The government launches France-Mer 2030 to achieve the “zero emission” ship

The Secretary of State for the Sea, Hervé Berville, unveiled the France-Mer 2030 plan on Tuesday, aimed at accelerating the decarbonization of the maritime sector with the objective of the “zero emission ship”, during the Assises de l’économie de la sea ​​at Lille. Both a ten-month consultation period with all the players in the sector and a unit within the Ministry of the Navy to support them, France-Mer 2030 will offer a “one-stop shop for the State dedicated solely to the decarbonisation of the maritime sector and to innovation” with “the zero-emission ship as the horizon”, detailed Hervé Berville.

A ship “as French as possible”

A decarbonization trajectory will have to be defined for each type of fleet, he said, insisting on the need to quickly remove “technological locks” to decarbonize fishing, commercial and pleasure vessels. With this in mind, the government plans to mobilize “300 million euros in public funding by the end of the five-year term” but also to “create a maritime investment fund (…) to increase support through subsidies , equity investments and guarantees”.

This mechanism will have to go hand in hand with the mobilization of private funds, which could make it possible to reach a total of one billion euros in investments, hopes Hervé Berville. While only 12% of the ships used in France are built there today compared to 80% in 1980, underlined the Secretary of State, “we are going to hand over all the technological bricks one by one to move towards the zero emission ship”, which must be “as French as possible, from its keel to its fuel cell”.

Double the number of officers trained in France by 2027

Insisting on the role of training in decarbonizing the maritime sector, the Secretary of State also underlined the ambition to double by 2027 the number of officers trained in France. The CEO of CMA CGM Rodolphe Saadé for his part announced that the French shipowner would “endow the new France-Mer fund with an envelope of 200 million euros to help the maritime sector to decarbonize”.

“It’s not just freight but everything related to maritime in France,” he said. CMA CGM must launch a call for projects platform in January 2023. This sum is part of the 1.5 billion euro fund already announced by the shipowner to accelerate the decarbonization of its activities. On offshore wind power, Hervé Berville reaffirmed the objective of 50 parks in 2050 set out by Emmanuel Macron, explaining that the State was going to launch 2 GW of calls for tenders per year, so that 20 GW would be allocated from here 2030.