By Dr. Maya Chen, Managing Partner · March 2025 · 16 min read

There is a version of the energy transition story that has already been told, at least in its broad outlines. Solar panel costs have fallen 90% over the last decade. Wind power is now the cheapest form of new electricity generation in most of the world. Electric vehicles are achieving cost parity with internal combustion cars in market after market. Battery storage is scaling at a pace that would have seemed implausible to energy analysts in 2015. By every metric that matters for power generation, the renewable energy transition is on track — not because governments mandated it, but because the economics made it inevitable.

But here is the problem with that story: it only covers about 35% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity generation is important, but it is not the whole economy. The other 65% of emissions — from industry, transportation, agriculture, buildings, and the legacy carbon already accumulated in the atmosphere from 150 years of fossil fuel combustion — cannot be solved by solar panels and wind turbines alone. Decarbonizing cement, steel, aviation, shipping, and heavy chemicals requires technologies that do not exist yet at commercial scale. Removing the excess COâ‚‚ that has already accumulated in the atmosphere requires technologies that are only now emerging from the laboratory. And doing all of this at the pace the climate science demands requires a mobilization of capital and engineering talent that dwarfs anything the first generation of clean energy companies achieved.

This is the frontier that Sway for Future exists to invest in. Not the already-solved problems of utility-scale solar and onshore wind — those markets are enormous and important, but they are well-served by infrastructure investors with lower return requirements than early-stage venture. We focus on the hard problems: the technologies that address the 65% of emissions that renewables cannot touch, and the carbon removal approaches that may be humanity's last resort if we cannot cut emissions fast enough. Three companies — Climeworks, Twelve, and Charm Industrial — define the frontier of what we believe is possible, and they provide the empirical foundation for how we think about the next generation of climate technology investments.

The Problem Solar and Wind Cannot Solve

Before examining the technologies that go beyond solar and wind, it is worth being precise about the problem they are solving. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels requires achieving net-zero carbon emissions globally by approximately 2050 and drawing down a cumulative total of approximately 100–1,000 gigatons of COâ‚‚ from the atmosphere over the following decades. These are staggering numbers, and they imply a decarbonization challenge that extends far beyond the electricity sector.

Consider the specific emissions sources that renewable energy cannot directly address:

Industrial process emissions. The production of cement, steel, aluminum, and basic chemicals involves chemical processes that release COâ‚‚ as a direct byproduct of the chemistry involved — not just from the energy used to power the plants. Cement production, for example, accounts for approximately 8% of global COâ‚‚ emissions, and roughly two-thirds of those emissions come from the chemical decomposition of limestone into lime — a process that releases COâ‚‚ regardless of whether the kiln is powered by coal or solar electricity. Decarbonizing cement requires either capturing those process emissions or fundamentally redesigning the chemistry of cement production.

Long-distance transportation. Aviation and shipping together account for approximately 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and are among the hardest sectors to electrify. The energy density of jet fuel is approximately 40 times higher than the best lithium-ion batteries available today, which makes battery-electric aircraft physically impractical for long-haul routes. Decarbonizing aviation requires either sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) produced from low-carbon feedstocks, hydrogen combustion, or some combination of the two — none of which can be produced at commercial scale using existing infrastructure.

Agricultural emissions. Agriculture accounts for approximately 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from methane produced by livestock digestion and nitrous oxide released by nitrogen fertilizer application. These emissions cannot be addressed by electrification — they require either changes in agricultural practice, biological or chemical interventions that alter the emission-producing processes, or carbon sequestration in soil and biomass that offsets the residual emissions.

Legacy atmospheric COâ‚‚. Even if humanity achieves net-zero emissions by 2050 — itself an extraordinarily ambitious goal — the atmospheric COâ‚‚ concentration will remain elevated for centuries without active carbon removal. The IPCC's most optimistic scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5°C depend on removing billions of tons of COâ‚‚ from the atmosphere annually by mid-century. No technology currently exists that can achieve this at the required scale and cost. The carbon removal industry needs to go through the same cost-curve journey that solar and wind went through over the past two decades — but in half the time.

