Ex Ilva, agreement closer. Urso: two scenarios for the signature

The road to reach the program agreement for the decarbonization of the former Ilva of Taranto seems to be downhill after yesterday's meeting between the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy (Mimit), the Puglia Region and the local authorities of Taranto. The first to profess optimism is Minister Adolfo Urso, even if negotiations continue and there are open points.

A new meeting is scheduled for July 15th («to sign» asks Mimit) and consequently the conference of services on the new Integrated Environmental Authorization (Aia), which the Ministry of the Environment had already called for tomorrow, has been postponed by a week. This is to allow the program agreement to be closed sooner.

In the next few hours, Mimit, as explained by Urso, will put two more hypotheses on the table to reach an agreement. In both cases, the target is 6 million tons. The first includes three new electric furnaces, as many pre-reduced plants to power the furnaces, and a regasification ship to provide the gas needed for decarbonization. A significant detail is that the operation would be done in eight years, trying to speed it up as much as possible, while now the entire operation is expected to be up and running by 2039, a date that the Region and local authorities believe is too far away. So much so that they have asked for a timeframe of six to seven years, but Mimit sees it as difficult to go below eight.

As for the ship, the Mimit proposed it in a port like Piombino, but on this the closure of the Region and local authorities was total. From the Taranto front, the positioning of the ship 12 miles from the coast was therefore relaunched, while the ministry reiterated that the distance and depth of the seabed in that stretch of sea make the management of the unit uneconomical. As an alternative to the two hypotheses, i.e. port and 12 miles, a third possibility will therefore be explored: placing the ship near the breakwater, as suggested by the Port Authority of the Ionian Sea, which means shallower seabeds and a shorter distance from the coast than 12 miles. But even this last possibility has the Municipality of Taranto very doubtful for now.

The other scenario, instead, focuses on the possibility that the ship will not arrive in Taranto because the agreement cannot be reached. And then only the three electric furnaces would be built, with the timeframes dropping to seven years from eight and with the gas arriving from Tap. The pre-reduced gas pipeline would instead be moved elsewhere: one possibility is Gioia Tauro, where an onshore regasification plant has already been authorized and the construction site must start. In this case, the public company Dri d'Italia, which must spend the billion euros allocated for this purpose and transferred from the PNRR to the cohesion fund, should commit - sources close to the Municipality of Taranto say - to first supply the steelworks of the pre-reduced gas pipeline that is needed and then perhaps sell any excess quota to others. This commitment, the Municipality has asked, should also be included, to make it binding, in an amendment to the latest decree law on the former Ilva, currently being examined by the Senate Industry Committee. The Municipality also believes it is necessary to involve the unions in the discussion on the agreement. Furthermore, as revealed yesterday by Il Sole 24 Ore, there is the heavy unknown of a new tender. A program agreement would in fact probably also require the launch of a new procedure since it would move from an invitation to decarbonize even if set as a priority - and such was the case in the July 2024 tender - to a more binding path, namely the three electric furnaces, from which the new investor could not deviate.