My inbox and calendar have been filled all year with press releases and requests to chat about new carbon removal technologies, artificial intelligence and its attendant energy demand, novel battery designs, advances in fission and fusion, and investors’ ever-present concerns about how to get all of this to market in time to make a real dent in the climate crisis (and also, you know, a profit).
I wrote about a lot of it — but not all of it, and much of the stuff that got left out is no less worthy of your attention than the stuff that made it. So here I present a roundup of the climate technologies that you might not have read about in Heatmap this year, but that have investors, academics, and the climate world at large buzzing as we look toward 2025.
1. Green methanol for sustainable shipping fuels
This fall when I spoke with Amy Duffuor, a co-founder and partner at the venture capital firm Azolla Ventures, she told me that her firm, which is focused on “overlooked and neglected” climate solutions, has been fascinated by the shipping industry. Because while aviation and shipping each account for about 3% of global emissions, decarbonizing flight seems to get the bulk of the attention. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to imagine what they don’t see or what they’re not interacting with on a day to day basis,” Duffuor told me.