Decarbonisation Technology August 2025 Issue

Typical investor

Angel

Early stage VC

Late stage VC/PE

Bulge bracket PE/Infra

$10 K - $250 K

$250 K - $5 M

$5 M - $50 M

Typical investment

$50 M - $200 M

$200 M - Billions

Targeted nancial returns Typical holding period Typical technology maturity (TRL) Financing stage and investment type

6 - 8 years

5 - 7 years

3 - 7 years

3 - 5 years

8 - 10 years

> 75% IRR or +10x > 60% IRR or +10x > 40% IRR or +7x

~25 to 35% IRR or +5x

> 18% IRR or +3x

Growth capital, Series A to C rounds with full due dilligence

Seed capital, rst institutional check

Initial raise, friends and family, angel investors

Series C round to IPO with full prospectus

Majority control, debt leveraged

1 - 3

2 - 4

4 - 7

7 - 8

8 - 9

Developments of emerging and established technologies

Example decarbonisation technologies

Tech

Projects

MOF

Tech e-fuels

DAC

PEM/AEC

CO Solvent

SOEC/AEM

Figure 2 Business maturity and typical decarbonisation investment characteristics

years ago failed to make it through to the final investment decision (FID), and some that did have subsequently been cancelled. Investor pressure in this sector is heavy. Johnson Matthey (JM) has recently confirmed that it will cut the costs in its hydrogen electrolyser and fuel cell membrane electrode assembly (MEA) assembly business by 85% (The Chemical Engineer, 2025) . Its blue hydrogen catalyst business and ammonia cracking catalysts are included in a division that has been proposed to be sold to the US Technology licensor Honeywell UOP (Johnson Matthey, 2025) . As a result of these changes, JM will significantly reduce its exposure to the hydrogen economy. Air Products has experienced several months of turmoil at the top. CEO Seifi Ghasemi, arguably the world’s most ambitious green hydrogen pioneer, has been ousted from the board (Collins, 2025) . The D. E. Shaw Group and Mantle Ridge, two significant investors in Air Products, made their dissatisfaction public through open letters (The Fly, 2025) . They put pressure on Air Products to make more efficient use of capital and reduce the risk of their investments. Green hydrogen projects without offtakers have been at the heart of the controversy, and a broad level of investor pressure forced Air Products to cancel its participation in a 50:50 JV with AES to build a $4 billion, 1.4 GW green hydrogen plant in north Texas (Bettenhausen, 2024). Fortescue has been one of the boldest

protagonists of green hydrogen. Its ambitions to develop green hydrogen projects in Australia began to unravel in 2024 (Martin, 2024) . In 2025, it announced its intent to consider the closure of its 2GW capacity electrolyser production plant in Geraldton. The need for electrolysers for its own projects was low, and the external market demand was insufficient. In 2025, MAN Energy Solutions announced it would cut 120 jobs at Quest One, its proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyser producer (Quest One, 2025) . Quest One operates an electrolyser production factory in Hamburg, but orders were well below the capacity of the plant. The cuts will reduce the cost base of the company and enable a more competitive offering in the future. Trimming back has been a prevailing theme in the green hydrogen sector in 2025. Like pruning a tree, what will remain is a healthier core to revitalise a more sustainable phase of growth in the future. Innovation needs critical mass Finance for speculative innovation in the electrolyser value chain will become scarce and increasingly expensive. The wave of buy- side venture capital (VC) investor interest from the past five years is likely to shift to private equity (PE) consolidation plays and other value- seeking deals (see Figure 2 ). The next wave of high-value green hydrogen