Climeworks: Engineering a Carbon Removal Industry from Scratch

Climeworks was founded in 2009 by Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher, two engineers who had met as students at ETH Zurich and become convinced that direct air capture — the process of extracting COâ‚‚ directly from the ambient atmosphere — was both physically possible and potentially economically viable at scale. At the time, the idea attracted more skepticism than investment. The thermodynamics of pulling COâ‚‚ from air, where it exists at a concentration of roughly 420 parts per million — about 300 times more dilute than in the flue gas of a coal power plant — made direct air capture appear inherently expensive. For years, Climeworks existed at the margins of the climate technology world, funding its research through academic grants and small pilot projects.

The $650 million in funding that Climeworks has raised since 2020 signals that the skeptics have been partially answered. The company's first commercial plant, Orca, opened in Iceland in 2021 with a capacity of 4,000 tonnes of COâ‚‚ per year. Its successor, Mammoth, opened in 2024 with a capacity of 36,000 tonnes per year — a ninefold scale-up in a single generation of plant design. The cost per ton of COâ‚‚ removed has declined substantially from the company's earliest estimates, and the company's published cost roadmap projects costs below $300 per ton by 2030 and below $200 per ton by 2035 on the path to the sub-$100 per ton target that would unlock mass-market adoption.

The strategic importance of Climeworks' Iceland operations extends beyond the engineering achievement. Iceland provides two critical resources that are essential for cost-effective DAC: abundant renewable electricity from geothermal sources, and abundant basalt rock formations that provide permanent, verified geological storage. The Orca and Mammoth plants are not just carbon removal facilities — they are cost-reduction laboratories, where every operational cycle generates data that feeds into the next generation of plant design, sorbent chemistry, and process optimization.

The commercial model Climeworks has developed is equally important. The company sells carbon removal credits to corporate customers on long-term offtake contracts, with prices set to reflect current costs while providing a clear commitment to cost reduction as volume scales. The roster of customers — Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, Swiss Re, and the Frontier Climate coalition — represents both the demand-side validation of the carbon removal market and the working capital base that allows Climeworks to invest in cost reduction with confidence that the revenue will materialize as capacity scales.

For Sway for Future, Climeworks defines the ambition and the trajectory for the entire carbon removal sector. The company has demonstrated that DAC is technically feasible, that permanent geological storage is achievable at commercial scale, and that corporate demand for high-quality carbon removal is real and growing. What Climeworks has not yet demonstrated is that DAC can achieve the cost levels required for mass-market adoption — that work lies in the decade ahead. The companies we are backing at seed stage are those that will contribute to that cost reduction journey, whether through novel sorbent chemistries, alternative energy sources, different storage mechanisms, or the process engineering innovations that will make the next generation of plants radically cheaper to build and operate than Mammoth.

"Climeworks has done for direct air capture what the first utility-scale solar farms did for solar: proven the concept, established the commercial model, and set the cost-reduction trajectory in motion. The question now is how fast the engineering learning curve runs, and who is on the right side of it." — Dr. Maya Chen, Managing Partner, Sway for Future

Twelve: Turning COâ‚‚ into the Building Block of the Industrial Economy

Twelve approaches the carbon problem from a fundamentally different direction than Climeworks. Rather than storing captured COâ‚‚ underground, Twelve has developed a proprietary electrochemical process that converts COâ‚‚ into valuable industrial products — synthetic fuels, plastics, and chemicals — using only COâ‚‚, water, and renewable electricity as inputs. The company calls this process "carbon transformation," and its implications, if the technology achieves commercial scale, are profound: every molecule of COâ‚‚ that becomes a jet fuel molecule or a plastic molecule is a molecule that does not come from petroleum.

The technology at the heart of Twelve's platform is a COâ‚‚ electrolyzer — an electrochemical cell that uses catalysts developed by the company to drive the reduction of COâ‚‚ molecules into carbon monoxide, which can then be combined with hydrogen through established Fischer-Tropsch chemistry to produce synthetic hydrocarbons. The key innovation is the catalyst: Twelve has developed proprietary materials that achieve COâ‚‚ conversion efficiencies and selectivities that were not previously achievable at industrially relevant current densities. The result is a process that can produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), synthetic natural gas, and a range of carbon-negative industrial chemicals at costs that are becoming competitive with conventional petroleum-derived alternatives as renewable electricity prices continue to fall.

