.  

Synthetic means that we’re making them from, from water and CO₂ and energy. They’re not being derived in their natural form underground as we find oil and gas there. Natural gas is, is one of the names for methane or CH4. It’s the simplest hydrocarbon. It’s also the fuel that is used by a lot of modern rockets. In some ways, it’s a very versatile chemical. It’s somewhat more difficult to transport than oil because it’s gaseous at room temperature, but we’re getting pretty good at that as well. United States is now the world’s major exporter of natural gas and it’s exporting it all over the world, largely derived from the fracking boom.  

So the good thing about that is that it’s all this existing infrastructure that already uses that process; all we need to do is substitute the point of creation, right? So like, you can think of, of like, the surface of the earth, just above the grass, where like the natural gas comes out of a pipe and then goes into a distribution system and you just kind of cut it there and then plug in, plug in a new system that’s completely backwards compatible, it’s cost compatible.  

We’re, we’re looking actively at deploying our first [00:07:00] systems in existing gas fields so that we can augment their production, and bootstrap off their existing distribution infrastructure, which is super helpful. So, at no point do we have to rip everything out and start again. At no point do you have to build a new national pipeline network for hydrogen or ammonia or some other, some of the chemical, just kind of feed straight in. But you can’t make it cheaper unless you have a source of energy that’s significantly cheaper than natural gas.  

And natural gas is one of the cheapest forms of energy there is. So like, what is cheaper than natural gas? Because the interconversion process is not perfectly efficient, far from it, actually. So you need something that’s even cheaper than that. And it turns out that we’ve gotten so good at making solar panels, you can synthesize natural gas from that electricity, out in the middle of nowhere in some desert somewhere, more cheaply than a drilling hole in the ground, which is super important if you happen to be someone who needs a natural gas and you don’t happen to be in a part of the world that has it naturally occurring. Now all you have to do is put a solar array out, which is essentially how we got our energy before the industrial revolution, right?  

Everywhere that people live, it’s just a place where they can go and plant plants, which is solar powered, but they mix synthetic carbohydrates using sunlight and air, and then you would take that energy and eat it and that was how you feed your body. So basically we’re doing the same thing but on [00:08:00] an industrial scale.  

James Lawler: So I understand the like, so the inputs to the process are, you know, you’re taking electrolysis, so you’re breaking the oxygen, hydrogen bonds and water by running an electric current through water. And you’re getting that electric current from solar panels. So that’s your source of hydrogen.  

Then on the other side, your source of CO₂ is a direct air capture process where you’re running the ambient air across the sorbent, which is capturing the CO₂ which you’re then re-releasing and compressing sufficiently to then enter into a reaction with the hydrogen you’ve produced to produce your methane, right? 

So you’ve got these two processes that sort of connect and make your final product. Now, what I struggled to get my, my head around with this is you’re doing two things that are incredibly energy intensive, right? You’re breaking the oxygen hydrogen oxygen bond, which is one of, which is a strong bond. So it needs a lot of energy to do that. And then you’re, you need a lot of energy to take CO₂ out of the air, which again, is a few hundred parts per million. And that is also not trivial. We’ve [00:09:00] talked a lot about direct air capture on this podcast. And so our listeners maybe are, are somewhat aware with, with how energy intensive that is to, to do that at any kind of scale. 

