IEEE Spectrum’s Top Climate Tech Stories of 2025

The sky may have rained at this year’s big climate summit in Belém, Brazil, but engineers have invented plenty of exciting climate technologies this year that are worth celebrating. Here are some of the best of the year IEEE Spectrum climate technology stories:

Richard Zare, Xiaowei Song et al.

Ammonia is a crucial ingredient for human civilization, fueling agriculture, explosives and next-generation cargo ships. Researchers have turned to classical laboratory chemistry and artificial intelligence in search of more efficient ammonia production. In January, independent contributor Alfred Poor reported on a real-world demonstration of passive technology that captures ammonia from the wind, with no batteries or necessary.

Daniel Kunz

HAS IEEE Spectrum, we love any story that makes good use of electrons, and freelance contributor Rachel Berkowitz founded a startup using piezoelectric catalysts to permanently eliminate the chemicals contaminating our waterways. Most systems spend a lot of energy mechanically filtering out harmful, long-lasting chemicals, but these researchers propose using the kinetic energy of natural water flow to drive their system, along with their skillful chemical exploitation of electrons. Take these mechanical engineers! And always chemicals, of course.

Original photo: Emily Waltz

Did you think the only greenhouse gas you had to worry about was carbon dioxide? Please note: certain gases linked to fluoride have heat trapping capacities thousands of times greater than those of CO.₂. One in particular, SF₆happens to be the main insulator of the high voltage circuit breakers necessary on all our electrical networks. Energy Editor Emily Waltz explained how to use supercritical CO2 gas instead, keeping the toxic SF.₆—responsible for about 1 percent of global warming in 2018 – of our supply chain and our atmosphere.

Chris Philpot

It’s one thing to avoid emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and another to sequester carbon from the air. Longtime editor W. Wayt Gibbs explored the question of how much carbon society could remove from the atmosphere for The Scale Issue. The resulting infographic identifies where we can inject CO₂ underground, how many people have managed to capture so far and the scale of the challenge remaining.

Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters/Redux

It will take more than engineering to extract Greenland’s rare earth elements, which are valuable for many types of climate technologies, Flemming Getreuer Christiansen, a mining consultant and former deputy director of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, wrote in a guest post: This will require policy clarity that is currently lacking. Like so many exciting engineering problems, politics is the limiting factor.

Nicole Millman; Original drawing: Daria Ustiugova

And finally, because IEEE Spectrum readers know we should balance the technical side of our lives with poetry, a meditation by fiber optic engineer and poet Steven Searcy on the joys and electrons of summer.