“The anaerobic digestion sector is the only source of renewable energy that has met and even exceeded the targets of the public energy plan.”
TOGETHER, MOBILISED TO BECOME A LEADER IN THE THIRD GAS REVOLUTION
2022 undoubtedly marks a historic turning point for our energy future. The repeated calls from the IPCC to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions quickly and the increasingly frequent extreme weather events in various regions of the world had previously had a limited impact on our production and supply model.
In just a few months, the Russia–Ukraine conflict exploded everyone’s faith in access to abundant, long-lasting, affordable energy. Our economies face a situation that spotlights a set of closely-linked challenges, calling into question the sovereignty and diversity of our production and supply systems and intensifying the need for sobriety and decarbonisation in our energy use.
For over a year, rocketing prices for all forms of energy, combined with the risk to supplies of electricity and gas, have plunged the European continent into a profound reckoning, even calling into question the principle of open energy markets agreed at the end of the twentieth century.
The new integrated report from GRTgaz aims to shine a light on how one network operator is rethinking its model to bring new momentum to its public service role and open up new prospects for the energy transition with the third gas revolution. At this point I would like to emphasise three strong convictions, which were supported by the facts in 2022 and which, from my point of view, seem to illustrate the relevance of our commitments.
First of all, the priority of having the infrastructure we need for our energy supplies. Since last summer, when deliveries of Russian gas via the Obergailbach interconnection ended, GRTgaz has been able to reconfigure its network thanks to robust installations (methane terminals, storage) to meet the needs of domestic consumption, support electricity generation and export gas to help our European neighbours. As this situation is likely to continue, France has decided to strengthen its natural gas import capacity by installing a floating terminal in the port of Le Havre, to which GRTgaz has committed to making a connection by summer 2023. At the same time, GRTgaz has continued its investment to accelerate the development of renewable gas. With over 500 anaerobic digestion units installed across the country, the flow direction has begun to reverse in areas where biomethane production is higher than local consumption at certain times. As further proof that the importance of logistics has been recognised alongside energy production, the French, Spanish and Portuguese governments launched a large-scale project at the end of 2022, H2med, which will make it possible to transport green hydrogen from southern to northern Europe by 2030. This ambition perfectly complements the initiatives launched by GRTgaz in recent months to transfer hydrogen at regional level, in areas such as the southern region, Alsace, Moselle and the port of Dunkirk.
With the emergence in the medium term of hydrogen as a third energy vector, supplementing electricity and methane, our economies seem to have realised that it would be inefficient and irresponsible “to put all our eggs in the same basket” when it comes to energy. While the use of fossil fuels must be reduced, this does not mean that methane as an energy vector has inevitably to disappear. At a time when France is committed to a 40% CO₂ emission decrease by 2030, and when this ambition has to be strengthened to take new European targets into account (–55%), the country has to double the pace of emission reductions to around –4.7% per year between 2022 and 2030, according to the French High Council on Climate. This is a significant target, because our electricity generation has already been decarbonised to a great extent. The time has therefore come to engage in the decarbonisation of the gas system with the same determination. Biomethane clearly provides immediate, operational responses in terms of sovereignty and decarbonisation. With 9 TWh/year of production capacity installed by the end of 2022, the anaerobic digestion sector is the only source of renewable energy that has met and even exceeded the targets of the public energy plan. If pending projects go ahead, the sector has more than enough capacity to exceed the target of 14 to 22 TWh by 2028. While cost and budget constraints were the arguments put forward to justify these modest targets, France’s Energy Regulation Commission has just announced that the industry is likely to have repaid all the grants it has received since 2012 by the end of 2023, without drawing on the budget package of €9.7 billion allocated in the 2020 public energy plan for use by 2028. The ambitious decisions suggested by the industry, which could see 60 TWh of renewable and low-carbon gas by 2030 (50 from anaerobic digestion + 10 from innovative sectors), are thus within reach for the next energy plan. Like the relaunch of the nuclear programme, this would send a clear message about the restoration of our energy and industrial sovereignty.
The third conviction that has taken on sudden relevance due to geopolitical events and repeated tensions about the nuclear fleet is the strong resurgence of sober energy consumption. France used 11.2% less gas (weather-corrected data) between August and December 2022 than in the same period in 2018. This sobriety is even more marked (16.6%) if we exclude consumption by gas-fired power stations, which rose by 38.5% over the period to compensate for stoppages at nuclear reactors in France. There is no doubt that these responses to the current economic situation are likely to have a permanent effect on behaviour and on energy efficiency efforts in general. The reductions we have seen in both gas and electricity will have positive repercussions for energy security. This is why GRTgaz met its responsibilities head-on, alongside Térega and Ademe, by launching the Ecogaz site last October, the gas counterpart to Ecowatt. With around a hundred partners (industrial companies, housing providers, local authorities, etc.) having already joined the programme, the new awareness that our energy future will be based on sobriety and efficiency is spreading fast.
As you will see in this report, GRTgaz is determined to provide solutions in a context that may be difficult, but is also a source of opportunities and good sense. To make this a reality, I felt it was time to overhaul our internal organisation to prepare the network of the future, rationalise our asset management, optimise the organisation of maintenance activities and simplify our central operation with two priorities: energising the development of renewable gas and shifting towards the integrated management of our activities. This transformation, prepared during 2022 and implemented in 2023 underlies the strong ambitions our stakeholders rightly expect of us, which are in line with our corporate purpose: “Together, enable a secure, affordable energy future that is climate-neutral”.
Thierry Trouvé
