INFRA-NEEDS

The research project "Infrastructure needs of an EU industrial transformation towards deep decarbonisation" (INFRA NEEDS) analyses how much (additional) energy demand arises by decarbonising three energy-intensive industrial sectors in Europe, where exactly this new demand will be located and what the resulting infrastructure demand will be in 2050.

Therefore, it is part of the ECF initiative "IT50" and based on scenarios on deep decarbonisation and material efficiency in the three most critical energy intensive processing industries (plastics, steel and cement) in the EU. These scenarios show that deep decarbonisation of European energy intensive industries will need very significant amounts of additional renewable energy, in form of electricity, hydrogen and/or synthetic fuels produced from renewable electricity.

Due to this background the project INFRA NEEDS aims to explore and show:

• Which energetic infrastructures would be needed if the scenarios proposed and the high additional demand foreseen would be realised,
• where these infrastructures might roughly be needed and
• what impacts could be roughly assigned to these – potentially additional – infrastructures.

The findings and results will be feed into the processes of the overall IT50 initiative, in order to become a part of a respective publication and outreach initiative targeting the European discussion on the industrial strategy as well as the mid century climate targets.