Turning CO₂ into E-fuels with General Galactic
Halen Mattison and Luke Neise are co-founders at General Galactic.
General Galactic is a seed-stage e-fuels startup out of El Segundo in the Los Angeles area that converts captured CO₂ into synthetic fuels, starting with natural gas. They claim that their end product is a carbon-neutral drop-in replacement for natural gas that can run in all of today's vast gas infrastructure. In their view, any company or country can in theory become a gas producer.
The two founders met at Stanford and went on to early careers in aerospace, Halen at SpaceX and Luke at Varda Space Industries. As they'll share, the vision for General Galactic was ultimately inspired by technologies that are used in space today, which they felt could help solve the energy transition here on Earth.
*The claims made in this episode are based on current research and theoretical models. Real-world impact will depend on factors like scalability, infrastructure readiness, and policy support. We encourage listeners to stay curious, explore further resources, and engage in the evolving conversation around these solutions.
Episode recorded on Nov 7, 2024 (Published on Jan 30, 2025)
In this episode, we cover:
1:43] The origin of the name General Galactic (GG)
[3:07] Halen and Luke’s backgrounds
[7:00] An overview of GG
[8:14] How GG’s technology leverages existing infrastructure
[14:15] GG and its connection to SAF
[16:55] How GG chose to focus on natural gas
[19:18] Differences between CNG and RNG
[22:44] An overview of LNG
[26:06] The Jones Act and its impact on fuel transportation
[28:14] GG’s drop-in replacement and its economic implications
[31:02] The footprint of GG’s “Genesis modules”
[34:49] The importance of location for GG’s hardware
[38:05] Addressing methane emissions concerns
[40:19] GG’s technology readiness and commercialization pathways
[42:11] GG’s business model and go-to-market strategy
[45:12] GG’s financing to date
[49:20] Who GG wants to connect with
Additional Resources:
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Cody Simms (00:00):
Today on Inevitable, our guests are Halen Mattison and Luke Neise, co-founders at General Galactic. General Galactic is a seed-stage clean fuels startup out of El Segundo in the Los Angeles area that converts captured CO₂ into synthetic fuels, starting with natural gas. They claim that their end product is a carbon-neutral drop-in replacement for natural gas that can run in all of today's vast gas infrastructure, including the global network of gas pipelines but without the need for underground drilling or exploration. In their view, any company or country can in theory become a gas producer. The two founders met at Stanford and went on to early careers in aerospace, Halen at SpaceX and Luke at Varda Space Industries. As they'll share, the vision for General Galactic was ultimately inspired by technologies that are used in space today, which they felt could help solve the energy transition here on earth.
(01:12):
From MCJ, I'm Cody Simms, and this is Inevitable. Climate change is inevitable, it's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry. Halen, Luke, welcome to the show.
Luke Neise (01:41):
Great to be here, Cody.
Halen Mattison (01:42):
Thanks.
Cody Simms (01:43):
I'm excited to learn more about what you all are doing. It's, I think, a timely technology that you're building given some of the recent election outcomes here in the US potentially. But first of all, you guys have the coolest name of any startup I think I've talked to in a while, so no offense to any of the other companies I've met. But how did you land on the name General Galactic, because I mean it sounds like a 1980s video game or something?
Halen Mattison (02:08):
Well, that's high praise because you've definitely had some really cool companies on here. General Galactic really came from, one, us coming from the aerospace industry, which I'm sure we'll talk about, but really the broader idea of what does the energy company of the future look like? What is energy going to look like when humans aren't just living on earth but are living on the moon and living on Mars? What would the name of the company be that builds that? And so it's a little bit of a play on General Electric, a company that I think defined a lot of the Industrial Revolution. And it's one of those things where we wrote it down I think the first time we ever pitched the company as a fill-in name of like, "Okay, we'll go back, we'll potentially change this," but immediately people grasped onto it and they're like, "That's a cool name." We're getting emails, "What's next for GG? When are you guys going to go raise the next thing for GG?" And so people have really, really liked it and it's just one of those things that stuck.
Cody Simms (03:01):
Why don't you both introduce yourselves a little bit? Tell me how you met, tell me how you decided to start GG.
Halen Mattison (03:07):
So my name's Halen. I always say like Van Halen. I'm originally from North Carolina, very much outside, not just the climate world, but also the tech world. Was a first-generation student, grew up working on cars with my dad. Ended up coming out to California for work at SpaceX as an intern and then eventually up to Northern California for grad school at Stanford. That's actually where Luke and I met originally, but both of us had spent time in the aerospace industry and thinking about climate before that. I'd say that I'm always been a very mechanically-inclined person, and I've just been very lucky to work on some of the cool stuff I have over the years. I'll let Luke take it from here and talk about how we met and he got stuck working with me.
Luke Neise (03:47):
Luke Neise. Grew up in St. Louis, Missouri originally. At a young age, for me, I was always sort of a lover of learning more so than anything else. That's what drove what I was curious about when I was young. That covered a ton of different domains, but the one that it manifested in most intensely was the aerospace industry and in the space industry. And that was because to me at a young age it was what we knew the least about as a species, as a people and therefore was most worthy of being worked on because it had the most ground to cover effectively. And so I spent a lot of my early career pursuing that specifically. Went to Vanderbilt University, focused on it there, Stanford University, focused on it there, and then spent time in industry at DoD and then at Varda Space Industries as well.
(04:26):
But the lens for me was always, what could space do for earth? That's the fundamental underpinning of what Varda is working on, and that was always the fundamental underpinning of what I found interesting about space. It was what we knew the least about, but it was also what we could by extension harness the most to improve and change life on earth. As I continued on in my career, I think I came to a realization that maybe what we knew the least about wasn't the single most worthy thing to work on but rather what was most worthy of our knowledge and most worthy of our learning was what I should be submitting time on. And for me, that became the climate challenge, that became the climate crisis.
