Industry is accountable for about 20 per cent of the EU's annual net CO2 emissions. In the 2020s, a large proportion of European industrial installations are facing major reinvestment decisions. As these are investments in very durable capital assets, the EU must use this window of opportunity to move into climate-friendly production technologies in order to become climate-neutral by 2050.
The study "Klimaneutrale Industrie – Schlüsseltechnologien und Politikoptionen für Stahl, Chemie und Zement," jointly prepared by Agora Energiewende and the Wuppertal Institute in 2019, identified and characterised – initially with a view to Germany – key technologies for climate-neutral industrial production in the steel, chemicals and cement sectors. These key technologies can also play a central role at the European level in the transformation to a climate-neutral basic industry.
Within the project "Climate Neutral Basic Industries EU," the Wuppertal Institute supported Agora Energiewende in transferring the findings on industrial key technologies to the European level by identifying, providing, and analysing core data for the steel, chemical and cement sectors at the European level. In addition to basic statistical data (employees, production volumes, import and export volumes, CO2 emissions), this included in particular data on sites and their production capacities as well as reinvestment requirements.