Mytilineos calls for a European response to the energy challenge
The industrial future of the EU will be shaped not by ambition alone, but by its ability to turn strategy into investment, Evangelos Mytilineos said commenting on President von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech.
“The proposed European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials could evolve into a useful industrial initiative. Europe remains heavily dependent on third countries for many of the materials that underpin the energy transition, digital technologies, defense applications and advanced manufacturing,” he said and added:
“Moving from identifying vulnerabilities to building capabilities is the challenge we’re faced with. That means supporting mature domestic extraction, refining, processing and recycling projects in Europe while also securing diversified partnerships with trusted suppliers, creating truly attractive conditions for long-term investments across the entire value chain.
“What was equally important, however, was the recognition that Europe faces an urgent and broad competitiveness challenge.
“Strategic autonomy, critical raw materials, batteries, artificial intelligence, defence technologies and industrial decarbonisation all require unprecedented levels of capital investment. Yet investment decisions are ultimately made on the basis of economic fundamentals. And perhaps the most crucial of those fundamentals is energy.”
The challenge of the transition
He underlined that “Europe’s long-term objective of reducing dependence on imported fossil fuels, expanding nuclear and renewable generation and strengthening energy infrastructure is in the right direction. But the end-state and the transition are not the same thing.”
“Today, the European Union still consumes roughly 450 million tonnes of oil and around 340 bcm of natural gas annually. Even under mainstream projections, those figures remain very substantial by 2030 and even 2035. For years to come, hydrocarbons will continue to influence industrial competitiveness, wholesale electricity prices and the energy bills paid by European households and businesses.
“As Mario Draghi noted in his report, the full competitiveness benefits of the clean transition will only materialise once sufficient investments in clean generation, grids, storage and system flexibility have been completed and absorbed into the system.
“That reality carries an important implication.
“Europe cannot wait for the future energy system to arrive before addressing competitiveness. We need a strategy for the transition itself.
“This requires a genuinely European response to the energy challenge. Not a patchwork of national measures available only to Member States with the largest fiscal capacity, but common European solutions backed by European funding and designed to preserve industrial competitiveness while the transition progresses.
“Global competitiveness is not the reward at the end of the transition. It is what enables the transition to happen in the first place.”
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