Casey Handmer: Okay. So, I think it’s a common misconception that the, that the reason DAC is hard is because it’s energy intensive. It’s actually not energy intensive, not compared to electrolysis, not even close, not intrinsically. If you’re in a situation where you’re extremely energetically constrained, you can capture CO₂ from the air with almost no energy. And the plants do this all the time, right. Plants are spending almost all their energy doing the electrolysis system. In our situation, at Terraform, we’re actually not particularly energy constrained because the solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper over time, whereas we are constrained in terms of materials, land, labor, and all the other stuff. So, we actually want to find ways to make the machinery more cheaply by spending energy that would otherwise be essentially for free, right? Like, in our system, we’re spending 80 plus percent of the energy on the electrolysis. So, so the rest of the system can afford to be [00:10:00] extremely inefficient and it doesn’t really make any difference to the bottom line in terms of energy use. So, so that actually significantly relaxes a bunch of constraints that would otherwise make our lives very difficult. And in particular, it allows us to use alkali oxide for the solvent materials, which are in our case, calcium carbonate or calcium hydroxide, which is the main ingredient in cement. It’s extremely energy intensive to make it, but it’s also extremely cheap to get the raw materials, which is necessary because we want to deploy this at enormous scale. The most expensive, highest efficiency CO₂ solvent materials can cost tens of thousands of dollars per gram. And maybe you can cycle them ten times a day, but that’s it. And so you spend $10,000 and you can capture a couple of grams of CO₂ a day if you’re lucky. By contrast, you know, crushed limestone is 20 bucks a ton, and you can cycle that once every two days. So you’re talking tons of CO₂ per day for 20 bucks instead of grams of CO₂ per day for tens of thousands of dollars. Which it’s like, it’s literally a billion times better value for money.  

James Lawler: What?  

Casey Handmer: A billion with a “B” times better [00:11:00] value for money.  

James Lawler: So right now, the price of natural gas is about $2.50 cents per million BTU or $2-$3 per thousand cubic feet. I think. 

Casey Handmer: Yeah. It varies from place to place, but that’s, that’s roughly right.  

James Lawler: And so, what is the cost you project that the cost of the gas that you’d produce is about the same?  

Casey Handmer: So it’s a slightly complex question, as you might appreciate. We think that we can produce natural gas at the same timescale as fracking, which is to say, reasonably quick return on investment, essentially at the same marginal price that we’re paying for electricity and dollars per megawatt.  

So to, to give you some concrete numbers here, right now, we believe that we could deploy in United States, solar arrays to produce electricity for at 20 bucks a megawatt hour. We think that number will drop down towards 10 bucks by the end of the decade, which is not particularly competitive if you are sitting on top of an existing [00:12:00] highly productive fracked well in Texas, for example, where the gas is basically free, but a lot of the world’s consumption of hydrocarbons is in places that are highly developed countries that do not have their own adequate supplies of oil. And in these, in these countries, it is not unusual for them to pay $20 to $50 per unit of natural gas. And their next best option is to import it via a colossal, you know, liquid fired natural gas tanker coming across from the United States. 

So, we think that the vast majority of the world’s population can depend on our technology for local supply of cost competitive hydrocarbons in the next decade. And then maybe the decade after that, we’ll finally get around to getting down towards the $2-$3 range in the handful of places on earth where you can actually get gas at that price locally. The critical thing for us right now is that, is that there is extremely large and energy hungry markets, which like our system and its price, would be very competitive. 

James Lawler: Got it. And so that’s your, that’s your customer. You’re focused on countries that have a hard time procuring natural gas at [00:13:00] anywhere close to that spot price now.  

Casey Handmer: Well, in the medium term, yes. In the short term, we’re actually deploying here in California. And the reason for that is that there’s, there’s actually a reasonably well-developed market here at the sort of scale that we’re considering production in the near future that’s willing to pay quite a bit more for renewable natural gas. And those, those prices are between 20 and 50 bucks, same as you would get in Europe. So it’s very convenient for us.  

And then on top of that, we have the Inflation Reduction Act, in the United States, which also is a substantial subsidy for us in the short term. All of these things basically help us bootstrap to the point where we can address the broader market. It’s also, you know, I think its underappreciated just how enormous these markets are. Other large industries might turn over a billion dollars in a year. And the oil and gas industry turns over a billion dollars in an hour.  

And so for us, we don’t actually have to sell all that much gas in the grand scheme of things to make a lot of money and to be able to self-fund our operations going forward and just walk down the experience curve and get those cost curves in the right direction. The critical thing for us is just getting, getting those early market entry points, right?  

James Lawler: Yeah. So a little more on that. So [00:14:00] in California today, you’re able to sell your natural gas at $10 to $30. Who’s buying it at that price?  

Casey Handmer: There’s the LCFS program in California, and there’s also a number of other programs. 

