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Clean Industrial Deal Presents Clean-tech Sector as Key Enabler for Industrial Competitiveness and Decarbonisation in the EU
27th February 2025
On 26 February, the European Commission released the Clean Industrial Deal (CID), outlining the EU’s vision to maintain industrial competitiveness without compromising on the bloc’s ambitious decarbonisation objectives.
Released within the first 100 days of the new College of Commissioner’s mandate, the initiative is designed to boost climate-neutral investments in energy-intensive industries and the clean tech sector, creating more favourable conditions for industries to decarbonise in Europe. In particular, the CID prioritises the development of clean technologies able to decarbonise European industries, providing a roadmap to advance their development through a wide range of policy and funding initiatives.
The CID encompasses a series of initiatives and recommendations that, once translated into concrete policy and legislation, may further directly or indirectly support the deployment of CCS across the region.
Among the measures, the European Commission announced or reiterated in the CID its intention to:
- Establish conditions to boost the demand for low-carbon products and create a lead market in Europe for captured carbon. In this context, the Commission also expects the implementation of the Industrial Carbon Management (ICM) Strategy announced last year (February 2024) to help build the business case for permanent carbon removals technologies, which could be leveraged to tackle residual emissions generated by hard-to-abate sectors;
- Clarify the rules for producing low-carbon hydrogen thanks to the adoption of the delegated act on low-carbon hydrogen in Q1 2025, stressing the importance of hydrogen in decarbonising the EU energy system;
- Establish an Industrial Decarbonisation Bank under the governance of the future Competitiveness Fund to maximise emission reductions. €100 billion in funding will be made available for this initiative from both Innovation Fund resources and ETS revenues to facilitate investment in carbon reduction projects and enable technology-neutral support across industrial sectors;
- Launch a Clean industry State Aid Framework designed to support industrial decarbonisation and clean tech manufacturing on the basis of new, simplified and flexible rules;
- Simplify the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) in Q1 2025 and, in the second half of 2025, prepare a CBAM review report to assess the extension of CBAM to other EU Emission Trading System (ETS) sectors and downstream production, as well as indirect emissions across all CBAM sectors;
- Review the EU ETS Directive in 2026.
Read more about the Clean Industrial Deal and the other measures planned by the European Commission to boost industrial competitiveness and decarbonisation in the EU here.