The EU will put more than a billion euros on seven environmental projects

The European Commission announced on Tuesday that the EU is investing more than 1.1 billion euros in seven large-scale innovative projects under the Innovation Fund. Through grants, the Union will support projects aimed at bringing to market breakthrough technologies in energy-intensive and hydrogen sectors, carbon capture, use and storage, and renewable energy production. These are projects that will be implemented in Belgium, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Italy. EC Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans, who is responsible for the Europe Green Agreement, said the innovation was crucial to finding the solutions the EU needed for decades to achieve the goal of keeping global warming up to 1.5 degrees Celsius. He recalled that the Fit-for-55 legislative package from the European Commission's workshop proposed to increase the Innovation Fund so that innovative European projects and ideas could compete globally with climate innovation. In the first call for proposals for large-scale projects to be funded by the Innovation Fund, seven projects were selected with a total capital cost exceeding € 7.5 million. They have been evaluated by independent experts who have focused on their ability to reduce - compared to conventional technologies - greenhouse gas emissions and innovate beyond state-of-the-art technologies. At the same time, the selected projects had to be advanced enough to be put into practice quickly. Other selection criteria included the potential of the projects in terms of their scalability and cost-effectiveness. EU-funded projects cover a wide range of sectors relevant to the decarbonisation of various sectors of European industry and energy, such as chemicals, steel, cement, refineries and electricity and heat. All projects are either already part of industrial hubs or are the starting point for decarbonisation groups of interconnected industries. The aim of the project in Sweden is to completely eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from steel production by using hydrogen from renewable sources. The project in Finland will show two ways of producing pure hydrogen at the Porvoo refinery through renewable energy and CO2 capture and permanent storage in the North Sea. The project in France aims to capture emissions in a cement plant, where CO2 is partly stored in the North Sea and partly added to concrete. The Belgian project is developing a complete value chain for carbon capture, transport and storage in the port of Antwerp. The Italians want to create a pilot line on an industrial scale for the production of innovative and high-performance photovoltaic cells. The project in Spain will convert non-recyclable municipal solid waste into methanol and another project in Sweden will build a carbon capture and storage facility at an existing biomass power plant for combined heat and power in Stockholm. The individual grant agreements will be prepared by the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA), which is the implementing body for the Innovation Fund. The agreements should be finalized in the first quarter of 2022, which will allow the EC to take the relevant grant decisions and start disbursing funds. At the end of October, the European Commission published a second call for proposals for large-scale projects with a deadline of 3 March 2022. Applicants of all projects that were not successful in the first call can re-submit their projects.