James Lawler: Got it. Now, for those who don’t know what LCFS stands for, it’s the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. It’s a program in California and elsewhere that has basically set a declining cap on the carbon intensity of certain fuels, which leaves emitters with two choices. Either refine cleaner fuel so they can meet the cap, or purchase credits generated by producers of low carbon fuel to account for their deficit. 

Casey Handmer: There are quite a number of fairly intense carbon emitters that are prepared to pay quite a lot of money so you can trade those carbon credits under the LCFS or similar systems.  

James Lawler: So broadly speaking, there are, there are ultimate buyers of natural gas, industrial buyers who, if they use your natural gas, you know, they’re willing to pay a multiple of what they would otherwise pay SoCal Gas or whomever they’re buying it from. 

Casey Handmer: So like, SoCal Gas is a regulated utility. They have a legal obligation to go [00:15:00] and purchase it at the lowest possible price, which makes sense. And so we actually have offtake agreements with SoCal Gas right now. And we anticipate that they will be the first people to hand us a check in the coming months as we complete our end-to-end demo, which will be fabulous. Really critical proof of concept or proof, proof point for what we’re doing here, which is converting electricity into money without having to go through the congested electrical grid. Yeah. And then they, they also directly procure RNG and then- and distribute it through their system. 

James Lawler: Got it. And so they have, they have customers that are willing to buy this gas for the purpose of counting the, the credits? 

Casey Handmer: Well, they do, but they also have legal obligations to purchase a certain fraction of RNG. So, SoCal Gas is an interesting, interesting position. Essentially all of the California utilities have to reduce their emissions and for the utilities that have electrical, they can offset the emissions of their gas business with their electricity business, but SoCal Gas is gas only. So they’re working like crazy to do this very multi-pronged approach to try and reduce their exposure to kind of unavoidable emissions of getting gas out of the ground and burning it.  

James Lawler: Right. Right. So it’s [00:16:00] principally the political liability or the legal liability that, you know, that SoCal Gas has that, that forces them to buy at a much higher price. It’s not like they have customers that are willing to pay that price. 

Casey Handmer: There’s some customers as well, right? So they also have this program. It was intended to, to provide a market for people who could make either voluntary or mandatory purchases of reduced carbon intensity fuel under the existing system. So like, we’re not, we’re not mandating from heaven that like, oh, well, you know, you’re, you’re an evil polluting cement company or truck company or something, therefore you have to go out of your way to somehow procure hydrogen to run your system. 

No, you can continue just using the same old supply chain as forever, but we have this accounting mechanism on top that allows us to like essentially provide these, these market signals that will help people essentially go and build RNG facilities. I think there’s, there’s a lot to be said for the success of that program, which is that it’s taken a bunch of methane emission that would otherwise just occur, and it’s terrible greenhouse gas itself, and captured it and burned it.  

James Lawler: Okay. There are a lot of companies that are focused on using, you know, [00:17:00] biological or non-fossil sources of carbon and converting those into fuels, you know, from agriculture or, you know, from forestry waste or other things, and they’re converting this through a variety of processes to aviation fuels. So on the surface, it would seem that that makes sense because you have a more concentrated source of the carbon in the biomass than you do, let’s say, in the ambient air. Right?  

So if you were to pick, if you were to pick your source of carbon, one might think that a better place to start would be the biomass, but you’re, you’re not choosing to go that route. You’re choosing to make fuels from carbon that is harder to get your hands around because it’s floating out there in the air. 

Casey Handmer: To an extent, but like, once you solve that problem, you can do that anyway. Right? So like, if in principle we could go and like set up shop next to a coal plant or something and be like, well, you know, the carbon that is in the smokestack from that coal plant is more concentrated than in the air, that’ll make our lives easier. But it, but it doesn’t really make your life easier because first of all, now you can’t deploy anywhere unless you’ve got a friendly coal plant nearby and that coal plant has to keep operating. And secondly, you can’t deploy it at [00:18:00] a meaningful scale globally.  

