Europe’s energy-intensive industries need an urgent transformation in order to dramatically reduce their emissions in line with the Paris climate goals. This is far from the reality: EU industrial emissions rose by 2% in 2017 and projections show that they are not expected to decline up to 2030.

One of the more challenging elements of the industrial zero-carbon transformation will be how to bring promising new process technologies to the commercialization stage. These new technologies will need to be market-ready by 2030 to allow for deployment across the EU by 2050. They will be capital intensive, but also, due to their pioneering nature, risk intense. The Innovation Fund under the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) for the post-2020 period can become an important tool to enable a timely commercialization of industrial breakthrough technologies.

Carbon Market Watch’s response to the public consultation on the establishment of the Innovation Fund can be found here.