Competition has already started aiming at the 2 trillion- yen fund for decarbonization which was established as the third supplemental budget of FY2020 through the good offices of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) established a fund in the amount of 2 trillion yen to New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) aiming to realize the “Carbon neutrality by 2050” plan under the official name of Green Innovation Fund in 2020.
The fund is intended to provide a continuous support for ten years from the stage of development/demonstration to a social implementation for those who have shown a commitment to an ambitious goal.

As shown in the separate table, the application of this fund is confined to 18 projects. METI utilizes about 1.4 trillion yen out of the 2 trillion yen and intends to start all the projects by the first half term of this year.

To this end, public offerings started on May 18 and closed on July 1 for the two projects of “The Development of Large-scale Hydrogen Supply Chain” and “The Production of Hydrogen by Water Electrolysis using Electric Power Derived from Renewable Energy.” NEDO will disclose the result of selection on the two projects within August.

For the other projects, public offerings are also starting from time to time in July. As for gases, the offerings will be related to the steelmaking process and the next-generation aircrafts, while hydrogen will be included in the development of the next-generation ships. Ammonia will be related in the development of supply network of fuel ammonia and next-generation ships and carbon dioxide will be taken up in the development of recycling and reusing technologies.

Regarding the fund amounting to two trillion yen at this time, it should be pointed out that the object to support is a long-term verification project of R & D for ten years and that the suggested scale of project is determined to be 20 billion yen or more. Therefore, it is supposed that in few cases an individual entity would be adopted and a consortium consisting of major trading firms, energy and shipbuilding companies would respond to the offerings.