The Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the EU started on 1 July and will run until the end of December 2024. CO₂ Value Europe takes note of the Presidency’s programme and invites it to reinforce its sustainability ambitions, particularly in the following priorities:
🔵 Emphasise the importance of mitigating climate change: We invite the Presidency to confirm the 90% GHG reduction by 2040 target compared to 1990 levels. We call on the Presidency to ensure that Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU), a net zero technology, has a central role in delivering these objectives.
🔵 Adopting a New European Competitiveness Deal: We call on the Presidency to guarantee that such an initiative goes hand in hand with the EU Green Deal and supports its objectives by ensuring legal consistency and clear objectives to boost the development of net-zero technology value chains e.g., CCU technologies.
🔵 Discussing the implementation of Member States’ National Energy and Climate Plans’ objectives: We encourage the Presidency to build on the recently adopted Net Zero Industry Act and invite Member States to consider all technologies listed in the legislation in their national plans to reach their climate objectives, including Carbon Capture and CO₂ Utilisation technologies.
🔵 Boosting net-zero energy technologies: CO₂ Value Europe underlines that captured carbon provides an essential feedstock to produce sustainable alternative fuels and RFNBOs – key technologies to defossilise maritime and aviation sectors as well as long-haul transports, and hard-to-abate industries.
🔵 Scheduled energy & sustainability discussions and fora: CO₂ Value Europe invites the Presidency to continue building an agreement on the Energy Taxation Directive revision. Furthermore, we welcome the Presidency’s organisation of several events on carbon capture-related topics but invite them to include CCU within the remits of these events and engage with the CCU community to fast-track the defossilisation of Europe’s economy.
Read our full statement here.
