Terraform Industries breaks ground on desert test site as Casey Handmer reveals full-scale synthetic fuel system underway

other product. And so they will survey through the trash and figure out that wait, for every jewel that we saw, we saw three puff bars, which are not approved or something like that. And and then they will know the ratio. Anyway, without further ado, we have Sean Magcguire. No, Casey Hammer.

Oh, Casey Hammer's here. Oh, fantastic. Surprise guest. Sorry, Casey. Great to see you. How you doing?

I'm very well. Definitely not Magguire though.

Sean McGuire is coming on in uh about 10 minutes. Uh thank you so much for joining. This is such a treat. This is even a surprise to me. Anyway, for those who don't know, uh reintroduce yourself for everyone.

Hi, my name is Casey and I'm the founder and CEO of Terraform Industries. Uh longtime fan of the show.

Longtime fan of you. Thank you for the tour of your amazing cast.

I don't want to dox I don't want to dox your location. Uh but uh Casey has like the coolest office I've ever seen. It's amazing. Uh how is progress going? Have you outgrown that facility? How many like what are you building and how many of them have you built?

We are bursting at the seams which is a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. And uh they've got machinery through all the parking lots. Come and visit again sometime. Bring the camera. We'll do a we'll do a a candid walk through. Yeah. It's a lot of progress. Uh it's really exciting actually getting to stand up our own in-house manufacturing uh machinery really like having to decide do we spend half a million dollars on buying this machine from somewhere or just get an intern or two to like build one and learn how to do it from scratch and almost always it's it's better just to like let the American uh engineer like kind of learn how to do it and um and then and then we own that information forever. It's it's super cool.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were we were watching a video of a a man who owns a bowling alley and was lamenting the fact that uh his machines are from the 60s and he can't figure out toi fix them and the parts aren't available anymore. Uh but I think with a little elbow grease he'll be able to keep those working for another 50 years. Uh remind us the the actual product rollout strategy the the uh the the thesis and the actual value prop of your company.

Yeah. So Terraform Industries makes uh synthetic fuel from sunlight and air. So, we're take making um methane and natural gas and um and and we're also making methanol now, which is a precursor to um to liquid hydrocarbons. So, these are all in the news recently. And it turns out that um historically, if you didn't have any underground, you had to depend on getting them from somewhere else and really hope that the US Navy stood between there and here to

make sure that the fuel got there safely. So, for my my fellow Australians still at home in Australia kind of staring at a you know, monitoring the situation type website with about 30 days of fuel left for the whole country. Yeah. And that's not the case. And air. And that's what we're working on.

And so, uh, obviously there's like a pretty sizable R&D effort because this capacity does not exist at scale in America yet. Uh, where are you in the research and development cycle versus deployment cycle versus testing scaling? How are you thinking about the next few years of the business?

Yeah. Uh that's a great question. Um so technology has actually been around in one form or another for more than a century. But the real challenge is innovating on cost. Uh because you know America's frack has got really good at making oil and gas quite cheap, which is great for all of us. Um but if we want to participate in that market, we've got to match them on price. As far as participation um goes, um we we've been, you know, hard at work for more than four years now on R&D. Um and we've we've really basically managed to to solve all the major technical problems. Uh we're right now in the process of building an integrating full-scale system on our test site in um in Burbank and actually this is uh breaking news here on TBNN as far as the wide world's concerned. Um we're uh in the we've broken ground on a test site in the desert as well. So um we'll be

that's great news.

Yeah. So, um, what they tell you about peritting in California is mostly true, but it is, uh, you can prevail and get through, which we've been able to do with the help of our of our friends and partners over at, um, Kern County Peritting, which is super helpful of them. Really appreciate it. Um, it's very, very exciting. It's, uh, we get to go out in the desert and kind of do the vision quest and and actually build this thing and and and have real, honest to God, synthetic methane and methanol in our hands from sunlight, not, you know, kind of the whole process end to end. It's it's a really exciting thing.

It's amazing. I uh

yeah wanted uh I in a perfect world you you could clone yourself and have one version of you just just posting about energy and energy markets and then the other version of you building your business but since we have you here how you know give give us an update on on current kind of LG shortages globally how you think the market uh will kind of react and evolve to so much supply coming offline you mentioned Australia but is everything priced in yet? Is it not priced in? What are you watching?

