The European Union (EU) announced a third round of awards under the Innovation Fund, which contemplates nearly €2 billion for clean tech projects to drive the green transition.
1. Innovation Fund
The funding of over €1.8 billion is coming from the EU’s Innovation Fund which aims to help bring breakthrough technologies to the market in energy-intensive industries, hydrogen, renewable energy, carbon capture and storage infrastructure, and manufacturing of key components for energy storage and renewables.
The Innovation Fund is an important tool to scale up innovations in renewable hydrogen and other solutions for European industry.
Frans Timmermans, European Commissioner in charge of the European Green Deal
The projects getting funding to develop clean tech are located in Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Sweden. In total 17 projects were selected with capital costs above €7.5 million.
“Compared to the first disbursement round, the funds available have increased by 60%, enabling us to double the number of projects supported. This is a big boost for the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industry in the European Union,” added Timmermans.
When announcing the REPowerEU Plan, the Commission said that funding available for projects working on the energy transition would double to around €3 billion to help bridge the EU’s independence from Russian fossil fuels. In the autumn, the EU executive will launch another call for large-scale projects.
We support innovative businesses across 🇪🇺 to develop cutting-edge technologies and drive the green transition.
— European Commission 🇪🇺 (@EU_Commission) July 12, 2022
Today, the EU is investing over €1.8 billion in 17 innovative clean-tech projects to boost the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries in the EU.#EUGreenDeal
2. Cement, chemicals, hydrogen
The projects chosen to develop and test new tech for sustainable energy purposes cover a wide range of sectors contributing to the EU’s decarbonisation efforts. These include production, distribution and use of green hydrogen, waste-to-hydrogen, offshore wind, manufacturing of photovoltaic (PV) modules, battery storage and recycling, carbon capture and storage, sustainable aviation fuels, and advanced biofuels. According to the Commission, all combined, they have a potential to save the equivalent of 136 million tonnes of CO2 over their first 10 years of operation.
A closer look into the selected projects shows, for the cement industry in particular, the envisaged deployment of a a second-generation oxyfuel carbon capture process at a cement plant in Germany, which intends to provide it as raw material for further processing into synthetic methanol. In Poland, an end-to-end carbon capture and storage chain starting from CO2 capture and liquefaction will be developed at a cement plant to storage in offshore sites.
In Finland, a project will chemically recycle plastics to be used as a feedstock for refineries. Another project in Sweden will create a first-of-a-kind methanol plant converting CO₂, residue streams, renewable hydrogen and biogas to methanol.
In the Netherlands, one project will produce, distribute and use green hydrogen through an electrolyser supplied by offshore wind electricity. Another one will produce 15,500 tonnes of renewable hydrogen per year. The third one will process non-recyclable solid waste streams and transform them primarily into hydrogen.
