On 3 September 2026, two things happened that look unrelated. In Rotkreuz, a memo was circulated to politicians, regulators, associations and industry arguing that Europe is on the verge of losing the industrial base it will need for defossilisation. In Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Daimler Truck announced that it, Volvo Group, Toyota Motor Corporation, Bosch, Air Liquide, TotalEnergies, TEAL Mobility and MB Energy are working with German policymakers on a blueprint for a fully integrated hydrogen ecosystem in heavy road freight. Toyota’s Swiss arm, Toyota Schweiz AG, is a SPIN member.
Read together, the two documents make the same argument from opposite ends of the value chain. The binding constraint on defossilised molecules in Europe is no longer whether they can be produced. It is whether anyone can be confident they will be bought.
A refinery closure is close to irreversible
The memo’s starting point is a distinction that gets lost in most European debates: defossilisation is not the same thing as deindustrialisation. Fossil production must decline. That is not in question. The question is what happens to the plant, the pipelines, the port connections and the people once it does.
A refinery is not a production line that can be idled for a few years and restarted when conditions improve. When one closes for good, units are dismantled, sold or scrapped, land is repurposed, staff move to other employers or other sectors, and supplier relationships dissolve. Usable equipment travels: capital, plant and technical knowledge are internationally mobile, and they tend to end up where long-term demand and investment conditions look better. What Europe shuts down today does not simply become available again tomorrow.
The loss is not “one refinery fewer”
Refineries sit inside highly integrated industrial clusters — petrochemicals, chemicals, logistics, ports, pipelines, tank farms, hydrogen and CO₂ infrastructure, plant engineering. They supply intermediate streams that plastics, tyres, coatings, adhesives, lubricants, construction and pharmaceutical producers depend on. Remove a central link and those streams have to come from somewhere else, which usually means longer supply chains, higher logistics and working-capital costs, and thinner security of supply.
The chain the memo sketches runs: less refining capacity → fewer local feedstocks → higher import dependency → weaker industrial clusters → further value creation lost. The integration that is currently a European competitive advantage becomes, in that scenario, a transmission mechanism for a domino effect.
From crude dependency to product dependency
Falling European refining capacity does not make the demand for refined products and petrochemical feedstocks disappear. Part of it will have to be met by imports. That shifts Europe’s position in the value chain: instead of importing raw materials and processing them here, Europe would import finished products processed elsewhere. Meanwhile new refining capacity is being built in Asia and the Middle East. Dependence on non-European refineries also means dependence on shipping lanes, ports, tanker traffic, export restrictions and geopolitics — a point the eFuel Alliance, itself a SPIN member, made from a different angle in the position paper we covered earlier this month.
The bottleneck is demand — and VEEF is a demand mechanism
New production plants for e-fuels and other sustainable, fossil-free fuels need substantial capital. Capital arrives only when a large and reliable market can be expected over the life of the asset. This is where VEEF — Vehicles running Exclusively on Eligible Fuels — becomes an industrial-policy instrument rather than a labelling exercise.
VEEF appeared as a proposed vehicle category in the draft report on the revision of EU CO₂ standards for cars and vans, which we analysed in June. The label matters less than the function. The memo’s argument is that two demand sources can work in parallel and should not be played off against each other. Rising blending quotas raise the share of sustainable, fossil-free fuels consumed by the existing fleet, which scales the market that already exists. VEEF add a separate, plannable offtake base on top of it. The existing fleet provides volume; VEEF provide offtake certainty. Together they give an investment committee something to point at.
The logic is deliberately circular in a productive way: additional and rising demand → higher investment certainty → new production capacity → scale → falling costs and greater availability → further market penetration. Read this way, VEEF are not a device for preserving the combustion engine. They are a demand creation mechanism for a European market that does not yet exist at scale, and the same production base can serve road transport, aviation via SAF and e-SAF, shipping and the chemical industry — which also reduces the risk of any single plant depending on a single offtake market.
The hydrogen truck alliance is the same argument, in hardware
Which is what makes the Daimler Truck announcement worth reading alongside the memo. The companies involved are not proposing a new fuel cell. They are proposing to coordinate vehicles, refuelling infrastructure along key European corridors and hydrogen supply at competitive prices, in a sequence matched to the ramp-up of truck fleets, so that customers reach a competitive total cost of ownership. The stated aim is a blueprint for a fully integrated hydrogen ecosystem in heavy road freight by 2030, developed together with policymakers. Details are due at a press conference with the participating CEOs at IAA Transportation in Hanover on 15 September 2026.
Strip away the technology and the structure is identical to the VEEF case: nobody builds the supply until someone can credibly promise the demand, and nobody commits to the demand until the supply and the price are visible. Breaking that deadlock is a coordination problem, and coordination problems are what regulation and industrial policy are for.
Time is the second ingredient
Converting a refinery is not a three-year project. Electrolysis, CO₂ infrastructure, synthesis routes, advanced biofuels and e-fuels all require planning certainty over long horizons, which is why the memo argues for a transformation window of ten to twenty years. That is not a plea for delay. It is the opposite: only a long and credible transformation path makes it rational to take an investment decision now. The years to 2035 or 2040 are not a postponement, they are the investment phase in which today’s fossil business model has to be converted into a different one.
The Power-to-X caveat
One condition remains non-negotiable from a Power-to-X perspective: e-fuels only make climate sense when the carbon they contain is recycled CO₂ from biogenic, atmospheric or industrial sources, and when that recycling displaces fossil carbon instead of providing a reason to burn more of it. Existing refinery sites are attractive precisely because they already have the land, tank farms, pipelines, port and grid connections, process units and engineering skills. That advantage is only worth having if the molecules coming out at the end are genuinely fossil-free. The problem is fossil carbon, not combustion.
Why this matters in Switzerland
Switzerland has one refinery left, Varo Energy’s plant at Cressier in the canton of Neuchâtel, with a capacity of roughly 68,000 barrels a day. The Swiss stake in this debate, though, is bigger than one site. Swiss engineering, plant construction, catalysis and process technology companies — many of them SPIN members — sell into exactly the European industrial clusters the memo is about. If those clusters are dismantled rather than converted, the addressable market for Swiss Power-to-X technology shrinks with them. If they are converted, Switzerland has a great deal to supply.
The memo’s closing line is worth carrying into the Swiss debate as well: the refinery is not the problem. The missing business model for the period after the fossil business model is. And it has to exist before the industrial substance is gone.
Sources: memo “VEEF als Abnehmer für nachhaltige, fossilfreie Kraftstoffe”, Rotkreuz, 3 September 2026; Daimler Truck press release, 3 September 2026.
🤖 AI transparency: This text and its visual were created using AI, reviewed and approved by a human.
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