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Europe’s Industrial Transition Needs Simpler Rules, Not Lower Ambition

Posted on: 26 May 2026

Bade Kizilaslan, Communications Manager

Europe’s next challenge is implementation

Europe has spent the past years building one of the world’s most ambitious climate policy frameworks. Now comes the harder part: making it work in practice.

For hard-to-abate industries such as cement, the conversation in Brussels is increasingly shifting from targets and ambition to implementation, deployment and investment conditions. And that is exactly where regulatory simplification enters the picture.

Simplification is sometimes misunderstood as a call to weaken environmental ambition. In reality, for industries undergoing deep transformation, it is about something much more practical: making sure rules are coherent, predictable, and workable enough to allow projects to move forward.

Ambition is not the problem

The direction of travel is clear. Europe wants to decarbonise industry while strengthening competitiveness and strategic resilience. The cement sector fully supports that objective and is already investing heavily to deliver it. Across Europe, more than 120 innovation and deployment projects are underway, covering carbon capture, alternative fuels, clinker substitution and circularity.

But the scale of the transition also means companies are navigating an increasingly complex regulatory environment.

Today, industrial operators often face overlapping requirements across multiple pieces of legislation, from the EU ETS and CBAM to the Industrial Emissions Directive, Renewable Energy Directive, taxonomy rules, and sustainability reporting frameworks. Individually, each initiative has a legitimate purpose. Together, however, they can create inconsistencies, duplication and delays that directly affect investment planning.

And for sectors making long-term industrial investments, predictability matters.

When complexity slows decarbonisation

Take carbon capture as an example. For the cement industry, CCUS is not optional. Around two thirds of cement emissions come from the chemical process of clinker production itself, meaning they cannot simply be eliminated through fuel switching or electrification. Carbon capture technologies are therefore indispensable to achieving climate neutrality and represent around 43% of the sector’s CO2 reduction pathway.

Yet deploying CCUS at scale requires more than technology. It requires permits, infrastructure, access to affordable energy, funding certainty, and coordinated regulation across multiple policy areas.

This is where simplification becomes critical.

If permitting procedures take years, infrastructure projects stall. If rules overlap or contradict one another, investment decisions slow down. If reporting obligations multiply without alignment, resources are diverted away from implementation and into administration.

The challenge is not ambition, but delivery.

Simplification is about making policy work

This is increasingly recognised at EU level. Discussions around the Clean Industrial Deal, the Environmental Omnibus and the Industrial Accelerator Act all reflect a growing understanding that Europe now needs policies that can be implemented rapidly and effectively on the ground.

For industry, simplification does not mean “less regulation at any cost”. It means smarter regulation.

That includes clearer objectives, proportionate implementation mechanisms, and faster deployability in practice. It also means improving coherence between legislation, accelerating permitting procedures and ensuring long-term business planning security for sectors investing over decades.

Competitiveness and decarbonisation go together

The stakes are high.

Europe’s cement industry is already facing structurally high energy costs, rising carbon costs, and increasing global competition. Imports of cement and clinker into the EU have risen sharply in recent years, often from regions with higher carbon intensity and lower regulatory costs. At the same time, European producers are expected to invest massively in breakthrough technologies, new infrastructure, and low-carbon production processes.

Maintaining industrial competitiveness while delivering decarbonisation is therefore not a contradiction. It is the central challenge of Europe’s industrial transition.

And this transition will ultimately be judged not by the number of legislative initiatives adopted, but by whether Europe succeeds in deploying projects, infrastructure and industrial innovation at the necessary speed and scale.

Ultimately, the success of Europe’s industrial transition will depend less on the complexity of its legislation, and more on its ability to deliver real projects, real infrastructure, and real industrial transformation on the ground.

Europe’s Industrial Transition Needs Simpler Rules, Not Lower Ambition

For industry, simplification does not mean “less regulation at any cost”. It means smarter regulation.

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