General Galactic emerges from stealth to make methane from carbon dioxide

Many products benefit from tight integration, in which companies design and sometimes manufacture key components of a product in-house: Apple and its custom microprocessors and Tesla and its Superchargers are two notable examples.

It’s not an easy strategy to implement, but General Galactic, a new stealth startup, hopes this approach will allow it to lower the prices of so-called e-fuels, which produce hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide captured, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

The company was born out of co-founder and CEO Halen Mattison’s time at SpaceX. “I worked on a team that focused on generating propellant for Starship. I started thinking, “Hey, what are we going to do when we get to Mars?” How are we going to produce fuel when we get home? »

Mattison urged SpaceX to tackle the problem, but that was too close to the company’s goals at the time, he said. Around this time, he also left SpaceX to attend graduate school at Stanford. There he met Luke Neise, and the two started the company after realizing that producing methane from carbon dioxide would be more useful here on Earth than on Mars.

The two struck out on their own after graduating from Stanford in 2022, and they raised a $1.9 million pre-seed round in July 2023 from venture capital firms including Box Group and Refactor.

“The main goal for us is to produce methane in a way that is literally cheaper to synthesize from the air, to reuse the emissions, than to pump it out of the ground,” Mattison told TechCrunch.

The plan is to design and develop the entire system in-house so the startup can capture carbon dioxide from the air, produce hydrogen from water and combine the two to form methane, all using renewable energy. This is a clear difference from other companies, which only work on one piece of the puzzle, whether it is direct air capture, electrolysis or e-fuel production.

By integrating the entire stack and selling only the fuel, not the equipment, Mattison said General Galactic would have a greater incentive to reduce costs. “I think one of the mistakes that other companies and other scientists who have studied this have made is to silo themselves,” Mattison said. “So what is your goal there?” You will make as much money as possible with your electrolyzer, for example. While we want to sell the fuel, our goal is to minimize these costs.

General Galactic’s plan is to modularize every key component, an approach that’s becoming the norm among climate tech startups these days. Modular components can be mass produced and are more easily transported over long distances. They are also easier to design and develop in a small laboratory, and the final installation of a commercial-scale factory is less likely to involve significant construction costs.

The startup focused on starting the methane reactor, and Mattison said the company was producing about 2,000 gallons of methane per day. He said the decision to focus on methane and not sustainable aviation fuel, a common target of many e-fuel startups, was deliberate. Jet fuel is a small market, he explained, while natural gas is used throughout the economy. “We want to be everywhere people are using methane today,” Mattison said.

This is an ambitious goal, although it shouldn’t be surprising given General Galactic’s equally ambitious plan to do everything in-house. Each of these components – direct air capture units, electrolyzers and methane reactors – could form the basis of independent companies. Although each step is based on proven science, each involves a series of technical challenges, challenges that have tripped up some of their predecessors. This isn’t to say that General Galactic is tackling an impossible task, just that it has its work cut out for it.