Partnership website: https://www.clean-hydrogen.europa.eu/index_en
As an institutionalised public-private partnership, Clean Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (JU) brings together the European Commission (the public sector), Hydrogen Europe and Hydrogen Europe Research (representing the hydrogen industries and hydrogen research community respectively) so as to bring together as many relevant actors as possible across the whole clean hydrogen value chain. It considers all sectors of the economy, but especially the hard-to-abate ones like transport and heavy industry.
In support of the European Green Deal, the Clean Hydrogen JU aims to accelerate development and deployment of European clean hydrogen technologies, contributing to a sustainable, decarbonised and fully integrated energy system. It contributes to the European climate neutrality goal by producing noticeable, quantifiable results towards the development and scaling up of hydrogen applications. This will help develop a number of hydrogen technologies, which are currently either not competitive or have a low technology readiness level, but are expected to contribute to the 2030 energy and climate targets and most importantly make the goal possible of climate neutrality by 2050.
The EU will support the Clean Hydrogen JU with €1 billion euro for the period 2021-2027, complemented by at least an equivalent amount of private investment (from the private members of the partnership), raising the total budget to above €2 billion euro.
As an institutionalised partnership, Clean Hydrogen JU has its own work programmes.
Partnerships group the EC and private and/or public partners, to coordinate and streamline the research & innovation initiatives and funding in some selected key domains.
The Miricle project, ‘Mine Risk Clearance for Europe’, obtained funding under the European Defence Industrial Development programme call ‘Underwater control contributing to resilience at sea’. The main objective of the project was to achieve a European and sovereign capacity in future mine warfare and create a path for the next generation ‘made in Europe’ countermeasure solutions. In order to realise this objective, Miricle addressed various stages: studies, design, prototyping and testing. These stages inter alia included the successful testing of an XL Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, a protototyped mine disposal system and multiple innovative systems to detect buried mines. Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), was one of the five Belgian partners in the consortium. Within the project, VLIZ was able to forward its research on the acoustic imaging of the seabed to spatially map and visualize buried structures and objects - in this case buried mines - in the highest possible detail. VLIZ also led the work on ‘Port and Offshore Testing’, building on the expertise of the institute in the field of marine operations and technology.