(05:05):
Even in 2020 going to Stanford, the skies were red with the wildfires there. You're showing up on site and immediately you're hit with the severity of it, you're hit with the necessity and criticality of it. And from there it just continued. Traveling even overseas, I spent a little of time in North Africa, and it was like locals are sharing about how it's the worst drought they've had in years, in decades. It's like at some point you just come to the realization that, "Hey, maybe this is the single most important thing I could be working on."
(05:29):
And so for me that transition came through the time at Stanford and through meeting Halen and specifically I think we came to a realization together that this problem space and this technology space that we'd been exposed to through the lens of the aerospace industry and some of the challenges that are integral to what our next generation of missions on the moon and Mars are going to look like if built in the right way could target not only that problem, but also the climate crisis and also the climate challenge on earth. Target General Galactic as the company to go do that and be that energy company of the future.
Cody Simms (06:00):
It's interesting, before we started recording, Halen, you were telling me how you had listened to the pod episode we did with Kim Stanley Robinson earlier this year or maybe a year or so ago. When I was reading his books for the first time, and particularly Red Mars, it was all about how do you explore Mars, but it was really about how do you transition the atmosphere of Mars and navigate it to be a planet that can go from one that's heavy in CO₂ to one that you can actually live and breathe on and can support oxygen life forms. Interesting parallels to what Luke just described, I think.
Halen Mattison (06:33):
Yeah, I mean, if you read that book, the first 100 colonists are going to Mars to set up the first ever basically group to stay there and live there. And one of the first things they do in the book is put out a machine that can convert carbon dioxide into rocket fuel. There's some made-up name for a futuristic company that does that, but you could basically pencil in General Galactic and that's basically the mission here.
Cody Simms (06:55):
That book was written in the 1980s.
Halen Mattison (06:57):
Yeah.
Cody Simms (06:58):
Tell me, what is General Galactic?
Halen Mattison (07:00):
Our company is focused on building a fossil-free future. And the way we see to do that is to convert CO₂ that is kind of the core problem of the climate crisis into something more useful. And when we say something more useful, we mean fuels and chemicals that the world relies on for energy abundance. This company very much carries with it a lot of the ethos of companies like SpaceX in the sense that we want to be very transformative and innovative and by doing that on a very first principle of engineering basis.
Luke Neise (07:32):
I think what we see is that the fundamental problem with the climate crisis is that CO₂ is everywhere. The fundamental need that industries have across the board is access to reliable, high density, low carbon energy, and specifically energy that is compatible with existing infrastructure that they use and depend upon today, because that just expedites our ability to make that green transition happen. And so, General Galactic is very fundamentally looking at connecting those two pieces of the puzzle. CO₂ is everywhere, it's causing a problem. Can we turn it into reliable, high density, clean energy that is compatible with the energy infrastructure that we have today and expedite that green transition while we're combating the problem that CO₂ presents and represents today?
Cody Simms (08:13):
Describe how it works.
Halen Mattison (08:14):
The process is really inspired very much by aerospace. The technology behind this has been demonstrated on the International Space Station. It's what actually helps keep astronauts alive. The CO₂ that they're breathing out gets converted in a machine called a Sabatier reactor. That reactor converts it along with hydrogen into methane, which on the International Space Station gets dumped overboard and the byproduct is water that gets recycled for the crew to use and drink. So that was how we got exposed to it. And then there was also an element of us working on it at SpaceX and trying to bring it up from the commercial side as well. We're really trying to take a lot of those core principles and apply them into the CO₂ conversion space. Some people call it CCUS. I'm a big hater of acronyms, so I just say carbon utilization. And what we're really bringing in here is a commercialized version of that.
Cody Simms (09:04):
And so you are taking CO₂, are you running it through some kind of electrolysis process? Or what does the actual mechanism look like?
Luke Neise (09:12):
Our process is a two-step process. So we do take in dirty emission streams of CO₂ specifically from point sources. Part of the underpinning of what we're doing here, again, is that CO₂ is everywhere, that's part of the problem. By extension of that, we can use it from those sources that are emitting it everywhere regardless of how dirty those emission streams are. So we do pass the CO₂ directly into our system through those streams and then it's a two-step process where we're producing hydrogen and oxygen and then converting that hydrogen with the CO₂ directly. This two-step thermochemical process with our technology is actually more selective for the products that we care about and fundamentally more energy efficient on a per unit of fuel produced at the back end than a single step electrochemical process is converting CO₂ at least for the fuels that we care about, which again, are intended to be the fuels that people are already using on a day-to basis across industries.
Cody Simms (10:02):
So you need some form of CO₂ feedstock. Sounds like you're looking mostly for now at point source captured CO₂. And then I assume you need a hydro for the hydrocarbons so are you combining it with some kind of hydrogen input as well?
Halen Mattison (10:16):
Yeah, that's right. So we're looking at vertically integrating the entire process and the idea is we want to make this into what we would call a minimally invasive procedure for industry. So fully containerized. We're talking about the only inputs being your existing emission stream, non-upgraded, and then whatever water supply we can get our hands on. So very robust.
Cody Simms (10:35):
Use water for the hydrogen component, I suppose.
Halen Mattison (10:38):
Exactly. So water electrolysis that's integrated, we see that as significantly, as Luke mentioned, more efficient pathway than trying to do it all in one step. And what that enables for us is a lot of flexibility as well on the breadth of products that we can ultimately deliver.
Luke Neise (10:53):
And it matters a lot for our customers too. The status quo for deploying something like this would be to traditionally work with an EPC to install all of this hardware on site via separate vendors, separate manufacturers who are going to each own some part of this puzzle and you have to link those chains together. That's just overwhelmingly cost-prohibitive, frankly, overwhelmingly centralized as well typically. So what we're building is an all-in-one mass manufacturable unit that we can deploy anywhere in the world, decentralized, reach the scales that our customers care about, and by extension have significantly more control over what the operation and fundamentally the economics of the project look like for the folks that want to deploy with us.
