Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2663 actions· ✨ 89 recent

Shandong Province's provincial government General Office issued Notice 鲁政办字〔2025〕183号 on 26 December 2025 ("Notice on Several Measures for Fiscal Support of the Integrated Development of Education, Science and Technology, and Talent"), a package of 30 fiscal-support measures running through end-2028. The measures fund R&D grants (up to RMB 30 million for major academician-led projects), talent awards (up to RMB 5 million per person), university-enterprise collaboration funding (up to RMB 15 million/project), an R&D-spend rebate (up to RMB 5 million/year per firm), and a 40%-of-interest subsidy (capped at RMB 500,000 per loan) for bank loans financing technology-achievement commercialization, plus co-financed non-performing-loan risk compensation of up to 90% on those loans. Global Trade Alert logged the interest-payment-subsidy component as a separate intervention tagged with generic extractive-sector codes (coal, crude petroleum, uranium) that do not correspond to any sector language in the underlying notice — the actual measures are horizontal, applying across education, R&D and technology-commercialization activity rather than to any named industry.

On 19 December 2025 Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) announced EUR 170 million in direct federal grants to seven transformation projects in former coal regions under the STARK programme (Stärkung der Transformationsdynamik und Aufbruch in den Revieren und an den Kohlekraftwerksstandorten), targeting an expected EUR 600 million in total triggered investment and roughly 600 direct jobs plus up to 3,000 indirect supply-chain jobs. The largest disclosed awards anchor the domestic battery-materials value chain: EUR 63.4 million to Aachen startup Cylib for Europe's first industrial-scale LFP battery-recycling line at Chempark Dormagen (60,000 t/year capacity), EUR 36 million to AMG-Lithium GmbH for a battery-grade lithium-salt production expansion (~20,000 t/year) at Chemiepark Bitterfeld-Wolfen, and EUR 46.1 million to Altech Batteries GmbH for a sodium-based (CERENERGY) stationary storage factory at the Lusatian industrial park Schwarze Pumpe. A fourth confirmed recipient, ORE Energy, received EUR 16.2 million for an iron-air storage project ("IronAir4Ruhr") in Gelsenkirchen; the remaining three of the seven funded projects are not yet individually named in public BMWE materials.

On 18 November 2025 the European Commission approved, under EU State aid rules, German financial support of up to EUR 1.75 billion in favour of Lausitz Energie Kraftwerke AG (LEAG), the operator of lignite-fired power plants in the Lusatian mining area of eastern Germany near the Polish and Czech borders. The aid compensates LEAG for additional costs and forgone profits arising from the early, government-mandated phase-out of its lignite fleet, which will close in stages in 2028, 2029, 2035 and 2038 under Germany's 2020 coal-exit legislation. The measure was first notified in 2020 and had been under a formal Commission investigation (opened March 2021) for nearly five years before this clearance; a parallel EUR 2.6 billion tranche for RWE's western lignite fleet was cleared separately in December 2023.

The US Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, via the National Energy Technology Laboratory, announced USD 355 million in federal funding across two notices of funding opportunity (NOFOs) on 14 November 2025: up to USD 275 million for pilot-scale facilities recovering critical minerals from coal-based feedstocks and industrial/mining byproducts at existing US industrial sites, and up to USD 80 million for the "Mine of the Future — Proving Ground Initiative," field-scale test sites for next-generation mining technologies (novel extraction, in-situ methods, beneficiation) plus mining-workforce training. Applications were due 15 December 2025.

DOE's Loan Programs Office closed a USD 1.5 billion loan under the Energy Dominance Financing Program to Wabash Valley Resources, LLC to restart and repurpose a coal-gasification plant (idled since 2016) in West Terre Haute, Indiana, converting it into a coal- and petcoke-fed anhydrous ammonia fertilizer facility with 500,000 metric tons/year capacity. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright framed the loan explicitly as reducing US dependence on foreign fertilizer supply by using domestic coal, positioning the plant to supply cost-competitive nitrogen fertilizer to Corn Belt farmers. Global Trade Alert logs the loan as a state-loan intervention.

Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) signed a loan agreement, announced 2025-08-21 (signed 2025-08-20), providing up to USD 14 million (JBIC's portion) toward a USD 24 million total co-financing package with Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation for ETC Group Limited, a Mauritius-based company backed by Mitsui & Co., Ltd. The loan funds liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) operations conducted through ETG Energy, ETC Group's wholly owned subsidiary, across Zambia, South Africa, Mozambique, and Uganda. JBIC explicitly framed the financing as supporting Japanese overseas business expansion and enabling a household-fuel transition from charcoal to LPG aligned with the recipient countries' Paris Agreement emissions commitments.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) committed AUD 44.9 million to Calix Limited to build a demonstration plant for its Zero Emissions Steel Technology (ZESTY), targeting up to 30,000 tonnes per year of low-carbon hydrogen direct reduced iron (HDRI) and hot briquetted iron (HBI) using renewable electricity and hydrogen instead of coking coal. The funding builds on prior ARENA-funded engineering studies and also supports early-stage engineering for a larger commercial-scale ZESTY plant, positioning low-emissions iron/steel as a strategic priority industry for Australia.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) committed AUD 19.8 million to the NeoSmelt joint venture to fund a front-end engineering design (FEED) study for a direct reduced iron-electric smelting furnace (DRI-ESF) pilot plant at Kwinana, Western Australia, aimed at proving Pilbara iron ore can be converted into lower-carbon iron without a coking-coal blast furnace. The consortium, founded by BlueScope, BHP and Rio Tinto, welcomed Woodside Energy and Mitsui Iron Ore Development as new equal-equity participants alongside the grant announcement. Total project cost is AUD 48.85 million, with the study running from May 2025 to August 2026 ahead of a targeted final investment decision.

In the Spending Review 2025 (delivered 11 June 2025), HM Treasury committed "over £2.5 billion" for nuclear fusion, explicitly including support for the UK's STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) programme to design and build a prototype fusion power plant on the site of the former West Burton A coal power station in Nottinghamshire. The commitment covers the multi-year Spending Review period and is administered through the UK Atomic Energy Authority. STEP construction is expected to begin in the 2030s, with first operations targeted for 2040, and the government cites over 10,000 jobs supported by the programme.

KfW IPEX-Bank, the export- and project-finance arm of German state development bank KfW, announced on 13 May 2025 a EUR 100 million contribution to a EUR 1 billion syndicated financing package (eight banks total) for BEW Berliner Energie und Wärme GmbH, operator of Western Europe's largest district heating system. The facility secures BEW's capital requirements until at least end-March 2027 following its 2024 acquisition by the state of Berlin from Vattenfall, and underwrites the utility's coal phase-out (targeted 2030) and path to climate-neutral district heating generation by 2045. BEW supplies district heating and hot water to roughly 700,000 apartments (over a third of Berlin's housing stock) and 8,000 other buildings.

On 20 January 2021, DOE's Office of Fossil Energy (now FECM), managed through the National Energy Technology Laboratory, announced Funding Opportunity Announcement DE-FOA-0002404, making USD 28.35 million available for cost-shared R&D projects developing advanced midstream processing technologies for rare earth elements and critical minerals from coal and coal by-products, for industrial and manufacturing applications. Applications were due 1 March 2021, with up to eight Phase 1 awards anticipated; no specific recipients were named at announcement.