Study 24: Decarbonisation of the agri-food industry

The French agri-food industry (IAA), the country’s leading industrial sector in terms of employment and turnover, faces a major challenge: reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to combat climate change whilst ensuring food security for a growing global population.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global food system is responsible for between 21 per cent and 37 per cent of global GHG emissions, highlighting the importance of decarbonising processing operations in this sector.

In the agri-food sector, trade associations and trade unions are currently working on roadmaps specific to each sub-sector. It is against this backdrop that ALLICE and the CTCPA have joined forces to carry out a technical study on the decarbonisation of the agri-food industry.

The aim of this study is to support the various roadmaps currently being drafted or already drawn up by the sector’s federations and trade unions, by providing technical details on current and emerging alternatives for decarbonising processing methods in the agri-food industry.

It consists of three main stages:

• Phase 1: Agri-food sub-sectors facing energy challenges.

The aim of this phase is to carry out a review of energy consumption – particularly thermal energy consumption – in the agri-food sector, and thereby identify the processes and operations where energy efficiency is a priority.

• Phase 2: Case studies, identification of decarbonisation levers for key processes.

The aim of this second phase is to examine the most relevant decarbonisation measures for the processes and operations with priority energy challenges, as identified in phase 1. These case studies will be supplemented by simplified applications at industrial sites.

• Phase 3: Technical input into the agri-food sector’s roadmaps.

The aim of this final phase is to analyse and extrapolate the results obtained and the levers identified in Phase 2 to the entire sectoral scope of the study: processing activities under NCE codes 12 (dairy industry) and NCE 14 (other agri-food industries). Based on this analysis, the decarbonisation potential of the processing operations is estimated.

These three parts were carried out independently of one another and are self-contained. To make them easier to read, this study has been divided into three separate reports, available exclusively to ALLICE members. Each report corresponds to a phase of the study and has its own structure (introduction, summary, conclusion, bibliography, list of tables and figures, list of appendices).

These reports are supplemented by a fourth document: a public executive summary.