Room: Poster Area
Date: Friday, 22 May 2026
Time: 11:30 - 12:45 CEST
Session code IDV.3
Industrial session
Bankability of Defossilised First of a Kind Chemicals & Fuels Production Facilities
Short Introductive summary
Europe already has the next generation of technologies needed to defossilise its industries, what is lacking are mechanisms to unlock financing for deploying these technologies. The first First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) projects hold the key: they must prove operational performance and build new supply chains to turn national ambitions into tangible production capacity. Most FOAK projects never leave the engineering stage due to high-risk profiles and substantial investment requirements, thereby trapped between venture capital & growth equity and commercial debt. Risks must be sufficiently allocated to parties best able to absorb them to improve certainty and credibility of cash flows. When government support is deployed to absorb risks beyond what market parties can cover, FOAK projects can move from being viewed as demonstrations to bankable assets, a critical shift for unlocking Europe’s clean industrial transformation.
Presenter
Marcelle SENEKAL
TNO, THE NETHERLANDS
Presenter's biography
Marcelle Senekal, Consultant within the Clean Competitive Industry team at TNO. Focused on the business and market economics aspects of transitioning heavy industry value chains toward sustainable feedstocks within a global trading perspective.
Biographies and Short introductive summaries are supplied directly by presenters and are published here unedited
Co-authors:
M. de Wit, TNO, The Hague, THE NETHERLANDS
M. Seefeldt, Via Solutis, Bad Homburg, GERMANY
Session reference: IDV.3.31