The strategic partnerships Twelve has secured — United Airlines for sustainable aviation fuel, Procter & Gamble for carbon-negative chemicals, and a significant contract with the US Air Force — validate the commercial potential of the technology. United's investment reflects the airline industry's existential interest in SAF: aviation cannot electrify, international carbon pricing is tightening, and SAF is currently the only scalable pathway to meaningful airline decarbonization. The P&G relationship addresses a different market entirely: the $600 billion global chemicals industry, which currently derives essentially all of its feedstocks from petroleum and accounts for approximately 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

For Sway for Future, Twelve represents the most compelling category of next-generation climate technology: a process that converts the problem — atmospheric COâ‚‚ — into the solution — a replacement for petroleum-derived products. The economics of this approach are inherently more robust than pure carbon removal: rather than relying entirely on voluntary corporate commitments to pay a premium for carbon removal credits, Twelve's products compete in existing industrial markets where the customer value proposition is the price and performance of the final product, not the carbon accounting. The climate benefit is real and verifiable, but it is not the primary reason United Airlines buys SAF — they buy it because it is fuel that burns in a jet engine, meets ASTM specifications, and will increasingly be required by regulation. The impact is embedded in the product.

Charm Industrial: Sequestering Carbon Through the Food System

Charm Industrial takes yet another approach to the carbon problem — one that is elegantly simple in concept but requires significant engineering to execute at scale. The company's process begins with agricultural residue: the stalks, husks, and other plant matter that remain in fields after harvest. This biomass contains carbon that was recently drawn from the atmosphere by photosynthesis. Conventionally, this biomass either decomposes (releasing the carbon back to the atmosphere as COâ‚‚ and methane) or is burned as a low-grade fuel (also releasing the carbon). Charm interrupts this cycle by converting the biomass into a stable liquid — bio-oil — through a high-temperature process called fast pyrolysis, then injecting the bio-oil into geological formations where it will remain sequestered for geological timescales.

The elegance of this approach is that it combines two existing, well-understood industrial processes — biomass pyrolysis and geological fluid injection — in a way that achieves permanent carbon removal. The carbon that was drawn from the atmosphere by the plant is converted into a form that resists decomposition and is then stored underground, effectively removing it from the carbon cycle. The bio-oil injection process borrows from the extensive infrastructure and regulatory frameworks developed by the oil and gas industry for underground fluid storage, reducing the technological and regulatory risk compared to approaches that require entirely novel infrastructure.

Charm's business model intersects with the agricultural economy in ways that create potential co-benefits beyond carbon removal. Agricultural residue management is a significant challenge for farmers: leaving too much residue in the field can harbor pests and disease, but burning residue (a common practice in parts of Asia and Africa) generates air pollution and immediate COâ‚‚ emissions. Charm offers farmers a use for their residue that generates revenue while avoiding the negative consequences of the alternatives. If the carbon removal credit prices remain supportive — and Stripe's $1 million purchase and the Frontier Climate commitment suggest they will — Charm has the potential to develop a collection and processing network that integrates deeply into agricultural supply chains.

Charm's path to scale is more straightforward than Climeworks or Twelve in one important respect: fast pyrolysis is not a new technology. Industrial pyrolysis systems have been operating in various applications for decades, and the engineering challenges of scaling them are well understood. The novel aspects of Charm's approach are the focus on agricultural biomass feedstocks, the geological storage system for the resulting bio-oil, and the carbon accounting and verification infrastructure that allows each ton of removed COâ‚‚ to be credibly measured and credited. These are real challenges, but they are more tractable than the fundamental materials science problems that Climeworks and Twelve are working on.

"Charm is solving a problem that the agricultural economy already has — what to do with residue — and generating permanent carbon removal as the output. It's the kind of system-level insight that we find most compelling: not a technology looking for a problem, but a solution that emerges from understanding the problem deeply." — Dr. Maya Chen, Managing Partner, Sway for Future

The Frontier Climate Coalition: Demand-Side Infrastructure for Carbon Removal

One of the most important developments in the carbon removal market over the past three years has been the emergence of structured demand-side commitments from technology companies. The Frontier Climate coalition — organized by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, McKinsey, and Meta — has committed $1 billion in advance purchase commitments for carbon removal by 2030. This initiative, which explicitly targets early-stage and nascent carbon removal technologies that cannot yet compete on price with conventional offsets, is modeled on the advance market commitments that accelerated vaccine development in global health — and it is beginning to have a similar effect on the carbon removal market.

