Nearly a century ago, this neighborhood in Burbank was the birthplace of Americas first fighter jet. Now this fortress may be the innovation frontier for the next global fight to take on climate change. In the process, the same technology could provide a key to the Mars equation, producing fuel in situ for return flights from the red planet. 

The origins of this castle trace back to an entrepreneur born in the San Fernando Valley named Gary Bandy. Bandy was a machinist by trade who took over his father’s machine shop in the 1950s. Under his leadership, the company Bandy Hinge became a pillar of the aerospace industry, and his precision milled parts were critical in the design and fabrication of many generations of Lockheed fighter jets as well as NASA’s Space Shuttle. Reinvesting the profits from this business, Bandy began building castles across Burbank to bring flair to the city he called home. Decades later, one of these castles would be home to new kind of start up, with ambitions as eccentric as the castle it called headquarters: Terraform Industries.

Terraform Industries’ plan, at face value, gets some raised eyebrows. Their stated mission is to create “gigascale atmospheric hydrocarbon synthesis”, or in simpler terms, production of natural gas, captured from the air instead of the extracted from the ground. Hydrocarbons are any chemical compound that is composed exclusively of hydrogen and carbon atoms. One such hydrocarbon, methane (CH4), is burned to create electricity and used in homes for heating and fuel for cooking applications. Raptor engines in Starship and Super Heavy rely on Methane combined with liquid oxygen to escape Earths gravity.

Production of hydrocarbons have faced increased scrutiny as the world grapples with the effects of climate change, caused in large part by emission of these very greenhouse gases. Plenty of research has gone into methods to replace systems reliant of natural gas with with electrified or green options, but to those working at TI, these hypothetical advancements may be too little, too late.

“In the energy sector, people have been talking about the energy transition for a while now. What's important to realize is that there is no time for the energy transition, we needed that transition decades ago.” said Lucie Nurden, a chemical engineer at Terraform Industries.

“We continue to have a linear relationship with carbon, where we extract it from the ground, we burn it, and it stays in the atmosphere. [Terraform Industries] is buying us some time for this energy transition to occur by allowing the formation of a carbon cycle, where we recycle the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere back into synthetic hydrocarbons, as if we were taking it out from the ground without actually taking it out from the ground.”

In this scenario, the emissions of today would be the fuel source of tomorrow. Burning any form of natural gas would still produce harmful emissions, but Terraform Industries could recapture those pollutants and recycle them into future fuel. Producing this carbon neutral natural gas from the atmosphere feels novel, though the technology behind their first product, the Terraformer, is not. The Terraformer, which is powered by an array of photovoltaic (PV) panels, combines a few pieces of existing technology to create synthetic hydrocarbons from the air.

A Direct Air Capture device pulls in air from the atmosphere from which CO2 is separated. An electrolyzer designed by scientists at Terraform Industries isolates Hydrogen. The resulting molecules are combined in a sabetier reactor to create CH4, with leftover oxygen to spare.

The idea of an unlimited power source, one that recycles emissions into reusable energy supplies, all by pulling energy straight from the air we breathe, reads like science fiction. But Terraform Industries CEO Casey Handmer is upfront about this. “Nothing comes for free. You have to put in way more power than you get out. All processes that convert energy from one another involve losses.”

Solar power. The price of PV panels and solar energy has cratered in the last decade, and that price is expected to continue to fall. From 2010 to 2020, there was a 82% reduction in the cost of utility-scale PV systems. In the last half decade, substantial investments and subsidies by governments across the globe have continued to bolster the technology, supercharging the market for solar power and ensuring that the energy is increasingly cheap and abundant.

With this development, the stars aligned for Handmer and the ideas he had been mulling over. “This Terraform idea kind of sprang out of some theoretical work I was doing with hydrocarbon supply chains on Mars, and making fuel from air to fly rockets.” In Handmer’s view, in order to be successful on the red planet, humanity needs a fuel source that can be made on Mars. “One of the key needs is a synthetic hydrocarbon supply chain, and it just so happens that solar power got cheap enough in the intervening years to make building it on Earth, first not only a good idea, but actually a compelling way to spin off the the absolutely colossal quantities of cash necessary to do something useful in space.”  

That’s the bet, that this kind of technology is achievable on Mars. In the meantime,  it has significant, important applications on Earth, where it can be developed for less money and on a more aggressive timeline. Terraform Industries faces significant headwinds. Energy market fluctuations, geopolitical factors (especially in the cost and production of solar panels), and the scale of production required to achieve cost parity with traditional natural gas extraction all add layers of complexity to TI’s business model. But that doesn't mean that Terraform Industries is waiting on the sidelines. 

In March 2024, Terraform Industries successfully synthesized their first batch of pipeline grade synthetic natural gas in an end to end demo of their technology. The scale of the production was limited, but this proof of concept is validation that these processes can work here on Earth to create energy-dense fuel from air. The company is currently building out their first commercial scale Terraformer for field deployment. Scaling will be the next obstacle, as the company envisions a future where fields of photo voltaic solar panels power Terraformers across the globe and everything from stovetop gas to rocket fuel can be made cheaply and cleanly. 

The idea is ambitious, the climate timeline is short, and the odds seem at times, insurmountably high. But like the castle they call home, employees at Terraform Industries aren’t afraid to buck the status quo in favor of bold solutions. And maybe one day, the achievements made in this fortress will find their way to Mars.