The Magical Methane Machine
Casey Handmer left NASA to make fuel from thin air. Turns out it’s just as hard as it sounds
Casey Handmer was in seventh grade when he first thought about terraforming a planet. Handmer’s family lived in Sydney, Australia, and his father had taken him to see a talk by Robert Zubrin, an astronautical engineer and the founder of the Mars Society. Zubrin had become a sensation, embraced by Carl Sagan among other scientific luminaries, for his ideas about the colonization of Mars. He argued that instead of hauling materials from Earth, we should aim to establish a Martian outpost by manufacturing as much as we can once we arrive.
Young Handmer sat in the audience, rapt. He was a red-headed kid who hadn’t found his place in the world. After the talk, Handmer waited in line so that Zubrin could sign a copy of his 1996 book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, which Handmer stealthily read at school whenever he got a chance. “At one point, some kids grabbed it out of my hands and ripped it a bit, and I was quite upset,” Handmer said. Zubrin’s book may not have increased his popularity in school, but it propelled him toward an astrophysics Ph.D. program at Caltech which, eventually, landed him a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the heart of NASA’s Mars program.
At NASA, Handmer worked on projects mapping the surface of Mars, but that wasn’t enough Mars for him. In his free time, he developed his own roadmap for Mars colonization, complete with spreadsheets and CAD models. Martian settlers would need the technological equivalent of the Library of Alexandria—both the knowledge and the means to make a hostile world habitable.
One of the first things we would need is more fuel. We could fly there tomorrow, no problem, but we couldn’t carry enough juice for the return journey. A Martian outpost would also require an entire synthetic hydrocarbon supply chain for all the paints and oils and lubricants used in any industrial process. “How do you make fuel on Mars?” Handmer said. “Well, you make it from carbon dioxide, which is in the atmosphere, and water, which is in the dirt.”
The chemistry was not new. It broke no laws of physics. It was just energetically costly. It wasn’t long before Handmer started to wonder why we shouldn’t begin harnessing this process right here on Earth. By filling our skies with carbon dioxide, we had already been terraforming a planet, just the wrong one and in the wrong direction. Making synthetic fuels couldn’t reverse the damage we had done, but it wouldn’t make it worse.
Handmer drove a Tesla, and he thought electric vehicles were a step forward. Batteries alone, though, would not solve the climate crisis. They can’t power container ships, airplanes, or rockets. Not for the foreseeable future. One gallon of liquid fuel contains ten times as much usable energy as a lithium-ion battery of the same weight. Methane, or natural gas, is also used in the production of nitrogen fertilizer, which made the entire green revolution possible.
The question was not whether we’ll still need hydrocarbons in 2050, but where they would come from. Handmer became determined to give the world what he called “Texan levels of energy wealth.” Instead of fracking the Permian Basin or plumbing the depths of Saudi Arabia, he’d make the hydrocarbons with a machine that ran on air, water and sunlight. Mars would have to wait. Earth would come first.