RFCS-2026-Steel-Big Tickets under the Clean Industrial Deal

This grant aims to support innovation and competitiveness in the steel sector for full decarbonisation, progress towards the European Green Deal and Clean Industrial Deal, and strengthening the European industrial base. Projects are expected to contribute to CO2 reduction, achieve positive environmental effects, enable novel technologies to produce steel products with equal or better quality, demonstrate health and safety benefits, outline scalable deployment plans, and support job creation. Objectives include advancement of recycling technologies, residue valorization, digitalization for scrap management, innovation in secondary carbon carriers, circularity management, and use of bio-based processes in the steel industry.

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Agency	RFCS (EU)
Region	EU
Country	N/A
Legal form	Company, NGO, Government organization, Other
Start date	17 Feb 2026
End date	6 May 2026
Budget	50,000,000 EUR for RFCS-2026-BT-Steel-CID Big Tickets (2026). 25,000,000 EUR for RFCS-2026-BT-Steel-SMAP Small Pilot Actions (2026).

Grant application conditions

Admissibility Conditions	Proposal page limit and layout described in section 5 of the call document; instructions in Part B of Application Form.
Eligible Countries	Described in section 6 of the call document.
Eligibility Conditions	Described in section 6 of the call document.
Financial and Operational Capacity & Exclusion	Described in section 7 of the call document.
Evaluation and Award Criteria	Submission and evaluation processes in section 8 of call document and the Online Manual. Award criteria, scoring and thresholds described in section 9. Indicative timeline for evaluation and grant agreement in section 4.
Legal and Financial Grant Set-up	Described in section 10 of the call document.
Project Scope	Proposals must relate to innovative technologies covered by at least one of the objectives. Pilot or demonstration projects (see Articles 15 and 16 of Council Decision (EU) 2008/376/EC). TRL 7-8 expected at the end of project.
Exploitation Strategy	Proposals must include a strategy for industrial integration and preliminary economic viability assessment.
Targeted Improvements	Proposals must clearly quantify and demonstrate improvements compared to existing installations or ETS benchmarks, via energy system and material balance assessments.
Documentation	https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/RFCS-2026-BT-Steel-CID

Eligible expenses

Evaluation criteria

Application process

Application requirements