Cody Simms (11:34):
And then the output is essentially a liquefied natural gas equivalent, is that right?
Halen Mattison (11:40):
Equivalent is almost too far away. I mean, it's chemically identical. And that's what we really have to share is we believe that there's a reason that the fuels that our entire urban infrastructure, our entire society are built around today are the fuels. And so we're trying to deliver chemically identical solutions. We call them fossil-free solutions, so there's a little bit of an asterisk there because of their carbon content, but it is identically the same. And so you can continue to use the legacy equipment, ships, aircraft, whatever that you already have, but you're doing it in a carbon-neutral way.
Cody Simms (12:14):
So they would still combust your product and presumably release emissions as part of the combustion, but it's emissions that came from somewhere else as opposed to net new emissions into the atmosphere. Is that the right way to think about it?
Luke Neise (12:26):
It is. We describe it as working with the earth's natural carbon cycle. So the earth is constantly doing this, you and I are doing this right now as we speak, we breathe out carbon dioxide and we're inhaling oxygen. It's just a natural carbon cycle that takes place for all things, all living life forms on earth. We're just making the energy consumption process on earth look exactly like that, circularizing it and making it compatible with the way that the planet is naturally built to work.
Cody Simms (12:52):
It's not a carbon removal solution per se, but rather it's a solution that allows all of the existing capex in the world that already exists that uses fuel today to continue to operate and do as it does without increasing a combustion-based emissions problem is what I'm hearing.
Halen Mattison (13:09):
That's right.
Cody Simms (13:09):
Okay.
Halen Mattison (13:10):
And there's some cool downstream effects too because we're basically solving for upstream, midstream, and downstream oil and gas all in one solution. If you prefer to look at things like a scope two or scope three basis, we're actually looking at overall carbon reduction on a pre-unit basis and then as time goes on-
Cody Simms (13:26):
Because you're obviating emissions from exploration, I assume in that case, right?
Halen Mattison (13:30):
Yeah, exploration, processing, all of the transportation that traditionally happens associated with that. I mean, today's O&G infrastructure is carbon-tensive on its own, even if they weren't dumping a bunch of CO₂ that's naturally sequestered in the earth's crust into the atmosphere again. I think that's actually something that we speak to pretty heavily. I said carbon utilization earlier, and I think that is something that is really poised to have its moment in the next few years because of the fundamental thermodynamics behind it. Co₂ is not super valuable. There is no inherent reason that we should be dumping it into the ground other than to try to meet an emissions target. But there are other ways to do it like this process that actually provide a lot more value and a lot more utility.
Cody Simms (14:15):
I recorded an episode fairly recently that we got a lot of feedback on with the Vicki Hollub, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum. One of the things she said on the episode that really struck me was that, while they are doing very significant DAC investments today and are planning to do DAC, meaning direct air capture, continue to scale that business and they're selling carbon credits today, including selling multi-hundred million dollar deals to Microsoft and the like already, she ultimately sounded like viewed that as not the long-term way they plan to use the DAC footprint that they're building but rather plan to use the CO₂ they're capturing as a feedstock. She said for sustainable aviation fuel and for enhanced oil recovery, which that's a totally different topic we can talk about probably not on this episode, some other time because I need to dig into that more myself for sure. But on the sustainable aviation fuel side, that sounds very quite similar to what you are doing, which is it's just a different way of taking CO₂, combining it with a hydrogen of some sort and creating a hydrocarbon. You're just taking it and turning it into a different hydrocarbon as opposed to SAF.
Halen Mattison (15:22):
That's right. I mean, hydrocarbons are a beautiful thing. I think that in years past the thought process was that the way the climate transition is going all fuels will just somehow go away. Again, thermodynamics and physics tell you that that's not really possible to continue to live the lives that we have now and to be able to do things like fly jets around the world. And so that's a world that we're very interested in. We're starting with natural gas. I think that there's other hydrocarbon pathways, methanol, SAF and others that are very much available to us with this technology. It's really the core building blocks that we've done over the last year that I think are going to open up this and kind of make that route of reality. And the other big difference is people already use these fuels, it is already the backbone of our lives. It's not this new voluntary thing like the carbon removal world is and is trying to be.
Luke Neise (16:12):
I think the SAF analogy is apt too because of the industries and markets that we're actually targeting for fuel consumption. I mean, aviation takes up about the same amount of CO₂ emissions into the global emissions profile as an industry like maritime transportation does. Maritime transportation gets some attention, certainly, but not as much, as you say, as SAF. Everybody sort of knows what that is. It's just captured the mind share I suppose in terms of how we're going to decarbonize aviation. I think there's some work to do on other industries that take up just as much of the pie and can be solved in exactly the same way. As you say, it's still just valorizing CO₂ stream with hydrogenation into a fuel that decarbonizes the industry. This technology can do that for other industries. Aviation isn't the only one for which that is part of it.
Cody Simms (16:55):
How did you land on LNG as the initial output?
Halen Mattison (17:00):
I think we had a little bit of background in it because I'm a former Starship engineer. Most people don't realize this, but Starship runs on natural gas, and so will majority of the heavy lift launch vehicles in the space industry for the foreseeable future. You can get really impressive efficiencies out of a methane or called methalox-based combustion. We had a background in working with it coming from the space industry. When you look at the global fuel usage profile, so when you just look at all the fuels used in the entire world, natural gas/methane is the vast plurality of it. It's like 40% of the overall mix. Even gasoline takes up a small sliver when you look at that pie. And so we went, "Hey, there's really not a carbon-neutral piece here. There's not something that people are doing here, and this is a really big part of the energy mix that needs to go be solved."
