France unveils plan to up investments in nuclear fusion, natural hydrogen

France will give the green light to new investments in nuclear fusion, natural hydrogen, energy storage and carbon capture, President Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday (11 December).

Read the French original story here.

Macron visited the premises of European aviation giant Airbus in Toulouse on Monday to mark the second anniversary of France’s €54 billion investment plan for 2030.

He used the occasion to make new announcements on energy and industrial decarbonisation, saying the government will aim to “move faster and stronger in the beginning of the year [2024]” with “a French strategy and the reform of our European strategy”.

“We need to speed up our breakthrough innovations,” the French President said, citing the need to “explore” fusion technology as well as the development of small nuclear reactors (SMR) such as EDF’s Nuward project.

“In addition to SMRs, which we have promoted extensively, fusion and superconducting magnets will be two vertical areas that we will strongly promote with France 2030 and on which I want us to redouble our efforts,” Macron announced.

The aim is to achieve “a level of progress that is as strong in relative terms as today’s innovative reactors” within the next two years.

Although the potential of nuclear fusion is considerable, the technology is not expected to be operational for several decades and is, therefore, unlikely to play a role in achieving the 2030 or even 2050 decarbonisation targets, experts told Euractiv France.

At the same time, Macron stressed the need for a massive expansion of energy storage to support the development of renewables.

“I want us to speed up the development of medium- and long-term storage resources to better manage the flexibility of the electricity system, made necessary in particular by the use of renewable energies, and to meet the growth in electricity demand,” he declared.

Macron said he wanted to “redouble our efforts” to meet all these challenges.

Natural hydrogen

The president also mentioned hydrogen to speed up industrial decarbonisation, making France “a hub for hydrogen transport”.

Moreover, Macron announced the deployment of “massive funding” to explore the potential of natural hydrogen, which is found beneath the earth’s surface.

The existence of natural hydrogen has been known since the 1980s, but it was only in June this year that it was only this year that potentially exploitable deposits were identified in the north-eastern region of Lorraine and the south-western region of Pyrénées-Atlantiques.

For these potential deposits, the authorities issued France’s first natural hydrogen exploration licence on 3 December, the president said.

Expectations are high, especially as the resource is expected to be abundant, cheap to extract, and low-carbon.

“In France, it is possible to imagine quantities that could make the country an exporter,” Mikaa Blugeon-Mered, a lecturer specialising in the geopolitics of hydrogen at Sciences Po, told Euractiv France in June.

While this mining expedition is expected to produce 3 million tonnes of hydrogen annually, production will not start until 2028 at the earliest.

Critical metals and carbon capture

The presence of hydrogen in the French subsoil illustrates the need for a more general mapping of France’s geological deposits, which Macron hopes to see up and running by mid-2024.

The French president did not forget to mention carbon capture, storage and utilisation, recalling the objectives of the French strategy in this area.

Partnerships are already being developed at the European level, notably between France and Norway, to transport carbon captured from industries and store it in the Norwegian waters in depleted oil and gas fields.

In its latest list of projects of common European interest, the European Commission has made several carbon storage and transport projects eligible for EU funding.

[Edited by Frédéric Simon/Alice Taylor]

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