Turning Challenge into Opportunity: Supplier Voices from Heavy-Emitting Sectors

To accelerate the decarbonization of heavy industry demands more than early market enthusiasm – it requires addressing the barriers that hinder suppliers from delivering low-carbon technologies and products at sufficient speed and scale. This report seeks to elevate the voices of the producers, project developers and innovators working within the hardest-to-abate heavy industrial sectors that underpin the world’s mobility and materials systems.

The accounts of efforts to decarbonize are often told from the demand side – through buyers, regulators and financiers. Yet the pace and practicality of this transition ultimately hinge on those developing and supplying the low-carbon solutions themselves.

Drawing on extensive, structured interviews across the industries that comprise the First Movers Coalition (FMC) and its First Suppliers Hub (FSH) database of low-carbon products and services – aluminium, aviation, carbon dioxide removal (CDR), cement and concrete, shipping, steel and trucking – this report captures candid supplier perspectives that identify where progress is tangible, where market, technological and regulatory challenges persist, and how the path forward is viewed by many suppliers. The report connects on-the-ground experience with pragmatic solutions, offering insights valuable to producers, but equally relevant to offtakers, investors and policy-makers.