Luke Neise (17:50):
I think even just talking with folks that were operating in these critical industries, you say, "Okay, what is on the table for you? What is on the board for you? What are you looking at? You're aware that this is taking place, you're aware that we need to be transitioning to a more reliable, more affordable, and more green energy future. What are the things that are going to work for you?" For a lot of folks, the answer was nothing. Our infrastructure is our infrastructure. The choices are we find some way to make it more compatible or we bulldoze the whole thing.
(18:20):
And so that in and of itself was, again, going back to this idea of we can expedite the green transition by making fuels and chemicals that are specifically what these folks are already using, specifically what they have to be able to use in order to be able to continue their current lines of business in any meaningful way.
Cody Simms (18:36):
For many of our listeners who may come into the energy transition really from a renewables perspective, thinking about solar and wind and all of that may not be familiar with the ins and outs of the different forms of natural gas. I'm not in depth, so could you take a minute to describe the difference between LNG, or liquefied natural gas, from regular old natural gas and then maybe there's also RNG, which is renewable natural gas? Just help us understand the landscape of those fuels and roughly how big each of those market opportunities are and where they're each used today, if you wouldn't mind.
Halen Mattison (19:18):
So natural gas is mostly methane. It's very well-branded fuel. We're saying natural, but it does come from the earth's crust. Usually it's about 95% methane, give or take. Different pipelines have different standards for what they'll accept. And then there's a mix of other hydrocarbons and some other kind of additives put in. If you have a gas stove, that's what the fuel is burning when you turn it on. That is broadly referred to as just natural gas or sometimes CNG for compressed natural gas. It needs to be slightly pressurized to move through the distribution system and the pipelines that go to all of our houses and businesses.
Cody Simms (19:55):
So when you think of large gas pipelines that people are protesting or whatever, this is compressed natural gas, this is gas in a gaseous form typically, is that correct?
Halen Mattison (20:04):
Yeah, that's right. It's almost always transported in compressed form. It can be liquefied for ocean transport and a few other things. Pipelines can also be for liquid gas as well, but especially in the US after the shale revolution, we see a lot more of that being natural gas.
Luke Neise (20:18):
The RNG you are describing, that's coming from traditional bio processes. A lot of times what you'll see that comes from specifically is biogenic or biogas processes that take place naturally with earth's agricultural or are man-made agricultural processes that have put biogas. Biogas is literally mostly just a split of methane, CH4, and carbon dioxide, CO₂. And so biogas upgrading is what it's referred to. Processes just split that. They just take the biogas, they separate it out. So you have CO₂ that you then vent into the atmosphere, and then you then have the CH4, which is referred to as an RNG product. And it can get used in the same way that traditional natural gas would get used because it's still, as Halen said, 95% plus methane. It's the same constituent element, but it comes from a natural biogenic process from earth's livestock and things like that as opposed to being pulled from the ground or fracked.
Cody Simms (21:11):
So that's RNG for renewable natural gas, and that could be from an anaerobic digester, it could be from a landfill, it could be from a cattle farm as you said.
Luke Neise (21:19):
That's right. It gets somewhat complicated actually in terms of how renewable the renewable natural gas is depending on where it comes from. So typically landfill gas is only about half as carbon beneficial as traditional natural gas versus livestock. Upgraded RNG is actually super carbon negative, but that also is to an extent from clever accounting in the sense of if you were just not have that system there and you vented the biogas, then it goes out as methane and instead you're turning it into a fuel and combusting it, and so it's more beneficial.
(21:49):
But the fundamental problem with RNG across the board is that it's feedstock limited. There's just not that much of it available out there. We've even spoken to customers who they actually want to be purchasing and procuring carbon-neutral carbon negative natural gas. They literally can't get their hands on it because bigger utilities have purchased up all of the RNG in the area, and so you're just stuck in this position where, okay, now what do you do? Well, what you do is you deploy it.
Cody Simms (22:15):
Ah, utilities are buying RNG in order to combust it in a power plant and make their combined cycle gas power plant have a lower emissions in theory.
Luke Neise (22:22):
Or use it for heating with industrial, residential, or commercial customers. The obvious solution to that is to use a General Galactic technology, where you're turning either biogenic or anthropogenic CO₂ directly into more RNG, and in our case, at a worst case, carbon-neutral. So better than even what you would see traditional landfill RNG as being. Better than SAF in many cases.
Cody Simms (22:44):
Let's hit the LNG side just to make sure we cover that one too.
Luke Neise (22:47):
LNG is literally just liquefied traditional fracked natural gas. I mean, technically you can liquefy RNG, but most of the time it's just a liquefied version of the CNG that Halen described earlier. It's liquefied either for use in industries where it needs to be liquefied, so that would be, for example, aerospace commercial launch, for example, maritime transportation. But oftentimes it's liquefied simply for the purposes of transporting it intercontinently or something similar like that.
Halen Mattison (23:14):
Yeah, and one of the cool things I should mention about all three of these variants is that they all work in the same pipelines. This entire network across the planet is mass balanced. So you can have a dairy farm in the Midwest producing natural gas that technically gets sold and used in California. In California, we actually have a fairly large amount. When I say fairly, it's only about half a percent. But about half a percent of the gas that you're burning when you turn your stove on here in California is coming from RNG.
Yin Lu (23:40):
Hey, everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ, here to take a quick minute to tell you the MCJ Collective membership. Globally, startups are rewriting industries to be cleaner, more profitable and more secure. And at MCJ, we recognize that a rapidly changing business landscape requires a workforce that can adapt. MCJ Collective is a vetted member network for tech and industry leaders who are building, working for, or advising on solutions that can address the transition of energy and industry. MCJ Collective connects members with one another, with MCJ's portfolio, and our broader network. We do this through a powerful member hub, timely introductions, curated events, and a unique talent matchmaking system and opportunities to learn from peers and podcast guests. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. If you want to learn more, head over to mcj.vc and click the Membership tab at the top. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (24:42):
It sounds like you guys have gone after LNG in particular as your initial product. Does that matter or could you also produce it in gaseous form and is there a reason why you chose one or the other?
