3.3. Alternative fuels and mobile energy sources

Meeting Europe's energy and CO_(2) reduction goals also requires the development of new fuels and mobile energy sources. This is particularly important to meet the challenge of smart, green and integrated transport. Value chains for these technologies and alternative fuels are not sufficiently developed and must be accelerated to demonstration scale. The objective for bioenergy is to bring to commercial maturity the most promising technologies, to permit large-scale, sustainable production of advanced biofuels of different value chains in a bio-refinery approach for surface, maritime and air transport, and highly efficient combined heat and power and green gas from biomass and waste, including CCS. The aim is to develop and demonstrate the technology for different bioenergy pathways at different scales, taking account of differing geographical and climate conditions and logistical constraints, while minimising negative environmental and social impacts linked to land use. Longer term research will support the development of a sustainable bioenergy industry beyond 2020. These activities will complement upstream (e.g. feedstock, bio-resources) and downstream (e.g. integration into vehicle fleets) research activities carried out in other relevant specific objectives of the priority "Societal challenges". Fuel cells and hydrogen have a great potential to contribute to addressing energy challenges facing Europe. Bringing these technologies to market competitiveness will require significant cost decrease. As an illustration the cost of fuel cell systems for transportation will have to be reduced by a factor of ten over the next 10 years. To do so, support will be given to demonstrations and pre-commercial deployment activities for portable, stationary and micro-stationary, transport applications and the related services, as well as long-term research and technology development to build up a competitive fuel cell chain and a sustainable hydrogen production and infrastructure across the Union. Strong national and international cooperation is needed to enable market breakthroughs of a sufficient scale, including the development of appropriate standards. There is a range of new options with long term potential, such as powdered metal fuel, fuel from photosynthetic micro-organisms (in water and land environments) and from artificial photosynthesis mimics and solar fuels. These new paths may offer potential for more efficient energy conversion and more cost-competitive and sustainable technologies. Support will be given notably to bring these new and other potential technologies from laboratory to demonstration scale size in view of pre-commercial demonstration by 2020.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-04 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.