'The secret push': Bloomberg says Bill Gates got on the phone to save President Biden's $370B climate bill. Here are the multibillionaire's big green bets

Clean energy stocks made a strong comeback after the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which consists of around $370 billion on climate and energy programs. The bill has since been signed into law by President Biden.

According to a recent report from Bloomberg titled “Bill Gates and the Secret Push to Save Biden’s Climate Bil,” Gates was instrumental in pushing the bill through the Senate.

“One of the world’s richest men felt he had to give one of the nation’s most powerful lawmakers a little pep talk,” Bloomberg Green — the climate change vertical of the publication — reports.

When Senator Joe Manchin would not support the economic package, Gates “got on the phone with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.”

In a surprising reversal, Manchin later announced that he reached an agreement with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to vote on the climate spending package.

"Gates started wooing Manchin and other senators who might prove pivotal for clean-energy policy in 2019 over a meal in Washington DC," Bloomberg writes.

According to Bloomberg, Gates’ organization has “sunk at least tens of millions into green cement startups such as Ecocem, Chement and Brimstone.”

Here’s a look at these up-and-coming players in the green space.

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Ecocem

Cement production is responsible for about 8% of the total carbon dioxide emissions in the world. Ecocem aims to solve that problem.

Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Ecocem specializes in the manufacturing of high-performance cement, featuring the “Best Available Technology” for environmental performance.

Last year, it was reported that Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures — a billion-dollar sustainable energy investment fund — invested in Ecocem. While Ecocem is still a startup, it seems to already be making a positive impact.

“Ecocem is working to minimize carbon emissions for the global construction industry and have already reduced CO2 emissions in Europe by over 14 million tons,” Gates wrote in a tweet earlier this year.

CHEMent

CHEMent is another BEV investment in the cement industry.

CHEMent utilizes an electrochemical process that takes place at room temperature and eliminates the first 50% of CO2 emissions in cement production.

The second half of CO2 emissions is chemically released and difficult to capture at the present time. But this is changed by CHEMent’s technology, which produces a pure stream of CO2 and makes it possible to capture carbon in a much cleaner and less expensive manner.

BEV says that the end result of this technology is “the elimination of the remaining 50% of CO2 emissions” in cement production.

Brimstone Energy

Brimstone Energy is a startup that aims to produce mass-market, zero-carbon cement.

In April, CNBC reported that BEV and a Silicon Valley venture capital firm co-led a $55 million Series A funding round in Brimstone. The company was still pre-revenue at the time.

“We need to recognize that cement is a massive problem for climate and that nobody has figured out how to address it at scale without dramatically increasing costs or moving away from the regulated materials that the construction industry knows and loves,” says Carmichael Roberts, co-leader of BEV’s investment committee.

Not a risk-free endeavor

Investing in startups can be a lucrative endeavor if they make it big, but it’s not risk-free.

According to Bloomberg, Gates had to witness the bankruptcy filing of Aquion Energy, a startup that makes sodium-ion batteries and electricity storage systems.

The hope now is that with the climate spending package in the Inflation Reduction Act, more clean energy startups can make it to the main stage.

Bloomberg notes that Aquion “might have had a fighting chance if energy-storage tax credits were available.”

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