Brussels, 26 February 2025: The publication of the Clean Industrial Deal (CID) marks a crucial milestone for European industry. FuelsEurope fully supports the overarching objective of a growth strategy bringing together climate and competitiveness and remains committed to playing a key role in shaping it. However, FuelsEurope regrets the absence of a dedicated action plan for the fuel manufacturing industry, an essential enabler in this transition, providing sustainable energy and feedstock to sectors across the industrial value chain.

The Clean Industrial Deal rightly recognises the need to move beyond traditional silo solutions and to adopt a comprehensive, value chain-wide strategy to ensure a thriving and competitive European industrial ecosystem. However, FuelsEurope regrets the absence of a dedicated action plan for the fuel manufacturing industry, despite its close interconnections with key sectors identified as requiring tailored support.

Liana Gouta, FuelsEurope Director General, stated: “Our industry, not only keeps economies and societies moving and producing, but it also connects the dots of the sectors whose decarbonisation depends on us: aviation, maritime, parts of road transport, the chemical industry, machinery, the defence sector and the bioeconomy cannot decarbonise if our renewable fuels and products are not produced at scale in Europe. Our competitiveness must be safeguarded and our transition enabled. Losing its robust and competitive fuels manufacturing capacity is not an option for Europe.”

The  European  Commission  has  invited industry to exercise bottom-up leadership to deliver tangible results that could be scalable at the European level. The fuel manufacturing industry, supplying today 97% of the energy needed for transport and 50% of the feedstock for the chemical industry, is already demonstrating this leadership through the ongoing transition to renewable and low- carbon fuels and products. It is therefore essential that the Commission and the co- legislators fully engage with our sector, to reinforce the business case for scaling up and accelerating the needed investments.

The creation of lead markets for clean technologies and products, indicated in the Clean Industrial Deal as crucial for a competitive transition, is an objective we fully embrace: renewable and low-carbon fuels and other products need a stable, predictable demand and market size, to unlock investments and drive economies of scale.

We welcome also the emphasis on the key importance of the Circular Economy and of a Bioeconomy Strategy: the gradual replacement of our fossil feedstock with reused materials, waste biomass from agriculture and forestry, and recycled CO2 from the atmosphere to produce sustainable biofuels and synthetic fuels are the foundation of the transition of our industry and shows the future of our industry.

We hope that today’s announcement of the CID is only the beginning, setting the scene for the transition of strategic industrial sectors.

FuelsEurope stands ready to collaborate with policymakers and stakeholders to define clear and practical sectoral transition pathways. The Clean Industrial Deal provides the framework; now is the time for action, implementation, and delivery.