See https://terraformindustries.com/ and https://twitter.com/TerraformIndies
Terraform Industries is a carbon-capture company that claims to be "a bet on cheap solar, synthetic hydrocarbon supremacy, and hyperscale". Basically, they think solar power will be cheap enough to efficiently turn atmospheric CO2 into methane.
Previous market: https://manifold.markets/citrinitas/will-terraform-industries-sell-some#
Terraform already has a sales contract to sell an unspecified amount of methane, so that market resolved YES. This market is limited in scope to ONLY sales of the main Sabatier reactor product.
The specific criteria to resolve YES:
Selling, or contracting to sell, any electricity-to-hydrocarbon reactor (such as their sabatier reactor), or any large part of such a reactor, to be used for the purpose of storing solar energy as hydrocarbons. "Large part" means either the complete sabatier reactor, or the complete carbon concentrator.
Complicated leasing setups still count as a sale, as long as the transaction is "Party A gives Terraform money, and Terraform gives Party A a machine"
Resolves based on any information that's publicly available and/or shared with this market at close time. Note that by this design, they don't need to actually deliver by the end of 2024.
(Meeting these criteria in 2023 would also resolve YES, if they go that fast)
These criteria are fuzzy until 20 March, if anyone would like to suggest any improvements. After that I'll interpret them as written.
1,000
1.00We’re taking reservations for our first production Terraformers, and ramping production to meet demand.
From the end of this press release: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/04/01/terraform-makes-carbon-neutral-natural-gas/
I'm happy waiting a bit longer for something more specific, but the current status is they're "taking reservations", unclear if those reservations are actually sales for future delivery or not.
@jojo Correct, if they manage to sell a reactor that doesn't yet exist it still counts as YES. I'm outsourcing my "how real is this?" decision capacity to the buyer.
@citrinitas if i understand correctly it seems that they currently have deals with oil & gas companies, though i don’t know if that’s just for sale of gas or includes reactors too
@jojo Hmm. One such deal resolved the previous market -- https://manifold.markets/citrinitas/will-terraform-industries-sell-some#
But that one was just for sale of methane, I think to cover the excess they were producing in the course of R&D. This market is more narrowly targeted. If you can find public evidence of a reactor sale, post it so I can resolve.
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I assume that if they begin to commercialise before 2024, this market still resolves Yes?
I'm betting NO, for four reasons:
1) Their website is good. Too good. It is tingling my "it's a trap" reflex.
2) Hardware is always slow; I doubt they have a working prototype the size of shipping container before 2025.
3) There are "CO2 pipelines" and other sources of CO2 that don't involve atmospheric capture today. Other than making a non-economic ideological statement, I don't see how they can have "carbon capture" in their plan right now.
4) Despite that negativity, this is really cool, and I kind of want to incentivize other market participants to bet YES.
@AlexPower Not trying to promote either side here, but I'm curious what you mean by "the website is too good"? I read this and expected to see a really professionally done website with pictures sliding in as you scroll and what not. Instead, I saw a raw-html ASCII art main site and a blog on wordpress.
@BoltonBailey I don't know what OP meant, but I also think it's a fantastic website. There's a kind of raw, understated beauty in advertising the ethos of your company as 5 ascii-art chemical equations. The website is so minimalist in order to emphasize that the tech should stand on its own. They have nothing to hide, so they don't need a fancy window-dressing to shape the reader's perspective.
Of course, that's only if you believe them. Maybe the entire frame is wrong, or the problem is not quite as simple as they make it out to be. That's why I made this market, to lure out the people who understand the chemistry well enough to say if they're bullshitting or legit.
1) "The website is too good" heh have you seen Prometheus fuels? They're doing something similar but their website is basically a marvel movie!
I've seen the Terraform Industries website grow over time from 3 plaintext lines in 2021 to its current form with ASCII art, that progress seems legit to me.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211103092036/http://terraformindustries.com/
2) They don't need to have a working prototype for this market to resolve Yes, let alone have one the size of a shipping container.
3) Yeah that's fair, I think parts of this could work when attached to something like the cement industry. But now you're building a slightly different reactor with quite different optimization criteria, and your default reactor wouldn't be as competitive in that application. They're basically betting on solar trends continuing, and so far that seems like a good bet.
4) I'll take that Yes then :D
@Mqrius I'm a bit skeptical they'll be able to line up a contract if it's not clear they've got a product and a hard timeline. That's why I included the "contract to sell" term -- if someone is signed up to give them 100k, it's a pretty strong signal that terraform isn't vaporware.
Re (3), as I understand it the carbon capture unit isn't super tightly integrated. They've included it so that you can drop a reactor on a solar field with no other inputs, but if you've got a CO2 source and sufficient power you should be able to use the electrolyzer + sabatier on their own.
This isn't Yes yet, but:
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-terraformer-mark-one/
Production starts Q2 2024.
Well, that's promising. I think it's very likely that, if this market resolves YES, it's because they've sold a Terraformer unit.
That leaves 2.5 quarters to build and sell a unit. Will they pull it off?
@citrinitas Fwiw for this market they don't need to "build and sell a unit" for it to resolve Yes. They only need to contract/sell one, which can happen before they start production.
@citrinitas The base price is to replace an inverter of a 1MW array, which can easily cost 200k in just the parts.