On 29 June 2026, INCIPE held the virtual session "The Challenges of Decarbonization," featuring JoaquĂn PĂ©rez de Ayala, Director of track, the business unit responsible for TĂ©cnicas Reunidas' decarbonization strategy. The event was introduced by Ricardo DĂez-Hochleitner, Secretary General of INCIPE, and moderated by Vicente Garrido, Director General of the Foundation.
The session focused on what is needed to put decarbonization into practice, as well as on the strengths and limitations of its main regulatory models and the real difficulties of implementation across sectors and countries. To address these questions, INCIPE welcomed JoaquĂn PĂ©rez de Ayala. Born in Madrid, he is an industrial engineer from ICAI with more than thirty years of experience in senior positions in the energy sector, with a career linked above all to Endesa and TĂ©cnicas Reunidas. At Endesa, he worked as an expert in the electricity sector regulation department and served as Chief of Staff to the Chairman and CEO between 2000 and 2008, as well as sitting on the boards of several group subsidiaries, including Elcogas, Chilectra, and Endesa Italia. At TĂ©cnicas Reunidas, from 2018 he led the corporate development and investor relations areas until the 2023 capital increase.
PĂ©rez de Ayala began by placing decarbonization on the well-known Gartner hype cycle, which describes the trajectory of any emerging technology. Between 2021 and early 2024, in his words, excessive euphoria prevailed; the second half of 2024 and 2025 brought a period of deflation. And yet, PĂ©rez de Ayala argued, the sector is holding firm, much like British railways, Japanese electronics, or the dot-coms, industries that went through the same disillusionment before consolidating. He anticipates a gradual recovery in investment from late 2026 onwards.
The speaker set out the process as a one-way roadmap: measuring the carbon footprint, improving efficiency, electrifying with low-emission energy (solar, wind, nuclear, or combined cycles with carbon capture) and, where electrification cannot reach, replacing fuels with biomass, hydrogen, or its derivatives, capturing the carbon whose emission could not be avoided, as in cement, and offsetting what is still emitted. Citing an ExxonMobil estimate, he calculated that around 60% of decarbonization-related investment corresponds to electrons and 40% to molecules, the latter being the field in which TĂ©cnicas Reunidas specializes. He summed up the underlying idea with a football analogy: just as Spain did not win the 2010 World Cup with eleven Iniestas, there is no single technology or "silver bullet" that can solve everything. All of them are necessary.
Building these value chains, he warned, is far from simple. He illustrated this with the value chain for synthetic sustainable aviation fuel (e-SAF), whose industrial processes combine biogenic carbon derived from the processing of non-fossil feedstock with renewable hydrogen produced by electrolysis, for subsequent conversion into e-SAF. The obstacles are manifold: the availability of sufficient waste throughout the lifetime of a plant, twenty years during which its composition may change; the cost of renewable energy and competition for it from an unexpected rival, artificial intelligence, which can pay far more for that electricity than a hydrogen project can bear; and the development of the power grids needed to supply the electrolyzers. The alignment of these and other requirements, he summarized, comes down to a single word: bankability, that is, whether the chain as a whole can be financed by investors and financial institutions, taking into account all the conditions affecting the value chain in its entirety.
Added to this complexity is a physical scale that is often overlooked. Decarbonizing all of the European Union's steel production with renewable energy would require more than Spain's total electricity generation in 2024; and capturing the carbon from a medium-sized cement plant would mean moving some fifty railway wagons a day. On top of this come lengthy permitting timelines that undermine competitiveness and learning compared with more agile countries such as China, which is already selling renewable methanol and ammonia to major Western companies and gaining familiarity with a market that will prove decisive.
The prices of low-carbon products add further difficulties to investment decisions. Compared with around 60 euros per megawatt hour for conventional kerosene, synthetic fuels can cost up to ten times as much. The impact of this additional cost on the end consumer, however, is highly uneven: synthetic fuel could raise the price of a plane ticket by between 12% and 15% by 2040, whereas low-carbon cement would add 3% to the price of a home and decarbonized steel around 1% to that of a car. Hence PĂ©rez de Ayala's insistence on selective decarbonization, focused on the value chains capable of absorbing that additional cost.
On the regulatory front, he argued that good regulation is regulation that makes ambitions achievable, with realistic targets and workable pathways. Europe may have erred on the side of excessive ambition: the European Court of Auditors itself described its low-emission hydrogen targets as unrealistic in 2024. He also made the case for intermediate steps that are currently undervalued, such as blue hydrogen. He added that public funding has not flowed as the headlines promised either: in the second European hydrogen auction, only one in five submitted projects was awarded funding and, of the fifteen selected, just six went on to sign the grant agreement.
He closed his presentation by addressing competitiveness and offering a terminological caveat. He prefers to speak of energy addition rather than energy transition because, as he recalled drawing on an article by Daniel Yergin, global consumption of coal, oil, and gas continues to grow in absolute terms. An energy transition is only perceptible when looking at percentage shares of the energy supply mix. Using data from Boston Consulting Group, he showed how Europe is losing industrial weight relative to China and the United States. Industry, he clarified, does not reject decarbonization; it asks that it be reconciled with competitiveness.
In a qualitative exercise carried out with artificial intelligence, he compared, across various criteria, the ease of producing low-emission fuels at competitive prices in the three regions. The analysis placed Europe furthest behind and furthest from self-sufficiency by this route, trailing China and the United States, the latter having the best resources for self-sufficiency based on low-emission fuels.
The subsequent discussion covered much of the energy landscape. Topics included the role of nuclear energy as a highly suitable source for producing low-emission hydrogen, given its ability to provide electrolyzers with high load factors; the difficulty of achieving energy independence in light of reliance on Chinese manufacturers for the technologies needed for decarbonization; the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the risk of relocation; the real impact of Donald Trump's energy policies on projects inherited from the Biden era; the growing prominence of Gulf countries in low-emission energy productionâSaudi Arabia, for example, is designing the world's largest green ammonia project, geared towards exports to Europe; and the European Union's sustainability omnibus directive.
On Spain, PĂ©rez de Ayala described a country with ideal conditions for hydrogen derivatives and promising prospects for biomethane, but lagging behind in carbon capture and held back by the lead times required to develop the infrastructure needed to make decarbonization a reality.
The discussion confirmed a conclusion that the speaker expressed in a personal capacity: decarbonization is here to stay, although it will advance at different speeds across industries and geographies, and it calls for pragmatic, stable, long-term regulation, free of dogmatism, together with an honest acknowledgement of technological dependence on China. He summed it up with an image: a carbon molecule remains in the atmosphere for a century, "at least twenty-five legislative terms," so only a truly long-term vision will give these investments the certainty they need.
Aranzazu Ălvarez