Halen Mattison (24:52):
Yeah, so we actually produce in gaseous form.
Cody Simms (24:54):
Oh, you do?
Halen Mattison (24:55):
We're interested in the LNG market because that's one of the markets that we think will always require a fuel product. We're actually very pro-electrification. We want to see as much as we can be electrified, but in those industries where you need really heavy energy density, namely a lot of the LNG use cases that Luke just mentioned, you're always going to need this, and so we want to make sure it's carbon-neutral.
Luke Neise (25:15):
Yeah, we say electrify literally everything possible and whatever's left over, it's always going to need the energy density of a molecule. I mean, today, 80% of energy is consumed on a molecule basis. H opefully that drops, but a lot of it won't. And in the cases that it won't, you're going to need the energy density and you're going to need the compatibility that the fuels and chemicals that General Galactic produces fundamentally provide.
Cody Simms (25:36):
And just one more question on landscape. I know with the recent election there's all this conversation that the US has largely halted a lot of LNG exports and that people are speculating that the new Trump administration will likely reactivate those export terminals, I suppose. The reason we're talking about this as an export is, in order to send it overseas, you basically need to put it on a ship, and it's harder to transport a gas because it's not as dense as a liquid. Is that the right way to think about it?
Halen Mattison (26:06):
Somewhat. I think when you get into the natural gas space you learn about a very special piece of the US regulatory environment called the Jones Act. Jones Act was enacted I think 100 years ago, maybe a little bit more, specifically to regulate how we move fuel and gas in this country. It creates kind of a weird environment specific to the US, this is a problem that other nations don't have. And so there have only been a handful of vessels that have been considered Jones Act compliant, and that actually has to do with how the vessel is manufactured, who cruise it, who moves it, and which ports it moves through. So we have a very weird natural gas transportation process in this country.
(26:44):
The Biden administration changed that a little bit, specifically shutting down some of the exports that were possible. With this latest change in the election, we actually expect there to be a renewed focus on US energy independence and policy. And so there's a good chance that we're going to see a lot more drivers around natural gas production in this country and also the ways that they can scale it and continue to grow energy abundance.
(27:06):
The two downstream effects of that, one being specific to us interested in natural gas, is that there's going to be a very strong need to provide high density energy wherever we can. And there's a lot of places that just don't have access to natural gas. US is very lucky that we're abundant in it, but you look around the world, there's plenty of places that aren't. I often ask people whether we think that Putin would still be in Ukraine or even able to do what he's doing in that area if the Germans weren't dependent on Russian gas.
(27:33):
And so, one of the big elements of being able to do CO₂ conversion at scale, because as Luke mentioned, CO₂ is everywhere, fuel is not, is giving people energy autonomy in their hands. And I think that's somewhat politically agnostic, like everybody wants energy abundance. The second part of that is something we had talked about earlier, which is the idea of a voluntary market. I do think that we'll start to see that somewhat fade away with these changes. And again, our company was never built around that. It's a big thing for us, is providing real value off of these processes. The mentality will shift away from voluntary accounting towards very, very rapid scaling and growth towards energy abundance.
Cody Simms (28:14):
With that vision, I'm hearing you say you want to create a world where anyone can be a gas producer in order to gain traction on that in the US you almost have to undercut the existing natural gas market in the US because it's going to be hard for the US to go compete against itself in the global market. Explain a little bit about how you think about your path to not having this product have a green premium but ultimately being not just a drop-in replacement from a technology perspective, but a drop-in replacement from an economics perspective.
Halen Mattison (28:49):
I think that that's the holy grail in climate tech, when you can get to a point where your green carbon-neutral, carbon-negative solution is the obvious one, it's also the cheapest and the best. And so that's the dream for General Galactic.
(29:31):
Something that I talk about a lot from my previous career is what SpaceX was able to do for the launch industry and the space industry, where historically launch costs were really high, putting things into space was very difficult, cadences were long. We moved that by orders of magnitude and we continue to. And that really came from betting on the right tech stacks, putting together very strong teams, and focusing on mass manufacturing. That's something I don't see a lot of in the climate tech industry yet. I think it's starting to become a reality. At least I'm having conversations and trying to encourage people to think about things in this way. But to me, that is the path to victory, that's the path to massive cost reduction in your end product and to scaling this product globally.
Cody Simms (30:11):
Do you guys operate as a hardware sales company? Are you ultimately selling your hardware to commercial facilities that want to produce on-site fuel?
Luke Neise (30:20):
We definitely can sell the hardware to folks. I think what we found up to this point is that folks are actually more interested in just purchasing the fuel. We've had a lot of conversations with folks who've purchased hardware previously, I think even energy hardware where there's a huge premium on reliability and found that, okay, they purchased it from some vendor, it stopped working two years in. The company went out of business or something else happened and it no longer works. They don't know how to fix it, and it just sits there collecting dust. That is maybe not exactly what you want the future reliable energy future of America to look like or the world to look like. And so the scenario in which you're supplying the fuel specifically and providing customers with exactly what they actually need as opposed to a tool to create what they actually need is a more clean path.
Cody Simms (31:02):
And what's the footprint look like for one of the General Galactic facilities?
Halen Mattison (31:06):
So we call them Genesis modules. We're trying to containerize it. Everybody loves the shipping container. It kind of flies in the face of legacy chemical engineering where you see these massive centralized plants and economies of scale. Luckily for our process specifically, we actually optimize around that scale, so it works out really well. But the other big thing is that we're seeing that a lot of the speed bumps in the deployment of climate tech have been around siting, environmental regulations, things like that. If you can stick around that kind of ISO container scale, you eliminate a lot of those regulatory requirements and you can go deploy your tech a lot faster. So for us, there's a reason that we want to get that small containerized footprint.
