Our associations represent industrial sectors regulated under the Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) and support the Commission’s Green Deal objective to review EU measures to address pollution from large industrial installations, look at the sectoral scope of the legislation and how to make it fully consistent with climate policies.

The disruptive breakthrough technologies necessary to significantly contribute to achieving the climate-neutrality objective will require time to be developed, up scaled and commercialised. On one hand, various GHG abatement options are not available to the same extent across sectors and regions, on the other they are not directly under the control of the operators of IED installations, who to large extent remain dependent on other sectors, notably the energy one.

Mindful of the above considerations, the undersigned sectors have analysed the various policy options considered in context of the TSS and came to the following conclusions:

We support full coherency between policy measures addressing various environmental issues, in particular with regards to the IED, that is the backbone of the environmental legislation applicable to our industrial installations. In the spirit of better regulation principles, amongst others, we reject the option to regulate GHG emissions under an IED permitting regime where those GHG are already regulated under the ETS.

We support:

• the revision of IED (Art 15(5)) to facilitate development and testing of emerging techniques;
• the revision of IED Article 21(3) to provide more than 4 years for deep transformation of industrial sectors, where BAT conclusions have recognised innovative techniques being BAT and require dramatic changes across a sector;

We conditionally support:

• the upscale of the Industrial Emissions Innovation Observatory to monitor the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of emerging and breakthrough technologies and the fact that the recognition by the Observatory of an advanced TRL would trigger BREF reviews;

We do not support:

• the deletion of the provision that exempts plants from setting GHG ELVs and energy efficiency requirements in permit conditions if they are regulated by the EU ETS (IED Article 9);
• the identification of direct and indirect GHG as mandatory key environmental issues, so that GHG emissions are considered when identifying BAT alongside with pollutant emission;
• the setting of shorter BREF cycles focusing on recent innovations and their expected future environmental performance, i.e. Emerging Techniques Associated Emission Levels (ET-AELs);
• the revision of IED Article 21(3) to allow more time for operators to implement higher performing emerging techniques with a high TRL (this would be supported by inclusion in BREFs of stricter long-term ET-AELs reflecting the expected environmental performance of emerging techniques).

We have strong reservation regarding the option consisting in establishing a long-term permit review obligation (e.g. by 2035) focusing on the capacity of the concerned installations to operate in accordance with EU’s carbon neutrality objective.

A detailed analysis supporting those conclusions is provided in the paper.