Many products benefit from tight integration, where companies design and sometimes build key components of the product in-house. Apple and its custom microprocessor and Tesla and its Supercharger are two notable examples.
It's not an easy strategy to get right, but stealth startup General Galactic hopes this approach will lower the price of so-called e-fuels, which produce hydrocarbons from captured carbon dioxide. , the company exclusively told TechCrunch.
The company grew out of co-founder and CEO Halen Mattison's SpaceX days. “I was working on a team focused on propellant generation for Starship. I started thinking, 'What are we going to do once we get to Mars?' How do you produce fuel when you get home? ”
Mattison urged SpaceX to address the issue, but he said it was too far removed from the company's goals at the time. Around that time, he left SpaceX to attend graduate school at Stanford University. There he met Luke Nies, realized that producing methane from carbon dioxide would be more useful on Earth than on Mars, and the two founded a company.
The two went independent after graduating from Stanford University in 2022, and in July 2023 raised a pre-seed round of $1.9 million from venture capital firms such as Box Group and Refactor.
“The north star for us is to make methane in a way that's cheaper to literally synthesize it from the air and reuse the emissions than to pump it out of the ground,” Mattison told TechCrunch.
General Galactic's methane reactor produces approximately 2,000 liters per day.Image credit: General Galactic
The plan is to design and develop the entire system in-house, allowing the startup to capture carbon dioxide from the air, produce hydrogen from water, and combine the two to produce methane. This is done using renewable electricity. This is very different from other companies that are working on just one piece of the puzzle, such as direct air capture, electrolysis, or e-fuel production.
Mattison said General Galactic would have a big incentive to reduce costs by consolidating the entire stack and selling only fuel, not equipment. “I think one of the mistakes that other companies and other scientists who have studied this have made is to silo their companies,” Mattison said. “So what is the goal there? For example, to get the maximum profit from the electrolyser. We want to sell the fuel, so the goal is to minimize its cost.”
General Galactic's plan is to modularize each major component, an approach that has recently become the norm among climate technology startups. Modular components can be produced in large quantities and are easier to transport over long distances. It is also easier to design and develop in a small laboratory, and the final installation of a commercial-scale plant is unlikely to incur significant construction costs.
The company is focused on getting its methane reactor up and running, and Mattison said the company is producing about 2,000 liters of methane per day. He said the decision to focus on methane rather than sustainable aviation fuel, a common goal of many e-fuel startups, was intentional. He said natural gas is used throughout the economy, but the market for aviation fuel is small. “We want to go anywhere people are using methane today,” Mattison said.
That's a lofty goal, but not surprising given General Galactic's equally ambitious plans to do everything in-house. Each of these components (direct air recovery unit, electrolyzer, methane reactor) could form the basis of an independent business. Although each step is based on proven science, each step comes with different engineering challenges, challenges that have stumbled on some of the previous steps. It's not that the Galactic General is on an impossible mission, just that there's a good job for him.