(31:45):
And then of course, the other element is that we do see this as a very decentralized opportunity. This is something where we want to be able to deploy these globally, and so decentralization is the net win.
Luke Neise (31:56):
To be clear, we won't actually put our technology in one of those 40-foot dumpster containers that you see on the side of the road. We have our own containerized module that we build out. But the point is that that footprint is very compatible with the way that infrastructure is moved in the world and in the United States. And as a result of that, we're able to deploy this technology really anywhere in the world, which is also incredibly compatible with the fact that there are tons of decentralized CO₂ streams that are not necessarily high volume CO₂ streams. A lot of times these are smaller medium volume CO₂ streams that are in hard to reach places. But the infrastructure for transporting the fuels that we produce is pretty much everywhere. And so being able to connect and join those pieces together is a huge win that comes with being able to deploy in this modular decentralized way that can address whatever scale needs to be addressed fundamentally.
Cody Simms (32:42):
And it sounds like in that instance you're not reliant on the US needing to build out a large CO₂ pipeline infrastructure that hasn't really begun yet.
Luke Neise (32:51):
That's exactly right. We've seen legislation that has been proposed for that, even CO₂ pipelines that we're going to go interstate, that ultimately gets shut down or turned down because states don't want other states piping more emissions into their borders and frankly creating a massive expensive transportation infrastructure for a product that, again, as we've discussed, has no intrinsic value in and of itself isn't going to be a good use of resources. A much better resource is to be able to take advantage of the existing infrastructure that we already have for energy and fuels and just convert those CO₂ streams into something that can take advantage of those already, which is, again, what we do.
Cody Simms (33:27):
But if you're not doing hardware sales, like selling this to an industrial facility, it sounds like you would then operate these yourselves and presumably then also finance the build out of each of them yourselves. Is that accurate?
Halen Mattison (33:42):
Yeah, I mean that's what we see as the big win here. I think there are a lot of business opportunities that may include hardware sales or may include us plugging our technology into other gas plants that are already being put in. But on the whole, I think there's a really cool idea of us building a global energy infrastructure around this kind of tech. The plants themselves can run autonomously. Our plan is minimal maintenance, like I said, minimally invasive procedure, remote monitoring that allows us to be able to set these up on site and walk away and everybody's happy.
(34:13):
But the real win that you get from that, and by scaling that up is that you're ultimately able to sell these very long-term fuel deals to critical users en masse, because again, everything's mass balanced. So we can be pulling, say, 10 million BTUs per day from this site, 20 from this other one, and then selling that as 30 to a single off-take point. That's where we really see some pretty interesting wins, and it also gets us a little bit more steady on the pricing that we're able to offer.
Luke Neise (34:38):
In the industry, technicians often just work from home, work remotely, and just monitoring things, making sure alarms aren't going off. Our system is designed to be directly compatible with that same sort of legacy in that same way that things work.
Cody Simms (34:49):
In order to take advantage of all of the world's existing infrastructure as you said, one part of your story, which is you want to set up shop next to where the CO₂ waste streams already are. That I totally get as opposed to building large facilities and having to pipe CO₂ into you, which those big pipes of CO₂ frankly don't really exist today. On the other hand, if you're putting it in the middle of a cement factory in the middle of who knows where but you're not near an existing midstream natural gas distribution hub, aren't you also kind of stuck because the transport system doesn't exist for your output?
Halen Mattison (35:24):
When we talked about RNG earlier, which has been a growing field for about 20 years, those are also pretty much in the middle of nowhere. We've gone out to a lot of RNG facilities in the last year. They don't necessarily have a pipeline right at their back door. There are a lot of different ways to move gas around. And so, there's some pretty cool ways that we can leverage that. Some people just call it virtual pipelines en masse, but we don't necessarily have to be next door to the off-take point, and we're able to leverage a lot of the existing dynamics within the market.
Cody Simms (35:49):
That's such a good point. Natural gas is much easier to move than, say, hydrogen for example, which is very challenging to move.
Luke Neise (35:56):
That is absolutely true. The other point, even with the cement anecdote that you gave there, that cement plant's probably also consuming natural gas themselves because of the processes of the day [inaudible 00:36:05]. So the other option is to just literally recirculate it and use it on site to an extent. But yes, getting to your point on hydrogen, that's something that is another major reason that we see this point around producing fuels and chemicals that people consume every day. I mean, there's a ton of talk in the climate industry about the hydrogen future. We absolutely see there being a hydrogen future. We just see it as a hydrogen as an intermediate future, where hydrogen is being used to create fuels and chemicals that can be transported and are currently consumed.
(36:33):
We work with hydrogen every day here at General Galactic. It is a nightmare to deal with. It's truthfully a nightmare. And so even these analyses that talk about being able to put hydrogen in the pipelines, that caps out at some small percentage, that's not doing anything meaningful to decarbonize in any real way. And so we just don't see that as a solution that works from the end consumer's perspective where what they really care about is affordable, accessible, reliable energy. And we also don't see it as a solution that really works in terms of the green transition, in terms of actually creating a low carbon energy future, reliable low carbon energy future for the world. That's just not how it's going to work.
Cody Simms (37:08):
So one thing I wonder with your solution is, when I think about a life cycle analysis perspective and think about the emissions trade-offs, to some extent, you're taking CO₂, which obviously we know is responsible for global warming and climate change and all of that, but you're converting CO₂ to methane, which actually has a higher global warming potential than CO₂.
(37:35):
Now, as I would understand it, the argument would be, hey, but this is not methane that we're drilling. We're not adding new carbon into the atmosphere, we are chemically converting it, but I guess the hope would be very little of it actually ends up in the atmosphere itself, though I think there's a ton of effort right now to try to curb methane release into the atmosphere. So just curious to have you comment on this and how you think about this whole problem since you're right in the thick of it.
