The second call results for the large-scale low carbon technology projects to receive grant funding from the Innovation Fund were evaluated and announced this week. The European Commission has chosen 17 innovative clean tech projects located in Europe that will be awarded over $1.81 (€1.8) billion.
The substantial grants, disbursed from the Innovation Fund, will help bring breakthrough technologies to the market in energy-intensive industries.
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The projects cover a wide range of sectors like 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.
Combined, they have been estimated to save 136 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent over their first 10 years of operation. The 17 selected projects are located in Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Sweden.
“Today’s grants support innovative businesses across Europe to develop the cutting-edge technologies we need to drive the green transition. The Innovation Fund is an important tool to scale up innovations in renewable hydrogen and other solutions for European industry,” said EC Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans.
4 of the projects are decarbonizing the cement sector. One located in Poland will create an end-to-end carbon capture and storage chain starting from CO2 capture and liquefaction at a cement plant to storage in offshore sites.
Another one in France will capture the CO2 emissions coming from exhaust gases produced during lime production and store them permanently in offshore geological formations.
The third one in Bulgaria will be the first full-chain carbon capture and storage project in the country and will link CO2 capture facilities at a cement plant with offshore permanent storage in a depleted gas field in the Black Sea, through an onshore and offshore pipeline system.
The deadline to submit the applications for the second call was 3 March 2022 and the European Commission received 139 applications. Among them, around 20 projects were promising but not yet considered by the EC as sufficiently mature for a grant. They will be pre-selected for project development assistance by the European Investment Bank and announced in Q4 of 2022.
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The Innovation Fund is one of the world’s largest funding programs aiming to support innovative low-carbon technologies. It will allocate around EUR 38 billion of support from 2020 to 2030 for the commercial demonstration of green solutions.
The Innovation Fund is established by the EU Emission Trading System (EU ETS) till 2030 and funded through the auctioning of emissions allowances under the EU ETS. For Europe to deliver the Green Deal and cut ties with Russian gas, exponential growth in investment and development of green energies needs to take place in the next decade to achieve these goals.
