“The industrialists are playing the game” and achieving the goals of greening the most climate-damaging industries is “possible,” Industry Minister Roland Lescure said on Wednesday.
He again received representatives of the 50 French industrial sites that emit the most greenhouse gases: cement, steel and other refineries, which represent 11% of French emissions and almost 60% of industrial emissions.
The government has pledged to negotiate decarbonisation trajectories with them, offering to double the pace of their efforts in exchange for doubling state aid, raising the budget to €10bn over the 2022-2027 period.
“The first roadmaps on which we exchanged announce a reduction in emissions of 44% in 2030 and 80% in 2050, so we are almost there,” he said.
Decarbonization of several large industrial sites
With these roadmaps, the State wants to be able to estimate and plan the “breakthrough” infrastructures and technologies that will be necessary for this decarbonization: future hydrogen “hubs”, higher power electrical connections, biomass supplies, or even, great news, the “carboductos”, these conduits that will allow the CO2 resulting from residual emissions to be transported to geological storage wells.
Among the land requested by the State are, for example, Arcelor Mittal in Dunkerque and Fos-sur-Mer, the Vicat, Lafarge, Calcia cement factories, the Grand Est chemical factories, the Yara or Borealis fertilizer manufacturers, the glass factories in Arques, Esso-ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies refineries in Normandy, Air Liquide in PACA, Tereos and Cristal Union sugar factories…
A decarbonization of these sites would be equivalent in terms of greenhouse gases avoided to the energy renovation of 10 million homes, said Roland Lescure, believing it would also have symbolic value.
President Emmanuel Macron will take stock of this work in June. In November he had brought these industrialists together to propose doubling from 5,000 to 10,000 million euros the public aid planned for 2022-27 for their decarbonization if they intensified their measures.
This sum is part of the France 2030 plan, in the form of calls for projects, of which the most effective will be supported.
Source: BFM TV
