Industriklivet 2026: Sweden's Industrial Decarbonisation Funding, With a Negative-Emissions Research Call Open to 31 August 2026

Correction notice: an earlier version of this page described a “Sweden Net-Zero Industrial Demonstrator Grants” programme worth up to kr150 million per demonstrator, with a 26 September 2025 deadline and scored criteria covering workforce transition and circular economy. No such programme exists. The Swedish Energy Agency has never published a call under that name or with that per-project amount, and the eligibility criteria described were invented. The page below has been rewritten around the real funding line, Industriklivet, using only what the agency itself publishes.

If you are looking for Swedish public money to decarbonise heavy industry, the programme you want is Industriklivet — literally “the industrial leap” — run by the Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten). It has existed since 2018, it funds feasibility studies, research projects, pilot and demonstration projects, and outright investments, and it is the vehicle behind most of the well-known Swedish industrial climate projects you have read about.

The important thing to understand before you plan around it is that 2026 is a lean year. Industriklivet’s own programme page states the initiative has SEK 653 million for 2026 and can finance projects running through 2033, with each year’s allocation decided in the budget proposition. That is a fraction of what the programme handled in recent years, and the agency has been explicit about the consequences: most of Industriklivet is simply not opening calls this year.

What is actually open right now

As of 27 July 2026, checking the Swedish Energy Agency’s call listing, exactly one Industriklivet call is open:

Stöd för forskning för negativa utsläpp (Support for research on negative emissions)

Two things about that table deserve emphasis, because they are where people go wrong.

First, SEK 15 million is the whole call, not the per-project award. This is a research call, not a demonstrator call. If you arrived here expecting nine-figure capital support for building a plant, this is not that instrument, and no amount of framing will make a demonstrator budget fit inside it.

Second, the agency’s support desk is available until 16:00 on the closing day. The system stays open later, but if you hit a problem with Mina sidor after four in the afternoon on 31 August, there is nobody to call. Submit a complete application at least a full working day early.

The 2026 picture, and why it looks like this

On 30 January 2026 the Swedish Energy Agency published a news item announcing that Industriklivet would open a new call for negative emissions, planned for March 2026, with a preliminary budget of approximately SEK 300 million. That announcement also said something more consequential for anyone planning a project: within Industriklivet’s other two areas — process emissions and strategically important initiatives — no calls are planned for 2026, given the available budget.

Industriklivet formally covers three areas:

1. Process industry emissions. Projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes, including CCS for carbon dioxide of fossil origin, but only where no other reasonable alternative exists.
2. Negative emissions. Capture and permanent geological storage of greenhouse gases of biogenic origin or removed from the atmosphere — bio-CCS being the central example.
3. Strategically important initiatives. New technologies or innovative solutions applied through industry and industrial value chains that significantly reduce emissions across society.

Only area two is active in 2026. If your project is hydrogen-based steelmaking, electrification of chemical processes, or fossil-CCS on a cement kiln, Industriklivet has no open door for you this year, and the agency has said so directly rather than leaving applicants to guess. Plan for a 2027 call and watch the programme page, which states that information about upcoming calls is published on a rolling basis and that all planning is preliminary.

Also note what is excluded even inside the active area. The January announcement was specific: carbon utilisation (CCU) and biochar production and use are out of scope for the 2026 negative-emissions effort. Sweden’s definition of negative emissions here rests on permanence through geological storage, and a project that converts captured CO₂ into a product does not satisfy it.

Calls that have already closed this year

Several genuinely relevant windows have shut, and knowing their terms tells you a great deal about what the next comparable call will look like.

Negativa utsläpp – uppskalning och kommersialisering closed on 29 April 2026 with roughly SEK 300 million available. This was the scaling and commercialisation half of the negative-emissions push: it accepted feasibility studies, pilot projects, demonstration projects, and investments in commercial facilities, aimed primarily at companies, with universities and research institutes able to participate where their role was justified. Support was framed around the whole value chain for permanent removals. Decisions were expected no earlier than June 2026, and the call warned plainly that costs incurred before an approval decision are borne at the applicant’s own risk. If you are planning a bio-CCS demonstrator, this is the call whose successor you are waiting for.

