Hydrogen, maritime projects among winners of €4.8 billion EU grant

The European Commission has selected 85 net-zero projects, including those involving hydrogen and maritime, to receive €4.8 billion in grants from the Innovation Fund.

Specifically, among the winners are projects of different scales (large, medium and small, alongside pilots), covering a wide range of sectors from the following categories: energy-intensive industries, renewable energy, energy storage, industrial carbon management, net-zero mobility (including maritime and aviation) and buildings. They are located in 18 countries: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Hungary, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden and Norway.

The selected projects are set to enter into operation before 2030 and over their first ten years of operation are expected to reduce emissions by about 476 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. According to the Commission, this will strengthen European industrial manufacturing capacity, reinforce Europe’s technology leadership and supply chain resilience and contribute to European decarbonization objectives, reducing emissions from the sectors that are particularly difficult to decarbonize.

The Commission said that these projects particularly contribute to reaching the following EU policy objectives:

• Renewable hydrogen: Selected projects will deliver 61 kilotonnes of renewable fuel of non-biological origin (RFNBO) annually, contributing to the increase in the use and production of renewable energy in hydrogen in hard-to-abate applications in industry and transport.
• Net-zero mobility: Projects will help cut emissions in the mobility sector, with the maritime sector benefiting the most. These projects involve building and retrofitting vessels for RFNBO fuels and electricity use, as well as reducing emissions in road transport component manufacturing. Awarded projects will also support sustainable transport fuels, producing 525 kilotonnes of renewable fuels per year.
• Cleantech manufacturing: In line with the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), clean-tech projects selected will develop, build and operate manufacturing plants for key components in wind and solar energy and for heat pumps, as well as components for electrolyzers, fuel cells, energy storage technologies and the batteries value chain. Selected projects will contribute to 3 GW of solar photovoltaic manufacturing capacity in the EU and 9.3 GW of electrolyzer manufacturing capacity in the EU.
• Energy-intensive industries: Selected projects will support various technologies to cut net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in energy-intensive industries, target renewable energy integration, heat and energy storage solutions, recycling and reuse, as well as electrification.
• Industrial carbon management: Projects selected in this call will capture CO2 and contribute 13% of the NZIA target of storing at least 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year from various hard-to-abate sources in energy-intensive industries, such as cement and lime, (bio)-refineries, chemicals and waste-to-energy.

Winners of the grant are due to sign their agreements with the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA) in the first quarter of 2025, the Commission revealed, adding that in addition to these 85 projects, other “promising but insufficiently mature” projects will receive project development assistance from the European Investment Bank (EIB).

So far, the Innovation Fund has awarded about €7.2 billion to more than 120 innovative projects across the European Economic Area (EEA) through previous calls for proposals, and as disclosed, the next call will be launched in early December 2024.