Natural hydrogen for decarbonization, space cargo or electronic components for artificial intelligence (AI)… Emmanuel Macron announced, Monday December 11 in Toulouse, new areas of development for France 2030, an investment plan intended for innovation .
Launched in October 2021, France 2030 is allocated 54 billion euros, almost half of which has been committed. More than 3,200 projects carried out by 3,500 research centers and companies, half of them small and medium-sized (SMEs), benefit from public funding of around 30% of the sums invested.
“We must continue to accelerate,” said Emmanuel Macron on an Airbus site, during a progress report two years after the launch. “If we want to win this battle of disruptive innovation, we must go even faster and stronger,” he added.
The president promised, “from the start of next year”, “very concrete” government measures in favor of “drastic simplification”, a “hyper simplification” for businesses.
“We cannot have procedures that are twice as long as our American and Asian competitors,” he justified, also pleading for a public purchasing policy that favors, when possible, innovative solutions. “local” even if they are less attractive from a “budgetary” point of view.
The Head of State praised the results of his economic policy carried out for six years around “three interdependent objectives”: “sovereignty”, “full employment” and “decarbonization”. He estimated that France 2030 – and its 54 billion euros in planned credits – was starting to bear fruit.
Emmanuel Macron also announced giving priority to nuclear fusion, superconducting magnets and CO2 capture, disruptive technologies as part of the second part of the plan.
“Fusion represents a path to explore, we know that much remains to be done,” he said, particularly in the development of superconducting magnets necessary for the operation of such a reactor.
He wants “within two years” a level of progress “as strong in relative terms as on innovative reactors”, small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) for which eight projects benefit from funding from France 2030.
In the area of decarbonization, the president announced the launch of “exploration missions” of natural hydrogen reservoirs throughout the country. This “white” hydrogen, naturally present in the subsoil, is arousing growing interest with a view to the decarbonization of industry and transport. A first exploration permit has just been granted and other files are being examined.
He also wants to map strategic minerals, essential to the decarbonization of the economy, such as lithium, used for electric car batteries, nickel or cobalt.
The Head of State is also counting on the development of carbon capture and storage technologies. The objective is to decarbonize, by 2030, 10% of incompressible industrial emissions, or 8 million tonnes of CO2, through carbon capture techniques.
France will support the development of a cargo spacecraft, capable of transporting cargo to future space stations, announced Mr. Macron, judging the market “potentially considerable, both in its civil and military needs”.
“We must enter this competition, but with the same method as for the launchers, by opening the way to private initiatives, by authorizing the riskiest bets,” said the president. Of the 54 billion euros allocated to France 2030, a sum of 1.5 billion devoted to space has already made it possible to hatch eight microlauncher projects, small reusable rockets, and four others for satellite constellations .
As for the question of AI, Emmanuel Macron is counting on companies and the scientific community to “bring out components and system architectures for the massive processing of data in artificial intelligence with the objective of energy consumption which is divided by a hundred or a thousand compared to today’s standards.”
However, he regretted the European agreement to regulate AI, judging that it was “not a good idea” to regulate “more than the others”. “I ask that we evaluate this regulation on a regular basis. And if we lose leaders or pioneers because of that, we will have to come back to it,” he argued.