Long-range aviation, shipping, and chemicals will remain hydrocarbon-based for decades
Casey Handmer · Casey Handmer of Terraform Industries on solar maximalism, hard tech, and reclaiming the Salton Sea · Oct 28, 2025 · at 15:36
Terraform Industries founder Casey Handmer discusses with Stripe co-founder John Collison which major industrial sectors cannot realistically electrify.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Fast aircraft, big aircraft, long, long range aircraft, hydrocarbons. Probably long range shipping would stay that way. Like LNG, it's just so cheap. It's gonna stay that way for a long time. Paints are gonna stay hydrocarbon based. Chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, and all that stuff. Plastics.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Casey Handmer
Mechanical solar tracking systems became economically obsolete in 2016
“Economically speaking we should have deleted trackers in 2016, right? Like the trackers are the systems that move the panels around. Obviously we're still in 2025 installing trackers.”
Handmer: Desalinated water can be produced for $99 per acre-foot
“So I believe that it should be possible to produce water, desalinated water, for 99 bucks an acre foot, which would be transformational, right?”
Handmer predicts China will beat the United States to the Moon
“Relax the outer space treaty in 2017 with the outer space, so the Artemis Accords, so we can go and kind of make a land grab on the moon, and then it turns out China's going to get there first.”
Handmer predicts Hyperloop will never happen
“Is Hyperloop ever gonna happen?
[79] Casey Handmer: No.
[80] Casey Handmer: I think I can safely say that now.”
Synthesizing natural gas from air and water is now financially viable
“The solar has gotten so cheap that you can actually kind of do the reverse process, and it makes financial sense, increasingly so over time.”
Synthetic fuel production is 100 times more land-efficient than biological photosynthesis
“Plants are great. Even this plastic one here but their net throughput efficiency is about a hundred times lower than a synthetic process like the one we're using in terms of like, Area of land into reduced carbon fuel.”