The European House – Ambrosetti, in collaboration with Eni, promotes a Strategic Study called “Zero Carbon Technology Roadmap”. An analysis carried out with the aim of providing a reference framework of the technologies required to achieve full decarbonization in the European Union by 2050 and which mainly relies on promote the principle of technological neutrality, for which it provides practical examples and detailed policy proposals.
The study is based on a first-of-its-kind methodology: a rigorous analysis of 185 sources of academic-scientific literature and the discussion with 56 stakeholders, including academic experts and managers from Europe's major hard-to-abate supply chains, led to the identification of 100 key technologies for decarbonization. Such a broad and inclusive mapping of the technological options available today to institutions, citizens, businesses and research organisations highlights the fact that they must be considered in a synergetic and complementary way and assessed on the basis of their real contribution to reducing CO2 emissions.
As Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi writes in the Foreword to the Strategic Study: “...we need to discuss objectively, select the best options to fit each context and then move swiftly to the deployment of the solutions that have been identified. It is not just about our ability to preserve the climate, but also about our competitiveness in an industrial system and its ability to create high quality employment. Lastly, it is about cohesion in our societies.”
The data collected through scientific analyses and the evidence that emerged during the Working Table discussions and interviews support the need for a broader set of technologies alongside electrical technologies, including: Carbon Capture Utilization & Storage (CCUS), Magnetic Confinement Fusion as a breakthrough technology, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), hydrogen, biofuels and synthetic fuels. More generally, the study supports the idea that the most strategic and effective way to address decarbonization is by working on both energy and non-energy emissions, such as emissions from industrial processes. The study points out that although most emissions (72%) are generated by fossil fuels, non-energy emissions account for 28% of the total in the European Union. Therefore, and more specifically, the focus should be on hard-to-abate industries, heavy transport and energy production from fossil fuels.