A Map of ClimateTech Maturity & Impact

By far my most popular article has been my analysis of the Gartner Emerging Technology Hype Cycle (120,000+ reads). For that article, I re-analyzed 200+ technologies that Gartner Group analysts had tracked over twenty years, and I concluded that the hype cycle is a very limited analytic frame for assessing technology maturity. For four reasons:

1. Most technologies don't travel along any kind of hype cycle.
2. Many important technologies penetrate the market without meaningful hype.
3. Many technologies die without much adoption.
4. The hype cycle is prone to serious recall and selection biases.

A few weeks ago, that article hit a fresh pocket of readers and I had someone reach out to me about my thoughts on a hype cycle for climate technology. There have been a few previous attempts. Silicon Valley Bank drafted a solid climate tech hype cycle in 2022. And the Climate Drift newsletter put one together last year that was quite plausible. But since I have a fundamental belief that Hype Cycles aren't very useful, I thought that we can do better than a Hype Cycle for mapping the market status of climate tech.

Here is my market map of 34 climate technologies. The map plots each technology according to its potential for reducing net global warming potential (y axis) vs. market maturity (x axis).

Acronyms: CDR- Carbon Dioxide Removal; N-fert - Nitrogenous fertilizer; Ag - Agriculture; ERW - Enhanced Rock Weathering; PF - Precision Fermentation; PV - Photo-Voltaic; CH4 - Methane/Fossil Gas.

The Axes of Assessment: Maturity

In my framework, technology maturity is plotted on the X axis. Climate technologies (like any hardtech) generally have four maturity stages once they graduate from pure research:

1. Laboratory proof of concept: works in a laboratory setting (e.g. an artificial rumen for animal methane, or a desktop reactor for electro-chemical processes.)
2. Pilot: first significant scale aka. there are no significant scale dis-economies or technical impediments. Many technologies can fail at this stage because of things like waste product inhibition (e.g. for vat grown meat cells) or reaction product crowding (e.g. some electro-chemical N fertilizers).
3. Scaled/High Cost: commercial scale production, but not at market-competitive costs (even with carbon pricing). Products at this maturity stage still require significant subsidization (either funded by the company itself in the form of low or negative gross margins, or explicit government subsidies). But there may also be a clear path to future cost-competitiveness from demonstrated learning curve progress.
4. Scaled/Competitive: commercial scale production at market-competitive costs. These products can displace higher-carbon alternatives with appropriate policy support. Some technologies, like methane-inhibition feed additives, may not graduate to this stage because there is no economic reason to use them without supportive subsidies.

I've placed technologies on the x-axis based on how many of the companies I've found in that technology are at each maturity stage.

There are technologies on here that don't really match the hardtech maturity model - Local Risk Models for example. My general sense of regional climate models is that they have quite a ways to go in reducing their uncertainty and improving their fidelity to observations (particularly for precipitation and runoff).

The Axes of Assessment: Impact

The second axis of assessment is the % net reduction in Global Warming Potential (GWP). I've used a notional log scale of 0.1% to 10% of GWP reduction to plot each technology's position on the y-axis. These positions have a moderate amount of uncertainty associated with them because in many cases, the research supporting the GWP impact comes to quite different conclusions. And for early maturity technologies, we have a much better sense of the gross GWP impact than the net impact. For example, what is the likely carbon footprint of a scaled production facility for electro-chemical nitrogen fertilizer? And what kind of learning curve can we expect over time? We just don't have the data yet.

"But What About <insert your favorite> Tech?"

I didn't put some potentially significant technologies onto the map because I considered them to either be in research or likely to have less than a 0.1% impact on total global warming potential.

One of these missing technologies is fusion power. Despite the many billions spent on proof of concepts for many different fusion pathways - Fusion is not really out of the lab yet. And it's very unclear whether it's actually going to be all that much cheaper at maturity than modern fission plants. Possibly? It's not an area of deep expertise for me.

The second research stage technology that could be significant is the potential to engineer the livestock rumen microbiome to convert hydrogen into useful lipids or carbohydrates. This would completely eliminate both methane and hydrogen emissions, and be a better solution than feed additive or vaccine approaches to ruminant emissions. Those approaches essentially convert methane emissions to hydrogen emissions (50% as bad as methane).

Another technology that is currently in the realm of science fiction is CAM pathway C3 crops. This is the proposal to take the highly water efficient Cassulacean Acid Metabolism photosynthetic pathway that arid-adapted plants like agave use, and engineer it into crops like wheat and rice which use the C3 photosynthetic pathway. Ideally, the CAM pathway would only activate under water stress, as needed. This would allow wheat and rice to grow in more arid regions. Because the CAM pathway trades off productivity for water-efficiency, this may impose unacceptable yield penalties: but it would still be a monumental achievement.

Many other technologies didn't make it on the map because it's hard to know if they can hit a threshold of 0.1% of net global GWP. For example, sail-assisted heavy marine transport is extremely cool and there is a live proof of concept, but it's hard to know what it's addressable % of marine transport is likely to be.

Similarly, there are many technologies in the bio-energy and bio-feedstock spaces that I think are unlikely to produce net reductions in GWP, once land-use is accounted for. Anaerobic digesters, for example, reduce methane emissions from animal waste, but almost all their energy output is derived from the very large amounts of crop biomass that they require, which is theoretically sourced from crop residues, but at least in some countries will come mostly from dedicated bioenergy crops. And I am skeptical that there is enough food waste or crop residue available for this to make sense at scale, given competing uses.

The final class of technologies that I haven't included are those that help improve the efficiency of existing legacy technologies. Yes, I agree that they technically do reduce per-unit emissions. But they do not help build the pathway to net-zero, and technologies that make existing high emission practices more palatable are band-aids, not solutions. Like all legacy adaptation technologies, they are likely to be overtaken in the market before they can scale.

34 Climate Techs for Net Zero

Let me know in the comments if you think there is another major technology that I'm missing here (Small Modular Nuclear?), and whether you would move around any of these technologies on either the x or y axis. I will be doing followup posts on each of these technologies and the companies bringing them to market. For now I am using LinkedIN - but you can also subscribe to my (placeholder) substack if you'd like to follow along.

The ClimateTech Series

1: De-carbonizing Nitrogen Fertilizer

2: Anti-Methane Livestock Vaccines

3: Introduction to Enhanced Geothermal Energy (Fracked Geothermal)

4: Abating Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Agriculture

5: Decarbonizing Concrete is Hard

6: Decarbonizing Cooking Doesn't Matter (Much)

7: Biochar = Cheap & Reliable Carbon Removal

8: Is There a Path to $1/kg Green Hydrogen?

9: Microbial N Fertilizers Do Not Reduce Emissions

The Climate Change Impacts Series

1: Climate Change Alters Ecosystems