Whereas if you can conceive a system that all it requires is a bit of land to put out some solar arrays and then it can capture CO₂ locally, whether you’re in Antarctica or on top of Mount Everest or, you know, in your backyard, it’s pretty much the same CO₂ concentration everywhere. Once you’ve solved that problem, then you’ve solved it in a general case, right?  

I think that using biomass to make fuel is, in some cases, quite sensible, in other places, maybe less so. But, I don’t think anyone seriously believes that we can power today’s fleet of planes using 100 percent biomass-derived SAF. And the reason for that is that if biomass was capable of capturing enough CO₂ from the air using the sun’s energy, then we would never have needed to industrialize in the first place, right? We would never have needed to dig up coal. We could have just gone on cutting down trees and burning them as we did for, you know, tens of thousands of years, watching our children starved to death occasionally.  

And I think this is underappreciated, but I’ll say it here again for your listeners interest; a plant is about 10,000 times less efficient at converting sunlight into usable [00:19:00] chemical energy than a solar array, plus a system like us and food, fortunately, is about a hundred times more expensive per unit energy than say gasoline. So overall, if you have five acres of land growing corn or five acres of land producing electricity with solar array, the solar ray’s only 100 times more economically productive than the farming and farming and solar are both like essentially real estate plays, right? They like, well, we’ll need a couple of states of land to grow corn in a couple of states of land to grow soy and maybe half a state of land for solar arrays and then we’re done.  

But it is important to emphasize that, despite the fact that modern humans, particularly in the United States consume only 1 percent of their energy as food and 99 percent and electricity and gasoline, solar rays can more than keep up with that because they are so much more efficient at converting sunlight into usable energy than plants are. So deploying solar rays and then using them to power synthetic fuel production will actually free up tens of millions of acres of land in the United States, which is currently being used for biofuel production, right? 

 So if you’re, if you’re serious about wanting to [00:20:00] reduce the environmental impact of like monoculture farming across state after state after state, then you should be definitely in favor of synthetic fuel, with solar development, and you’d have to put the solar array on the nice arable land, right? You can rewild that, turn it back into prairie or pasture or forest or whatever, as it was, and put the solar rays in the relatively dry and sunny parts of the country, but you don’t even need all that much land for the solar rays. And it’s like 50:1 or a 100:1 leverage factor in terms of the amount of fuel you’re able to produce per unit land consumed. 

James Lawler: That’s fascinating. So give us some sense of the, of the ratios here in terms of, you know, total gigawatt capacity, photovoltaic solar system, and amount of natural gas that you could produce with your process. So let’s, let’s say you had one gigawatt capacity PV farm producing DC. So no inverters, no battery systems, and roughly 5,000 acres worth of solar panels, let’s say, for a gigawatt in somewhere fairly sunny.  

How much CO2 do you capture and how much methane do you [00:21:00] produce with that kind of source?  

Casey Handmer: Yeah, so that would, that would capture about 200,000 tons of CO₂ per year. And, and then that would essentially all that CO₂ gets converted into methane which would be about 2.4 billion cubic feet of methane per year, which it sounds like a lot. It’s actually not that much in the grand scheme of things as far as hydrocarbons go. I mean, it’d be fabulous for our company right now, if we were doing things of that scale, but it’s also, you know, 5,000 acres producing corn, right. That would be, you know, enough to feed a relatively small population of people and their machines.  

So that’s, that’s the rough numbers where we’re thinking here. I can actually give you the really big number if you want. So if you take world population of 8 billion people and you, you raise their level of hydrocarbon consumption to match the average US consumption, right? Then you would need about 400 terawatts of solar, which sounds like a very large number. 

James Lawler: In order to provide the hydrocarbons that are required? 

Casey Handmer: Yes. So we’d be out about 13 or 14 trillion at current hydrocarbon prices per year. So [00:22:00] 13 or 14 trillion-sized industry globally, 400 terawatts solar arrays, that’s the rough minimum. It’s roughly equivalent to something like one seventh of the world’s deserts would be under solar arrays. And deserts are about a third of the earth’s land surface area. So it’s, it’s a fairly substantial, it’s like 2 percent of earth’s land surface area or something would become solar arrays, which is kind of comparable to urbanization roads. It’s a lot less than farms, farming and forestry together, depending on the continent, 30 to 60 percent of, of land surface area.  