The strategic logic of advance purchase commitments for carbon removal is straightforward: the cost of carbon removal technologies is high today primarily because production volumes are low. Climeworks' Mammoth plant costs more per ton to operate than a mature, high-volume plant would cost, because all of the fixed costs of building the first plant of a new design are amortized over a relatively small number of tons of COâ‚‚. As volume scales, fixed costs per unit decline. But achieving that scale requires customers willing to pay today's prices in order to bring about tomorrow's lower prices. The Frontier coalition is providing exactly that signal — and it is doing so in a way that specifically rewards companies with clear cost reduction roadmaps, creating an incentive for the most technically ambitious carbon removal companies to be both ambitious and rigorous about their engineering economics.

This demand-side infrastructure matters enormously for seed-stage climate technology investors like Sway for Future. A decade ago, the fundamental uncertainty for carbon removal and hard-to-abate sector decarbonization was not just technological — it was commercial. Even if the technology worked, would there be paying customers? The Frontier coalition, combined with the voluntary carbon market's shift toward high-quality durable carbon removal, has substantially reduced that commercial uncertainty. The question for early-stage investors is now more cleanly focused on the engineering and operational challenges — which are substantial, but more tractable than the combination of technological and commercial uncertainty that early solar and wind investors faced.

The Hard-to-Abate Sectors: Where the Next Wave of Climate Capital Will Flow

Carbon removal is one piece of the beyond-solar-and-wind puzzle. The other piece is the decarbonization of the industrial economy — the sectors whose emissions cannot be addressed by electrification and must instead be addressed through process innovation, alternative feedstocks, or carbon capture at the point of emission.

Green Hydrogen and Industrial Decarbonization. Green hydrogen — produced by splitting water molecules using renewable electricity — is emerging as a critical decarbonizing agent for industries that cannot electrify directly. Steel production using hydrogen direct reduction (replacing coking coal with hydrogen as the reducing agent) can eliminate the 2 billion tons of COâ‚‚ that conventional steelmaking produces annually. Ammonia production from green hydrogen could decarbonize nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing, which accounts for 1-2% of global energy use. The challenge is cost: green hydrogen currently costs 3-5 times more than fossil hydrogen in most markets. The cost curve is declining, driven by electrolyzer scale-up and falling renewable electricity prices, but significant engineering work remains.

Green Cement and Construction Materials. Cement's 8% share of global emissions makes it one of the most significant decarbonization challenges in the industrial economy. Several approaches are being developed simultaneously: supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) that replace a fraction of cement with industrial byproducts; low-carbon cement formulations that use different chemical processes to avoid or minimize process COâ‚‚; and carbon capture at cement plants, which addresses the process emissions that cannot be eliminated by switching to clean energy. Startups including CarbonCure (which injects recycled COâ‚‚ into concrete during mixing, both sequestering it and improving concrete strength) and Sublime Systems (which has developed an electrochemical process for lime production that avoids process COâ‚‚) represent the frontier of this space.

Alternative Proteins and Agricultural Methane. The livestock sector accounts for approximately 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with cattle production the dominant contributor. Reducing agricultural emissions requires either shifting consumption patterns toward lower-emission protein sources or developing biological interventions that reduce the methane production of existing livestock. Companies in both categories are attracting significant investment. Precision fermentation, cultivated meat, and advanced plant-based formulations like NotCo's AI-driven products address the consumption side; feed additives that suppress enteric methane production (such as Mootral and 3-NOP) address the production side. Both represent genuine climate technology opportunities that are largely invisible to investors focused on the renewable energy transition.

How Sway for Future Evaluates Beyond-Solar-and-Wind Climate Technologies

The climate technology landscape is vast, technically complex, and populated by companies making claims about future cost curves that require careful scrutiny. At Sway for Future, we have developed a specific framework for evaluating early-stage climate technology companies in the beyond-solar-and-wind category — a framework informed by what we have learned from studying Climeworks, Twelve, Charm Industrial, and dozens of other companies in the space.