It's really hard to say. Um, Australia is actually a net LG exporter, but for the liquid products, they're they're obviously importers. And um, Australia, like New Zealand and California and a lot of the rest of the world, has really neglected the necessity of having onshore refining capability. Uh, so you're able to take in a wide variety of different crude products from a wide variety of different exporters and uh, and then process that into usable fuels to keep your economy working. Um and it's been very hard to justify maintaining those capabilities with the environmental problems they cause and and overwhelming cost in some cases. Um when when you know you can just buy it from Singapore or somewhere and and just hope that you know your term in office is not the term in office when the when the wheels come off. And we're kind of seeing the you know this this this foundation has become more shaky in recent years. Um it's very frustrating to me because I'm someone who understands the sheer necessity of uh energy sovereignty for you know well-being of people in particularly in the developed parts of the world and the western world um where you know every man woman child consumes an average of about 11 gallons sorry 11 barrels of oil per person per year um is really it's really important um and unfortunately this has happened so suddenly it's very difficult to adapt that quickly um you'll probably hear the the newspapers and and and TV and so on saying it's going to take years and years and years to rebuild this refinary capacity I don't believe that's actually true I I think if you wanted to do it uh quickly as possible, you could actually do it in months, not years. We know this because uh the Nazi Nazis are able to kind of build um coal to to fuel uh refinery processes uh you know in in the midst of horrific bombardment uh in the second world war which is you know almost 80 years ago. So it is it is possible to do um but uh but it requires a kind of different focus different approach to you know permitting and and construction that is really kind of a muscle that the west has largely lost in the last few years. Really going to have to find it again I think.

Interesting. Um, I I I I love that tour of your office. There was something interesting about your company culture. You had something pinned to the wall or a poll. Can you talk a little bit about the company culture?

Uh, you might have to be more specific. We do have a sign on the wall that says, "We do this not because it's easy, but because we thought it was easy."

Didn't you have Did you have like $100 bills uh taped?

Yeah. Yeah.

Explain that.

Yeah. Okay. So I mean from the perspective of a business owner and operator um we have um you know basically fixed costs and then we have variable costs and and the fixed costs are things like you know payroll and and um and and and rent and and all the rest and then the variable costs are you know when my engineers spend a lot of money buying a machine which I actually like because at the end of the day we're trying to maximize output per input and the fixed costs buy you zero output uh they're just they're just all costs um and so I have this ability to kind of um increase people's salary on a kind of bi-weekly basis. much the same way that the new core the steel American steel company does um by agreeing to series of milestones in advance and then um and then if we hit them which we do about a third of the time everyone gets uh you know basically the person who hit them gets to hand out the the fake money to everyone we write on it what it was for and um and then the cash lands in your account and you go and spend it and feel good about yourself. Um but then then the the the money you stick up by your computer and uh and it reminds you that you know even though we're kind of in this interminable grind uh to try and make this technology work and and you know sometimes you have weeks and even months of like really banging your head against the wall uh in the past you were able to succeed kind of doing almost impossible things on impossible timelines and budgets and and you can do it again and you will do it again and it's really important to kind of internalize that um you know you just got to keep on grinding away until till you solve the problem mentality.

Yeah, I love it. It's such a great like visual representation of progress. Uh well, congratulations on the progress. I would love to come by and and and see the the latest and greatest at the HQ and have a great rest of your valley

on the new site.

We'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, see you soon.

Have a good one. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market, your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that that powers it. Uh we have some news out of Certino. We've been we've been deep diving Apple today. Uh, Apple shipped ads in Apple Maps. Let's uh let's hit the gong for some.

We've been waiting for this.

Congratulations. Uh, I'm sure people love it. I'm sure people I'm sure no one's upset about this. Uh, no. Uh, uh, this is from Mark German, of course, the Germinator. Uh, Apple is launching ads in Apple Maps in search this summer in major advertising expansion. It'll be announced as early as this month. They have been pushing this

Siri ads would would go really hard. Unfortunately, I can't help you about