James Lawler: To your earlier point, if we were to produce a synthetic hydrocarbon supply chain using, you know, lots of solar in the way you’ve described, this would also free up some portion of the percent of the land that is used for farming energy crops,  

Casey Handmer: Oh yeah, that varies a lot by country to country because, because the United States and very few other countries really grow such enormous quantities of corn, for example, or soy for biofuels and also for meat production. So something like less than a tenth of US corn is actually for direct corn [00:23:00] product consumption. The rest is, is biofuels amongst other things. So in the United States, I think it’s, it tells a much better story than it does globally. I think most people are not, I mean, essentially most, most parts of the world do not have anything like the US level of arable land and irrigated land that can be put into agricultural production.  

James Lawler: So, I mean, in all of these cases, your concept really depends on this tradeoff of massive, massive amounts of land for solar arrays to power these processes. Like basically we’ll make any trade, the idea being that as long as our energy source is cheap enough, we can sort of solve any problem effectively.  

Casey Handmer: Well, I mean, maybe not every problem, but I think if you can simultaneously alleviate hydrocarbon scarcity worldwide and it’s concomitant strategic and security related issues, and at the same time halt net emission of carbon from the crust into the atmosphere, that would solve an awful lot of problems. That’d be a, that’d be a pretty good solution, like pretty good record for our generation.  

James Lawler: That would be a good result.  

Casey Handmer: Yeah. Previous generations solved refrigeration and we solved this, you know, like, okay, we’re doing pretty good. [00:24:00]  

James Lawler: Yeah. Yeah. So what scale do you think you can achieve in the, in the US?  

Casey Handmer: We think that by the time we’re deploying a gigawatt, 10 gigawatt-scale plants in the later part of this decade, early next decade, in the United States. We’ll be able to basically pay off the capital cost of the installation of these systems in two years, which would put us on par with oil and gas exploration, which is where it needs to be, right? 

James Lawler: What about water requirements? Just for that same one gigawatt capacity, how much water do you need?  

Casey Handmer: We’d be baselining, I think about 2000 cubic meters per day per gigawatt. However, there’s two important caveats here. The first is that there is astonishingly less water per unit area land than agriculture, right? So like, if you’ve got a bunch of empty land and you want to make it economically productive, you can irrigate it or you can put solar panels there. And the solar panels, as I’ve already explained, are like a hundred times more lucrative per unit area, even though the capex is higher. 

 The second factor is that we can [00:25:00] actually make all that water pretty easily. So if we’re in a situation where we cannot get access or we don’t want to get access to local water supplies, we can easily condense that water out of the air. And the reason for that is that water is 30,000 parts per million or something in the air, even in dry places and CO₂ is 400 parts per million. So, like, we can, we can easily snatch a few of those water molecules as they go by. And, and even, if the client wants, we can even generate net water, not enough to do serious agriculture, but enough to provide water for the local community or whatever.  

James Lawler: Society can.  

Casey Handmer: Terraform.  

James Lawler: Terraform? 

Casey Handmer: No, Terraform. Like, so a machine, basically we have a condenser, we have a series of condensers in the system. And if we have abundant local water, then it makes sense for us to delete those condensers and save money for the customer, right? But if we don’t, we can just leave those condensers in or, or upgrade them. And we can essentially capture probably up to 10 cubic meters of water per unit per megawatt per day, which is significantly more than we use. 

James Lawler: Yeah. Well, cool. Well, Casey, this has been fantastic. I love your- the vision that you have [00:26:00] and the way you think about it and it’s a very exciting one and, you know, go faster, please.  

Casey Handmer: Well, thank you.  

James Lawler: And that’s it for today’s episode of Climate Now. Thanks for tuning in. If you’d like to learn more about today’s conversation, visit our website, climatenow.com, where we always upload source transcripts of our episodes. If you have any questions about this episode, or if you know someone who you think would make a great guest, feel free to email us at contact@climatenow.com. Thanks for tuning in, and until next time.