The EU wants to be a leading player in the industries of the future. But, let\u2019s be clear, it is the US Inflation Reduction Act, the US green subsidy, tax incentive and domestic manufacturing requirements initiative, that has been the real wake up call for Europe to come with a net-zero industrial plan.<\/p>\n
The four pillars of the EU response to the US IRA are a predictable and simplified regulatory environment, faster access to sufficient funding, skills and open trade for resilient supply chains.<\/p>\n
This plan has been further worked out into two concrete Acts: the Net Zero Industry Act and the Critical Raw Material Act, two Commission proposals that have been published on the 16 March 2023.<\/p>\n
Even if it is far too early when writing this column to make a thorough assessment of the proposals, I will try to briefly outline some of the most relevant proposals and some first thoughts.<\/p>\n
The Act<\/strong><\/p>\n The Net Zero Industry Act, as proposed by the Commission, sets an overall benchmark of at least 40% of net-zero technologies needed for reaching the 2030 climate and energy targets to be manufactured in the EU by 2030.<\/p>\n Onshore wind and offshore renewable technologies, battery\/storage technologies, electrolysers and fuel cells, sustainable biogas\/biomethane technologies, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies and grid technologies are named as strategic net-zero technologies.<\/p>\n To boost the production of new technologies in Europe, the Act is making concrete proposals to ease the permitting of net-zero resilience projects.<\/p>\n The Member States are obliged to respect certain time limits for granting permits for certain projects, ranging between 9 and 18 months. Member States can recognise \u201cnet-zero strategic projects\u201d. These should then receive the status of the highest national significance possible.<\/p>\n The proposal is also putting forward an \u201cannual injection capacity of at least 50 million tonnes of CO2\u201d in storage sites located in the EU by 2030. Member States may also establish net-zero regulatory sandboxes, allowing for the development, testing and validation of innovative net-zero technologies, in a controlled real-world environment for a limited time before their placement on the market or putting into service.<\/p>\n Moreover, the Commission calls for an extension and acceleration of access to funding by \u201cmobilising\u201d public and private investments for the net-zero industry. As part of this, the Commission is looking again at the revenues of the Emission Trading System.<\/p>\n Revenues of ETS (remember that shipping is soon to be part of this) should now also be used by Member States to fund net-zero industry projects. Additionally, the Commission has put concrete initiatives on the table to relax the state aid guidelines. Following this, Member States will temporarily (until 2025) have the possibility to subsidise more easily certain specific projects, without having to notify the Commission.<\/p>\n Finally, the Commission is yet to come forward with a proposal for a Sovereignty Fund. It is however not clear how important this Fund will be and how it will actually be funded.<\/p>\n Next to the Net-Zero Industry Act, the Commission issued on 16 March a proposal for a Critical Raw Material Act. Following this proposal, the Union should by 2030 extract at least 10% of what they need in terms of critical raw materials and get 15% of the needs out of recycling.<\/p>\n What next?<\/strong><\/p>\n While it is too early to make a full analysis of these proposals, it is clear that these proposals are important initiatives for Europe\u2019s ports. It remains to be seen whether the response of the EU contains the right elements to counter the risk of deindustrialisation of Europe and to limit the potential hinder that can be caused by the US for exports coming from the EU.<\/p>\n Whereas the intention of the different permitting ease proposals now on the EU table are to be supported and are instrumental for those ports in Europe that want to develop and be a player in the net-zero economy, it is unclear to what extent they will effectively lead to success.<\/p>\n Finally, it seems that on the financing side, a lot is left to the Member States who can decide to give state aid or not. This could lead to a lot of unlevel playing field between ports in countries which have money to distribute and those who do not.<\/p>\n In any case, ESPO will be discussing these issues at its next Annual Conference in Bremen on 1 and 2 June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Europe has been focusing on its Green Deal ambition to make it the first net zero continent and this includes concrete green measures as defined in the Fit for 55 package.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":3217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,74],"tags":[176,120,177,300,100,509,299],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-3216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-greenport","category-insight-opinion-greenport","tag-espo","tag-europe","tag-european-ports","tag-fit-for-55","tag-green-deal","tag-isabelle-ryckbost","tag-policy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3218,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216\/revisions\/3218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3216"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=3216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}