Ottawa will invest nearly $350 million to support the decarbonization of the aerospace industry.
The investment will enable the creation of Canada’s Sustainable Aerospace Technology Initiative (INTAD), a pan-Canadian network that will be industry-led to fund collaborative research and development projects with companies across the country. INTAD will finance projects related to various technological fields such as aircraft architecture or sustainable fuel.
The Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, made the announcement on Monday at the Paris Air Show.
It will therefore be up to the industry and not to the government to determine the most promising projects. “We didn’t necessarily want to make a targeted investment in a company,” explained the minister in a press scrum. (We wanted to see) how we could help the Canadian ecosystem to be the most efficient. »
The selection process will be done independently by an industry committee, said Pratt & Whitney Canada President Maria Della Posta, who helped develop INTAD. “There is no company that will have more weight than others. »
With this intervention, Ottawa is occupying a space that the private sector would not have been able to occupy without government intervention, believes the minister. “There is not a company which, itself, will take this risk, because these are technologies which will be developed with everyone. If you do it in consortium and everyone benefits, everyone is going to be willing to put in some money. »
The Trudeau government has not yet specified deadlines for deploying the $350 million envelope. “We have not put an end to it, but I hope that we can have the projects as quickly as possible. »
Against the backdrop, the decarbonization of industry remains a central theme at Le Bourget, which officially began on Monday.
Before the official start of the show, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced an annual aid of 300 million euros (433 million) for the horizon 2024-2030 to encourage the development of a carbon neutral aircraft as well as an aid nearly 200 million euros (289 million) to develop the sustainable fuel sector.
Pressure is mounting on the aviation sector, which is responsible for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions could triple by 2050, according to industry growth projections, if industry does not find ways to reduce its footprint.
While this is a small proportion of total emissions, the sector’s environmental footprint is much larger when considered on an individual consumption basis, as a relatively small portion of the world’s population flies .