Halen Mattison (38:05):
Yeah, Cody, it's a great question because methane is definitely a bad word in the climate world. And when you look at overall methane emissions, the vast majority are coming from the fossil fuel producers. So post-meter, we're only talking about 5% of the overall methane emissions. Transmission and storage coming from the natural gas fracking and refineries makes up about 20% and the rest of it is all upstream. So what that means is, by focusing on fossil-free approaches like ours, you've eliminated majority the methane emissions. And then we also incorporate methane slip as far as how that methane actually gets utilized post-meter into all of our LCAs. And that's something Luke can comment on.
Luke Neise (39:02):
Yeah, I mean when we study, for example, the maritime industry and take into consideration how ships leak fuel, that's part of the reason why I think we have some hesitations around ammonia and methanol, which are of course poisonous, troublesome fuels. We take into account methane slip in the context of those actual induced applications as well. In the net life cycle, as you say, we are of course combusting these fuels back into CO₂ and circularizing the carbon economy in that way.
Cody Simms (39:26):
Post meter for you would mean after the natural gas is actually sold to an end consumer to use, is that right?
Halen Mattison (39:33):
That's right. Yeah, so it refers to utilization.
Cody Simms (39:35):
Okay, so it sounds like there is some slip in the transportation side, in the pipeline side in terms of the overall equation of methane that in theory your technology, because you would just utilize existing infrastructure, would still participate in. But again, you're obviating, it sounded like, 75-plus percent of the total methane slip which would come from mostly, sounds like, production. Am I understanding that correctly?
Halen Mattison (40:02):
Yeah, absolutely. If I could snap my fingers right now and replace all of the upstream natural gas infrastructure with General Galactic Genesis infrastructure, we would actually see a pretty drastic reduction in methane emissions even in that remaining percentage because of the way that our technology works.
Cody Simms (40:19):
Can you share a little bit about where you are today in terms of technology readiness and in terms of your commercialization pathway for the company?
Halen Mattison (40:28):
We see bringing new great tech solutions to market as a critical balance between absolute novelty. Those are your technologies that have just flown up out a lab, low technology readiness, and technology that's ready to commercialize today but might only have marginal impact. And so we've really tried to balance that line. What that's allowed us to do is, within the first few months of this company existing, we built up a prototype system that actually demonstrates the entire fuel conversion process. So we take CO₂ that's been captured from an industrial facility, combine that with water that we electrolyze here, and what that creates is a fossil-free natural gas product. And that's what we do our analysis on and our testing. Today, that's only about 2,000 liters per day. I say only because that sounds like a big number, but from an industrial perspective, we're just getting there. But it's demonstrated, A, onto something on the technology process, and B, that we're ready to go scale it out.
Cody Simms (41:18):
What do you do with that 2,000 liters a day today?
Halen Mattison (41:20):
Yeah, so right now we bottle it and then we can utilize it for different testing. We're able to analyze the composition to see if we're meeting the standards we want. Sometimes we're looking towards just the methane composition, but most of the time what we're attention to is, is this a quality that we can inject into a pipeline?
Cody Simms (41:36):
We can have this conversation all day long. I mean, to be fair, the value of hydrogen is that when you use it it doesn't create emissions. However, it has to be used at scale to have a benefit of it. So if you can't get it to scale because you can't move it around, then you're kind of stuck. And so what I'm hearing you guys say is, "Hey, we're using infrastructure that is everywhere already, and yes, you do combust our stuff and yes it does release emissions, but we're not generating net new emissions as part of it. We're just recycling what's already out there in the atmosphere today."
Luke Neise (42:05):
That's right. And taking both ideas to the limit, they end up being both carbon-neutral effectively.
Cody Simms (42:11):
Where have you done customer discovery? Where's the demand so far for what you're building? Obviously as you mentioned, just about every industry on the planet uses natural gas today, so how do you narrow your own go-to-market as a startup and be focused?
Halen Mattison (42:26):
It's interesting, when you divide up the types of natural gas, like I said, we want to see a lot of places that use natural gas try to electrify, and that's conventional fossil natural gas. The other side of it is on the RNG side there's an insane amount of demand. There's actually multitudes more demand than there is supply, and that's really where we're trying to play. And so those are the entities that are trying to decarbonize in some way, but very specifically, it's the applications that will always require a chemical fuel like we've talked about. So SAF is a great analogy because aircraft, you're never going to really see the battery density where it needs to be to do full electrification. You always need a SAF solution.
(42:59):
The element we see here is very similar for maritime. IMO regulations, which are what recently caused de-sulphurization of marine fuels, are also pushing very, very broadly towards LNG as the primary fuel. There's a lot of talk about methanol as well, but on either side, both of those are fuels that can be produced via a fossil-free process. And so those are the entities that are really, really trying to go after this and trying to figure out where their supply is going to come from.
Cody Simms (43:24):
Those entities don't necessarily have onsite CO₂ streams though, so to some extent you also need a customer on the production side, I would guess.
Halen Mattison (43:31):
That's right. I think it's kind of a partnership, we call it supply and demand side. But this is not a necessarily new model in a way. There's just a group that we source feedstock through and there's a group that we sell our product to, and I think that that's really what we're trying to put together here, is an ecosystem around that.
Cody Simms (43:48):
And do you envision the group that you're sourcing feedstock to participates in the economics of the sold gas at the end?
Luke Neise (43:56):
It's referred to as a tolling partner. It's a small percentage. Again, it's relatively industry standard process. It's very similar to any sort of process engineering where there's some supply stream that comes in and it's processed and turned into something else and that something else is then sold to somebody who cares about what it's been turned into. It works virtually the same way here.
