Energy transition, gradualness and Italian supply chains to preserve and create jobs

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«Reconversion and transformation of industrial sites are the keywords of the just transition. Only with a holistic approach can jobs be safeguarded and also create new employment opportunities». The President of Confindustria Energia, Giuseppe Ricci intervenes on one of the most sensitive issues when it comes to energy transition, the employment one which has absorbed a large part of the negotiation for the renewal of the national collective labor agreement in the energy and oil sector. In a conference at the CNEL in which the positive and negative effects of the process were discussed, Ricci underlined the importance of bilaterality in addressing it by pursuing common objectives with the unions. «An integrated sustainability involves considering all the solutions and technologies available, which are more effective and efficient for each context, always seeking synergies and complementarities», says Ricci, underlining that «the holistic approach to energy transition has the enormous advantage of allowing productive reconversion, because biofuels, circular processes, capture, storage and reuse of CO2, waste transformation, blue hydrogen, are activities that can be implemented by transforming and reconverting traditional sectors which, vice versa, should be abandoned, thus making it possible to safeguard, but also to increase jobs, improve energy security and reduce costs.’

The concrete examples of how in our country it has been possible to develop and adopt an Italian technology, producing decarbonised products that are competitive with electricity and safeguarding jobs, is “the conversion of the traditional refineries of Venice and Gela into biorefineries”, explains Ricci . At the same time, however, «the national development of new production chains, which today is the prerogative of a few Far East countries (PV, wind, batteries, etc.), should be favoured. Renewables alone will not be able to ensure a reliable and safe energy system, but fossil fuels, primarily gas for the production of electricity, will continue to accompany renewables precisely to compensate for the limits that not even accumulations can overcome, at least until no other energy sources will be available, such as fourth-generation nuclear power or, better still, nuclear fusion. Certainly important, but niche, will be hydrogen for the decarbonisation of the so-called “hard to abbot” (HTA) industrial and transport sectors. For the latter, then, biofuels are already available which can already decarbonise heavy transport, by air and by sea, where electricity is not a short- and medium-term solution».