For Philippe Cornille, General Secretary of the European Industrial Gases Association (EIGA), the two mega trends from the 2020 industrial gas year are saving lives under Covid-19 and hydrogen.
“As a major treatment intervention for patients with severe Covid-19, medical oxygen demand in hospitals in Europe has risen to unprecedented levels. This illustrates how instrumental ‘our’ oxygen has been, and how the medical gases sector was able to ensure and ramp up the supply of life-saving medical oxygen,” Cornille highlighted.
“The second mega trend relates to hydrogen, and its anticipated central role in the European Green Deal. Hydrogen is indeed more and more expected to play a key role in Europe’s ambitious decarbonisation goals.”
“The industrial gases sector has plenty of expertise to offer in the development a more hydrogen-based society.”
GW: How has EIGA supported the industry this year as it fought, and continues to fight, to save lives in the battle against Covid-19?
PC: EIGA organises frequent conference call meetings with our members to stay abreast with the fast-changing Covid-19 situation and measures implemented by national authorities.
Our industry continues participating in the bi-weekly meetings with the European Medicines Agency Steering Group: “Weekly update from EU Industry Trade Associations on the impact of the Covid-19 outbreak on the supply of medicines in the Union/EEA. Report to the EU Executive Steering Group of Shortages of Medicines caused my major events.’’
They define the measures needed to assure supply of medicines to the market and as such they advise directly the EU Commission.
During the second wave, EIGA has intensified our meetings around the Medical Gas Council and continues working with the National Gas Association. EIGA has published several useful documents and review which may need to be adapted and re-published.
Following documents on Covif-19 were published for our members
GW: Are there any lessons learned from the pandemic that you can share with our readers?
PC: Industry actions and authority decisions jointly allowed a continuous supply of medical oxygen, saving lives every single day.
Challenges included insufficient installed oxygen capacities in hospitals, medical oxygen cylinders shortages, continuity of critical staffing, red tape in transport, but all of these were overcome.
Competent Authorities and medical gases industry reacted timely, and never compromised on safety for users and patients.
GW: What future do you see for the gases market in Europe?
PC: The European Green Deal will push for more and more low carbon productions. This will impact both our production as well as our customer’s production.
Europe is currently drafting a panoply of climate and energy legislation that is directly relevant for our sector, either because the electricity intensity of our air separating units, or because of the carbon intensity of our steam methane reforming units.
GW: Finally, in the spirit of the time of year and theme of the series, if you could have one industrial gases related thing for Christmas, what would it be and why?
PC: Definitely safety! The industrial gases sector can present good safety statistics, but further improvement would really make me happy.
I hope that extending the safety library with a first eLearning module on oxygen safety will contribute too. The eLearning is free for all and offers a tiered module to address the needs from non-specialists and gas experts alike.
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