FOAK Review 2025: What Worked, What Broke, and What It Means for 2026

2025 was the year FOAK reality finally caught up with FOAK ambition. After a decade of increasingly bullish climate-tech projections, the past twelve months showed what it really takes to deploy first-of-a-kind projects, and what you lose when things don’t work.

The data reflects this: 42 FOAK projects were scrapped in the US in 2025, up from just 14 in all of 2024—a threefold increase in a single year. 69% of investors now expect FOAK funding to shrink through 2026, and most believe these projects will face the steepest financing conditions in years. There is no such aggregated data for the EU or the rest of the world, unfortunately.

But this same period also delivered some of the strongest FOAK wins we’ve seen to date. The picture is not one of collapse, but one of sorting. Technologies that are ready are scaling. Technologies that are not ready are getting exposed.


This is my first annual review of climate FOAK projects. I’ll focus on the three successful that struck me most, the three unsuccessful that teach valuable lessons, and I’ll end with three FOAK projects to watch in 2026.

What FOAK Succeeded in 2025

1. Kudgi Liquid CO₂ Energy Storage (India) – “Success by Leaving the West”

CTVC highlights Kudgi as one of the few actual FOAK wins of 2025, and the reasons are instructive. Instead of fighting for permits, incentives, and EPC labour in the US or EU, Energy Dome licensed its technology to a local EPC in India. Here’s what they got for such geographic pivot:

- Build time under 3 years

- 1-year construction phase

- CAPEX of $205/kWh vs $367/kWh in Europe and $500/kWh in the US

Even if you target the US and EU markets, your FOAK need not be there if it doesn’t make economic sense now. FOAK is the most expensive part of your journey, so if you can avoid compromising technology or market, then shifting to a cheaper geography may be the difference between success and failure.

2. Fervo Energy – Cape Station Geothermal (Utah, USA)

While not yet a full FOAK execution success, Fervo continued its execution streak, raising $206M in June 2025 to build the first 500 MW enhanced-geothermal FOAK in North America, with the first 100 MW expected online in 2026.

Geothermal has been sipping through many media outlets to me, but this year, I’ve managed to avoid writing any opinion posts on it. Looks like next year will be different.

3. Brevik CCS & Northern Lights (Norway)

Commissioned in June 2025, this could be one of the decade’s most important industrial decarbonization FOAKs:

- 50% emissions reduction at Norcem’s cement plant

- $3B total cost, where $2B was public money

- 5-year build time

It worked, but only because the state carried two-thirds of the financial load. And its offtake model is book-and-claim: the cement itself is still produced conventionally; the CO₂ reduction is “claimed” via accounting. A functional FOAK, but not a replicable one yet. After all, no NOAK can expect 2/3 of funds from the government.

What Failed in 2025

If successes teach us how to build FOAKs, the failures teach us how to avoid burning a hundred million dollars before discovering the physics doesn’t scale.

1. Climeworks – Mammoth DAC Under-Performance

The Mammoth plant captured only 105 tons in its first ten months, against a design capacity of 36,000 tons per year. The company failed to capture carbon at any meaningful scale.

I’ve written about Climeworks' modular approach to FOAK, showcasing it as one of the ways to make your FOAK a success. Well, it certainly seems that if your underlying tech isn’t working, then even building modular won’t save you. This is a textbook FOAK outcome: the plant taught the company what the tech actually is.

2. Natron Energy – Sodium-Ion Collapse

After raising $363M over 13 years and opening its first US sodium-ion facility in 2024, Natron shut down in September 2025. Sodium was (and still is) touted by some as an LFP/NMC killer. While I am not with this cheering crowd, I do see use cases for sodium.

Natron’s case just shows that even with good technology, juggling many things during FOAK can really mess things up.

3. Air Products – Mass Cancellations and a $3B Write-Off

2025 was the year FOAK hydrogen went from “hyped” to “paused.” Air Products demonstrated it best, when it exited three US-based hydrogen projects in February 2025 and recorded a write-off exceeding $3B.

When one of the largest industrial gas companies in the world walks away from its own flagship FOAKs, it signals a deeper structural problem - like hydrogen being a really poor energy carrier. And that’s on top of:

- No bankable demand for premium-priced hydrogen

- Unproven economics for multi-gigawatt electrolyzers

- Rising cost of capital hitting megaprojects hardest

Three Projects to Watch in 2026

The projects below aren’t guaranteed successes. What makes them worth watching is precisely the opposite: they will give us the clearest signals about which parts of climate tech are ready for true scaling.

1. Lyten – The Northvolt Takeover

If Lyten’s 3D-graphene-based lithium-sulfur batteries take root inside Northvolt’s assets, 2026 could see the most dramatic pivot in the battery sector since LFP’s global takeover.

This is FOAK at the intersection of distressed assets and breakthrough chemistry. I’ll be watching this one closely!

2. H2 Green Steel – Boden Facility

Europe’s first large-scale and long-hyped hydrogen DRI plant will test:

- Whether green hydrogen can run an industrial process reliably

Whether customers actually pay green premiums

Whether steel decarbonization will be built on hydrogen

My money is on H2 Green Steel going the way of Northvolt, but for the reason of initially flawed hydrogen economics, rather than poor execution. But you never know, and we could have both!

3. Form Energy – Multi-Day Iron-Air Battery

The FOAK 10 MW / 1000 MWh system planned for first operations will answer a decade-old question: Can long-duration storage be built without lithium, at grid scale, at a cost utilities will accept?

If the answer is even “partially yes,” then the case for overbuilding renewables will be even stronger. Otherwise (and highly likely), gas turbines will prove to be the only viable alternative to cover peak loads or renewable shortages.

Looking Ahead

The pattern emerging from 2025 is clear:

- FOAKs succeed when and where they are buildable, not when they are perfect.

- FOAKs fail when physics or economics break at scale, not when founders lack vision.

- Public capital still carries the heaviest industrial FOAKs, and that isn’t likely to change in 2026.

- Investors are pulling back, but the best technologies are moving forward regardless.

From January 2026, I’ll be monitoring FOAK projects around the world on a monthly basis and will dedicate one monthly edition of this newsletter to overview of what’s going on in the climate FOAK world.

2026 will bring its own real-world test cases. And—like this past year—they will rewrite strategies more than any policy paper or conference keynote ever could.