Terraform Industries — the context

[?: this date puts the page at the top of the projects list, above the build pages. If you'd rather it sit at the bottom as background reading, date it 2025-01-01.]

Most of the project pages here come from my work at Terraform Industries. They document individual builds — a cyclone, a set of refractory blocks — without much room to explain what any of it is for. So, here's some context. Also, maybe go watch some video of Casey Handmer(the founder) talking, he's a wonderful speaker and physicist.

What Terraform is doing

Terraform Industries makes synthetic hydrocarbon fuel from sunlight and air. Said synthetic fuel, from solar power and atsmopheric CO2, will eventually transform our relationship with energy and the climate. The company operates out of a converted building in Burbank they call the castle, with field testing in the Mojave desert at Muroc. If you want to understand the core principles at work this article is a good starting place.

The machine that does it is the Terraformer, and it's really four machines chained together:

1. Solar array — the energy input. Cheap solar is the bet the whole company rests on.
2. Electrolyzer — splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.
3. Direct air capture — pulls CO2 out of ambient air.
4. Methane synthesis reactor — combines the hydrogen and CO2 into methane clean enough for the existing gas pipeline network.

None of these steps is exotic or untested. The direct air capture is unproven industrially. The engineering problems is cost for the electrolizer and reactor teams, and industrial viability for the direct air capture team, works fine on a chemists bench and they're making fast progress creating and testing an industrial scale aparatus. The company mantra is SIMPLIFY DELETE REPEAT, this is done as quickly as possible.

When I joined, there was working hardware, strong iteration path in place on the electrolyzer team and scaled down functional prototype for the reactor team. The direct air capture team was pretty far behind the other teams, mostly in part to working in a new design space, while the other teams were improving on existing technology, the mechanisms of direct air capture(DAC) are quite challenging to implement. While I was there, scaled prototypes were designed and tested for each step of the DAC loop. They continue to make amazing progress with a 1.8 MW solar test site at Muroc, an electrolyzer stack qualified under $100/kW, CO2 capture under $250 a ton, and a $38M seed round closed in spring 2026.

The calcium loop

The part of the machine my work lives in is the direct air capture(DAC), which runs on one of the oldest chemical cycles humans know: lime and limestone.

Quicklime (CaO) is slaked with water into calcium hydroxide flakes. Big fans blow humid air through beds of those flakes, and the CO2 in the air reacts in to form calcium carbonate — limestone, the same reaction that cures lime mortar. Then a kiln — the calciner — heats the carbonate until it lets go of the CO2 as a concentrated stream and turns back into quicklime, ready to go around again. The sorbent loops forever; the only thing consumed is heat and air.

That loop is where my projects come from. It involves moving enormous amounts of hot, abrasive, dusty powder through machinery, continuously and cheaply — which turns out to be a very difficult engineering problem in design and in operation. Who doesn't love an extremely hard problem that could help to keep the world functional?

Where my projects fit

• Cyclonic characterization — the sorbent moves through the system as dust in air. Cyclones are how you get the dust back out of the air. First job: build one and learn what it actually does.
• Cyclonic scaled prototype — Cyclone Dev 1, the same idea scaled up into real steel.
• Mullite block mix formulation — the calciner runs hot, so it needs refractory. Casting and crushing tiles to pick a mix.
• Mullite block production — producing the seven refractory blocks for Dawson's calciner prototype.
• Wet filtration test campaign — the carbonator sheds calcium dust off the flakes, and cloth filters need changing daily. A modular skid built to test whether wet filtration does the job with less resistance and a longer service interval.
• Alumina rapid casting — ongoing: a faster way to make high-temperature ceramic parts.

Role

My role was largely "fastest possible path to working hardware": rapid prototyping, fabrication, figuring out how to actually make the things others design, and helping the incoming engineers understand our process and how to work in our shop. In the beginning I was tasked with production, model the object, source the parts, make it, run test. By the end I was running solo full stack, idea -> test rig -> prototype design -> integration. I'm not a formally trained engineer so mathy parts of data analysis and calculations were handled primarily by the ever vigilant engineer AK Jain.

Learnings

Terraform Industries is a magical place for learning and developing skills. This is primarily due to their painstaking and wildly selective hiring process. Everyone there is a genius, but they are also interesting people, insightful and generous. The company culture is distinctly 'yes I can help with that', with time taken for learning even when the pressure is particularly fierce(most of the time). Turns out I'm rather a sponge in such an environment. I was able to bring my CAD skills from antiquated to current and learn parametric design, as well as getting practical experience in rapid design for manufacture(DFM). Oh and there were lasers, the welding kind, fell a bit in love with what is possible with this emerging consumer grade technology. I also got to refine my scientific process being that my proposals and documentation would be reviewed by a panel of brilliant doctors of science, and not gently. Micro lessons and softer skills were aplenty, I'll write about some of them over in my writings.

Notes

• Company: terraformindustries.com — their blog is unusually good technical writing if you want the deep end.
• Status: Departed, May 2026