Turning Challenge into Opportunity 2025

Executive summary This report connects on-the-ground experience with pragmatic solutions, offering insights valuable to producers, but equally relevant to offtakers, investors and policy-makers. The accounts of efforts to decarbonize heavy industry are often told from the demand side – through buyers, regulators and financiers. Yet the pace and practicality of this transition ultimately hinge on those building and supplying the low-carbon solutions themselves. This report seeks to elevate the voice of the low-carbon supplier in high-emitting sectors – the producers, project developers and innovators working within the hardest-to-abate sectors that underpin the world’s mobility and materials systems. Drawing on extensive, structured interviews across the industries that comprise the First Movers Coalition (FMC) and First Suppliers Hub (FSH) – aviation, aluminium, carbon dioxide removal (CDR), cement and concrete, shipping, steel and trucking – this report captures candid supplier perspectives that identify where progress is tangible, where challenges persist and how many suppliers view the path forward. Each sector analysis delves into the most consistently raised and pressing issues identified through these conversations, grounding the analysis in suppliers’ experiences rather than abstract targets. The report’s perspective is deliberately specific: that of the supplier navigating early commercial deployment and scaling-up difficulties following final investment decision (FID), amid uncertain policy, financing and infrastructure environments. It is also inherently relational – suppliers operate within ecosystems of buyers, regulators, financiers and technology partners whose direct objectives may diverge but which require collaboration to achieve. By viewing systemic challenges through this lens, the report uncovers where these interdependencies can accelerate or inhibit scale and how coordination could help close the gap between ambition and adoption. To enhance the clarity of the analysis, this report groups the seven hard-to-abate sectors into two broad families: –Mobility sectors (aviation, shipping, trucking) –Materials sectors (aluminium, cement and concrete, steel, CDR) In this report, CDR is categorized within the materials sectors. However, unlike other core materials sectors, CDR does not manufacture physical goods for end-consumption. This distinction is important to ensure accurate sector analysis and meaningful comparisons within the report. Each sector analysis focuses on a particular, nuanced systemic challenge, highlighted by suppliers: –Aluminium – Powering low carbon aluminium: achieving parity with traditional supply. –Aviation – Scaling-up SAF: infrastructure integration, bottlenecks and future readiness. –Carbon dioxide removal – Creating a market structure to commercialize proven technologies. –Cement and concrete – Reimagining procurement practices to reward low-carbon innovation. –Shipping – The critical need for robust offtake in low-carbon fuel supply. –Steel – Commercializing pioneering technologies in an evolving policy landscape. –Trucking – Electrification realities: scaling-up, barriers and the road to decarbonization. The report also highlights structural challenges that cut across the broad sectors of Mobility and Materials, respectively. In the Mobility sectors, these include specific infrastructure premises that govern growth and financing mechanisms struggling to keep pace with technological maturity. In the Materials sectors, these include weak and volatile market signals, lack of unified standards and accounting, and project financing. Persistent inconsistencies and variations in policies continue to challenge both sector groupings. The cross-sector synthesis explores how these shared themes converge and where collaborative approaches could unlock scale. While sector-specific in scope, this report demonstrates that low-carbon suppliers across industries face common challenges: the need for durable demand signals, investable infrastructure, access to capital and consistent public policy. Their experiences, captured here in their own terms, help form a practical blueprint for the next phase of industrial decarbonization: one led not only by commitments, but by suppliers making those commitments real. Turning Challenge into Opportunity: Supplier Voices from Heavy-Emitting Sectors 4