Pilot och demonstration 2026 closed on 1 June 2026 at 23:59. This is a separate Energimyndigheten line, not part of Industriklivet, but it is the closest thing Sweden runs to a general-purpose industrial demonstration grant. It had approximately SEK 200 million available, required total eligible project costs of at least SEK 10 million, and was open to Swedish companies of any size demonstrating a product, service or production process, plus Swedish actors implementing system-level demonstrations. Funded projects start between 1 October 2026 and 1 March 2027 and must finish by 31 December 2030 at the latest, with decisions expected in December 2026. The SEK 10 million floor is the single most useful number in this document for scoping purposes: it tells you what “demonstration scale” means to this agency.

Impact Innovation: Net Zero Industry 2026 closed on 17 June 2026 — worth noting because it is a distinct route to industrial decarbonisation funding in Sweden and runs on its own annual cycle.

The very large adjacent programme: the bio-CCS reverse auction

If your organisation actually captures biogenic CO₂ at volume, the money is not in Industriklivet at all. It is in Investerings- och driftstöd för bio-CCS genom omvänd auktion — investment and operating support for bio-CCS through a reverse auction — and the second auction round is open until 13 August 2026 at 23:59, with SEK 10.17 billion allocated.

This is a different animal from a research grant and should be treated as one:

• Eligible bidders are companies holding permits for activities that generate biogenic carbon dioxide in Sweden.
• The captured CO₂ must originate from Swedish industrial processes or combustion facilities.
• Winners must deliver geologically stored biogenic CO₂ within four years of receiving support approval.
• Support covers both investment and operating costs and is paid out over up to 15 years from the point storage begins.
• Bids are submitted through TendSign, the procurement platform — not through Mina sidor.

The auction mechanics, minimum volumes and evaluation rules live in the tender documents rather than on the summary page, so if you intend to bid, download the full tender text early. A reverse auction is a procurement, and procurement deadlines are unforgiving in a way that research-grant deadlines usually are not. Two and a half weeks before closing is late to be starting.

How to approach Industriklivet realistically

Match the instrument to your stage. Industriklivet spans feasibility studies through to investments, but each call activates only part of that range. The one open call funds industrial research and experimental development. If you have a technology at pilot readiness and a site, your window this year has already passed; if you have a research question about permanence, monitoring, transport chains or capture chemistry, 31 August is live.

Write in Swedish. The agency states a preference for Swedish, and the mandatory attachment template is a Swedish document. If your consortium works in English, budget translation time and, more importantly, budget review time for the translated version — a rushed translation of a technical proposal reads badly to reviewers who know the field.

Submit complete. The negative-emissions calls state that applications must be complete when submitted and that no advantage accrues from submitting early in incomplete form. Everything is assessed after closing; there is no rolling prioritisation to game.

Respect the own-risk rule. Costs incurred before a decision are at your own risk. With decisions on the research call not expected before October 2026 and project starts not permitted before 1 November 2026, do not commit spend against a hoped-for award.

Contact the programme. [email protected] is the published address for the negative-emissions area. A short, specific question about whether your project concept sits inside the geological-storage boundary is a reasonable use of it, and a much better use of a week than writing an application that falls outside scope.

Where to check before you act

Call terms change, and the 2026 planning that the agency published in January was explicitly described as preliminary. Two pages are worth checking directly rather than trusting any summary, including this one:

• The Industriklivet programme page, which carries the current budget, the three areas, and links to whatever calls are live: https://www.energimyndigheten.se/forskning-och-innovation/forskning/industri/industriklivet/
• The full call listing, which shows every open Energimyndigheten call with its closing date: https://www.energimyndigheten.se/utlysningar/

If a source elsewhere quotes you a per-project figure for Swedish industrial demonstration funding that does not appear on one of those two pages, treat it the way you should have treated the earlier version of this page.