Net Zero Industrial Act (NZIA)
The European Council has recently adopted a regulation to establish a framework of measures for strengthening Europe's net-zero technology manufacturing ecosystem. The net-zero industry act is one of the three key legislative initiatives of the Green Deal Industrial Plan, together with the Critical Raw Materials Act and the Electricity Market Design Reform.
The net-zero industry act intends to create favourable conditions for investment in green technologies by:
Simplifying the permit-granting process for strategic projects
Facilitating market access for strategic technology products (in particular in public procurement or the auctioning of renewable energies)
Enhancing the skills of the European workforce in these sectors (i.e. with net-zero industry academies and high concentration industrial areas or 'valleys')
Creating a platform to coordinate EU action in this area, Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP)
Strategic net-zero technologies covered by NZIA include solar power, onshore and offshore renewable energy, battery and storage technologies, heat pumps and geothermal energy, nuclear energy, electrolysers and fuel cells, sustainable biogas, carbon capture and storage units, and grid technologies. And member states can support net zero technologies by establishing strategic projects.
In the case of the chemical industry, accelerating the emissions reduction of one of the hard to abate sectors might look like an impossible task to accomplish. Given all the particularities of the industry, the survival package becomes as complex as it can get. In reality there is no silver bullet to attack the global warming issue, and like in the case of other industrial sectors, the luxury of choosing between an array of possibilities can affect the deployment timeline dramatically.
Critical voices out line the shortcomings of the new piece of legislation that is supposed to counteract the US Inflation Reduction Act. To begin with, the list of technologies supported by the proposal do not cover all technical tools the energy intensive industries need to achieve neutrality, and fail to include the material efficiency dimension.
These voices call to reboot the NZIA and broaden the policy strategy with a strong, central advanced research funding agency, as the legislation only encourages funding from national Emission Trading System (ETS) revenues and for most strategic projects through the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP).