Technical defensibility. The most important question in climate tech is whether the core technology creates a durable competitive advantage or whether it is a combination of commercially available components that any well-funded competitor can replicate. Climeworks' solid sorbent chemistry, Twelve's COâ‚‚ electrolyzer catalysts, and Charm's pyrolysis process design all represent genuine technical differentiation that cannot be easily copied. We look for companies where the core innovation is protected by patents, by proprietary process knowledge, or by the accumulated learning that comes from operating at scale — and where that technical moat grows wider, not narrower, as the technology matures.

Cost curve visibility. Every climate technology company projects cost reductions as volume scales. The quality of those projections varies enormously, from physically rigorous first-principles analyses to marketing-driven optimism. We evaluate cost curves by asking: what are the specific engineering changes that will drive cost reduction, what is the evidence that those changes are achievable, and what is the rate-limiting step that determines how fast the cost curve runs? A company that can articulate specific process innovations, material cost reductions, or manufacturing scale benefits — and can point to analogous learning rates in comparable industries — is more credible than one that assumes cost reduction will happen as a natural consequence of volume growth.

Market structure and off-take visibility. Climate technology companies need paying customers, and the path to paying customers varies enormously across sub-sectors. Carbon removal companies increasingly have access to sophisticated demand-side structures like Frontier Climate. SAF producers have airline mandates and sustainability commitments creating near-term offtake. Green hydrogen producers face a more uncertain demand environment. We look for companies that have a clear, specific view of their first customers, a realistic assessment of the price at which those customers will buy, and a credible roadmap from the first customers to the mass market.

Team and capital efficiency. At seed stage, the team matters more than the technology, because the technology will almost certainly change materially before the company achieves commercial scale. We look for founding teams with deep domain expertise — materials scientists, electrochemists, process engineers — combined with the commercial instinct to design business models that can survive the transition from laboratory to factory to market. We also look for capital efficiency: climate technology is inherently capital-intensive, and companies that can achieve meaningful technical milestones with seed capital are more likely to survive the funding environment than those that require massive infrastructure investment before they can prove the core concept.

The Decade Ahead: From Demonstration to Gigaton Scale

The next decade in climate technology will be defined by a single challenge: scaling from demonstration to gigatons. Climeworks' Mammoth plant removes 36,000 tons of COâ‚‚ per year. The IPCC's scenarios for 1.5°C require removing billions of tons per year by mid-century. The gap between where the industry is today and where it needs to be is not just large — it is orders of magnitude, and closing it in a timeframe consistent with climate imperatives requires a pace of technology development and capital deployment that has no modern precedent.

This sounds daunting, but consider the analogous trajectory in solar. In 2005, the cumulative installed capacity of solar photovoltaics globally was approximately 5 gigawatts. In 2024, it exceeded 2,000 gigawatts. That is a 400-fold increase in 20 years, driven by a combination of technological learning, manufacturing scale, policy support, and falling costs that made solar progressively more competitive in market after market. The learning rate for solar was approximately 23% per doubling of cumulative capacity — meaning that every time total production doubled, costs fell by roughly 23%. If carbon removal technologies achieve even half of solar's learning rate, the cost reduction over the next two decades will be extraordinary.

At Sway for Future, we believe the companies that will achieve gigaton-scale carbon removal and industrial decarbonization are being founded right now. They are working in Berkeley and Zurich and Denver, in university labs and former industrial facilities, with founding teams that combine the deep scientific expertise needed to solve genuinely hard problems with the commercial instinct to design businesses that can survive the long road from seed round to market leadership. We want to be the first institutional capital behind those companies — the investors who were there when the technology was unproven and the commercial model was still being designed, and who can point to a decade of partnership and operational support as the evidence of what we bring to the table beyond a check.

Solar and wind have won. That battle is over. The next battle — decarbonizing industry, agriculture, and aviation, and removing the legacy carbon from the atmosphere — is just beginning. And the investors who back the right companies at the right moment will participate in the most consequential industrial transformation in human history while generating the financial returns that prove, again and definitively, that impact and investment excellence are not a trade-off but a single, unified thesis.