(44:13):
And in the case of maritime that we've described, there are more LNG vessels on order for delivery before 2026 than there are on the oceans right now. There's a ton of LNG bunkering infrastructure being built out around the world. The west coast of Canada is a major source for that right now, and they have significant infrastructure built out for LNG bunkering and LNG fueling infrastructure that just comes from traditional dirty natural gas because they can't get access to low carbon natural gas despite their demand for it. So in those instances, the way that we would supply it is the same way that we would supply traditional fuels, which is, again, getting back to the whole point behind what we do, which is that it doesn't really change anything. It's minimally invasive. It's just the fact that now it's carbon-neutral or carbon-negative as opposed to being intensely carbon-positive.
Halen Mattison (44:53):
I think we'd be remiss in 2024 to not mention that the vast majority of data centers that are going to be built are also going to be run on natural gas. So we are absolutely interested in that angle as well as being able to support that transition.
Luke Neise (45:07):
We would hope those would electrify where possible.
Cody Simms (45:09):
How have you financed the company so far?
Halen Mattison (45:12):
We've raised venture capital. We did our pre-seed last summer as Luke and I were transitioning out of our full-time roles. Over this summer, we raised another seed round of $8 million, and that's really supporting a lot of the development and the early commercialization targets that we have.
Cody Simms (45:25):
Where are you looking for partnerships? What kind of talent do you need? For folks listening who are like, "Oh, I'm on board with General Galactic," who do you want to hear from?
Halen Mattison (45:34):
I want to talk to builders. So if you consider yourself someone who either as a hobbyist level or at an engineering level likes to build and just try to move really quickly and break things, you're potentially a fit for General Galactic. We're hiring engineers across the board from electric chemistry to process to very point source chemical engineering, and so really trying to build out the team there and get a strong footprint here.
Luke Neise (45:58):
I think anyone interested in the big vision of what we're doing, whether that be a prospective partner or prospective teammate, anything. As we've talked about, the intention of General Galactic is to be the energy company of the future. And so yes, a lot of our conversation today has been about how is that the energy company of two years from now. But equally importantly, it's the energy company of 20 and 200 years from now, where we are deploying these units on the moon and Mars, as we talked about, where we're deploying these units in some completely different way, building on what we've done so far for industries that maybe don't even exist yet. So being aware of and being excited by the prospect of, hey, this technology and this fundamental way of thinking about working with the earth's natural carbon cycle, valorizing something that on its own is everywhere and causing a problem, but being able to turn it into something super valuable, that as a concept and as an underlying theme for what General Galactic is doing from maritime transportations to refueling spacecraft on Mars.
(46:48):
That's what we're excited about every day. That's what we're working on every day. And folks who feel similarly about that as the future of the energy landscape, that's who we want to talk to as well.
Cody Simms (46:57):
I mean, the thing that strikes me is, gosh, we hear so much from the world in climate who is saying, "How and where do we obviate our need to get off of fossil fuels? What does that look like?" What I'm hearing from you is basically saying, "No, the fuels themselves may not be the problem. It's the fact that we don't need to continue to pull new ones out of the ground."
Halen Mattison (47:16):
That's right.
Cody Simms (47:17):
"How do we create a fuel production company in the future that leverages what's already been pulled out of the ground over the last 150 years and turns it into fuel that we can continue to use?" It's essentially a circular economy for fuel, is what I'm hearing from you. Is that the right way to think about it? And if that's the case, it democratizes access to production of this to any geography on the planet as opposed to the places that just happen to be, quote-unquote, "rich" in this existing underground natural resource.
Halen Mattison (47:48):
You're absolutely right, Cody. That's the way that we look at the future. It's abundance and energy for all in a way that leverages the legacy of energy across the planet. We sometimes use the phrase decarbonization without disruption. We don't need to abandon all of the great wins of the Industrial Revolution to make for an amazing future.
Cody Simms (48:07):
We still need other builders out there who are doing things to actually do drawdown and to reduce the amount of emissions that are in the atmosphere. And those are different companies, different builders doing amazing different innovations. You're talking about solving how do we power the economy we already have and do it in a way that doesn't further add to the problem.
Luke Neise (48:25):
And powering industries that for the next hundreds of years will still need molecule-driven power, molecule-driven heat. But absolutely you're correct that direct air capture is a hugely important part of the future. Electrification, number one, is such a critical part of what the green transition is going to be. We see so many challenges to that, and we want to encourage those challenges in as many ways as possible. And in some ways, I think we see our technology as being, to an extent, an enabler of some electrification. A lot of times folks want to be able to deploy large scale electrification projects, but maybe it produces too much. There's a surplus and you don't end up having a place to put that, you don't have a place to end up load-balancing that surplus. Maybe our technology can plug in there as an enabler of large scales renewables projects and as an enabler of us electrifying everything that we possibly can as soon as we possibly can. Again, thesis of General Galactic is to make the green transition happen sooner, not later.
Cody Simms (49:13):
Well, guys, it's a great vision of the future. Thanks for taking the time to join and share it with us. Is there anything else we should have covered today that we didn't discuss?
Halen Mattison (49:20):
We're building and scaling, so we're looking for partners who want to off-take. If you're somebody that's looked at carbon removal, maybe you've thought about buying carbon credit, you're trying to figure out how your business is going to work for the next 100 years and you're dependent on legacy fossil fuels, we want to talk to you because I think our solution changes the paradigm, it certainly changes the economics, and we could be an amazing partner. So we're excited to work with new folks. We're growing the team here. We've got a very, very exciting next few years ahead of us.
Cody Simms (49:47):
Halen, Luke, thanks so much.
Luke Neise (49:48):
Thanks, Cody.
Halen Mattison (49:49):
Thanks. Cody.
Cody Simms (49:51):
Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. At MCJ, we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about MCJ, visit us at mcj.vc and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at newsletter.mcj.vc. Thanks, and see you next episode.
