Cement production accounts for a significant portion of global emissions—and it’s a challenging industry to decarbonize due to its energy-intensive nature. Fortera is tackling this issue. As CEO and co-founder, Ryan Gilliam is working to make it easier for existing cement plants to become more sustainable by implementing technology to capture up to 90% of the plant’s emissions and converting that CO2 back into cement. In 2024, Fortera opened its first commercial climate-friendly cement plant in California—the first in North America—capable of while preventing 9,600 tons of CO2 emissions annually.
What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government (other than your own), needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?
To effectively reduce CO2 emissions, we need to scale solutions significantly. I believe governments and the private sector need to collaborate on both the necessity and a joint strategy for capital project financing to advance technologies from initial commercial facilities to global deployment. This is particularly difficult in climate tech, where hard-to-abate sectors involve high capital costs and low-margin industries that don’t typically operate under traditional project financing models. The lack of clear funding will hinder many impactful technologies from having a substantial effect on CO2 reduction.
What is a climate solution (other than your own) that isn’t getting the attention or funding it deserves?
Climate solutions require scale to make a meaningful impact. If we aim to solve the problem, we must invest heavily in solutions that can achieve gigaton savings. While many funded concepts are positive steps, they don’t meet this necessary threshold due to the scalability of the sector or their ability to achieve economic competitiveness. I believe concepts surrounding ocean liming, mineral looping, and mineral carbonation deserve more attention from innovators. I also strongly believe that one of the biggest challenges in this fight is time. Choosing solutions that leverage existing infrastructure, feedstocks, supply chains, process units, and are economically competitive without the need for green incentives will be crucial if we are going to scale solutions quickly enough.
If you could stand up and talk to world leaders at the next U.N. climate conference, what would you say?
Governments have done an outstanding job in addressing the first of two steps. By introducing concepts like tax incentives, loan guarantees, grants, hydrogen pricing, etc., governments have spurred remarkable innovations in the climate space and helped many promising technologies scale to demonstration and initial commercial facilities. The second, and arguably more critical, step towards meaningful reductions in CO2 is providing funding mechanisms to drive global expansion. Traditional funding mechanisms are risk-averse and will require some form of guarantees, committed offtake agreements, firm price on CO2, etc. to unlock the capital needed to achieve substantial volumes within the necessary timeframes.