Low-Carbon Industrial Zones (ZIBaC)

The Low-Carbon Industrial Zones (ZIBaC) are territories that bring together several industrial sites committed to collectively reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than each factory investing alone, the approach involves pooling decarbonisation infrastructure at a basin level: CO₂ capture and transport, low-carbon hydrogen production and distribution, heat networks, strengthening electrical grids, or recovering lost heat. The objective is to transform major French industrial hubs into more efficient, competitive, and attractive ecosystems.

Behind this acronym lies a concrete public scheme, with dedicated funding, that generates a continuous flow of public procurement: studies, engineering, works, and equipment. This article explains what ZIBaC are, the programme’s status in 2026, and how to identify the resulting calls for tenders.

What is a low-carbon industrial zone?

A ZIBaC is not a factory, nor a company: it is a geographical perimeter that gathers industrialists, infrastructure managers, local authorities, and energy stakeholders around a common decarbonisation pathway. These zones are often industrial-port platforms or historical chemical basins, i.e. where the most difficult-to-reduce emissions are concentrated.

The guiding idea is simple: many decarbonisation solutions are only profitable at scale. A CO₂ capture and transport network, a hydrogen pipeline, or a heat network is only justified if several industrialists share them. By treating the zone as a system, and not as a collection of isolated sites, ZIBaC make possible investments that no single company would fund alone.

The ZIBaC call for projects: the France 2030 framework

The scheme was launched within the framework of France 2030, the State’s major investment plan, and is operated by ADEME (the Ecological Transition Agency). A first wave, the call for projects “ZIBaC phase 1: maturation”, was opened in 2022 to identify and support the country’s highest-emitting industrial zones and help them build their decarbonisation pathway.

The first winners were announced progressively from January 2023: the industrial-port zones of Dunkirk and Fos-sur-Mer in January 2023, the Le Havre, Port-Jérôme and Rouen axis in Normandy in spring 2023, then the Loire estuary around Saint-Nazaire in summer 2023. Other territories joined them, including the Lyon chemical valley, the Lacq basin, and the Bordeaux metropolitan area (Bassens and Ambès). In total, the selection covered about ten of France’s highest-emitting zones, those that concentrate most of the national industrial emissions.

Collaborative industrial ecosystems

The core of the ZIBaC model is cooperation. In the same basin, companies that are sometimes competitors agree to share infrastructure and coordinate their investments. The pooled technological building blocks are the main levers of industrial decarbonisation:

• CO₂ capture, transport and storage (the so-called CCUS chains), for emissions that cannot otherwise be avoided;
• production and distribution of low-carbon hydrogen, which replaces fossil fuels in many processes;
• heat networks and waste heat recovery, to reuse energy lost by one site for the benefit of another;
• strengthening electrical grids and energy storage, essential for the electrification of uses;
• energy efficiency and circular economy loops, which reduce consumption at the source.

Each zone thus builds its own roadmap, adapted to its industrial fabric, with shared governance that brings public and private stakeholders together.

ZIBaC phase 2: from trajectory to investments

The programme has entered a new stage. After the “maturation” phase, ADEME launched a phase 2, called “support”, whose specifications were approved by a decree of 8 April 2025. This second phase is reserved for phase 1 winners: it aims to help them move from the theoretical trajectory to its concrete implementation, through feasibility studies, consolidation of their governance, then structuring investments, experiments, and synergies between sites.

Specifically, the phase 2 call for projects is open from 28 April 2025 until 10 June 2028, with semi-annual submission dates, generally around 10 June and 10 December each year. The support is significant: according to the specifications published by ADEME, aid is modulated according to the zone’s emission volume and can reach up to 20 million euros for the highest-emitting sites. This long timeline, extending until 2028, ensures that ZIBaC will continue to generate tenders for several years.

What calls for tenders and public contracts result from this?

For a company selling decarbonisation solutions, a ZIBaC is a reservoir of opportunities. Each zone triggers, as its projects advance, a wide variety of consultations: trajectory and engineering studies, project management assistance missions, works contracts for shared networks, equipment supply, operation and maintenance contracts. These needs are not limited to energy: they also concern waste recovery, environmental studies, and environmental monitoring of installations.

The difficulty is not the lack of opportunities, but their dispersion. Consultations are published by very different actors (industrialists, ports, local authorities, public agencies), on hundreds of platforms, under titles that do not always mention the word “decarbonisation”. A ZIBaC infrastructure contract can appear as a simple works or engineering contract, and go unnoticed by a keyword search. To understand how these opportunities fit into the broader landscape of energy infrastructure, structured monitoring is essential.

How to identify these opportunities with Deepbloo

This is precisely the role of a public procurement monitoring platform. Rather than manually monitoring dozens of sources, the company centralises all relevant calls for tenders, contract notices, and calls for projects in one place. Three key actions make the difference:

1. Set up automated monitoring. A well-configured French public procurement watch captures new consultations as soon as they are published, without relying on manual verification.
2. Go beyond CPV codes. CPV codes, which classify European public procurement, are often too generic to isolate a decarbonisation lot hidden within a larger works contract. Analysing the actual content of documents then becomes decisive.
3. Do not forget official sources. A portion of consultations passes through the BOAMP, the official bulletin of public procurement notices, which must be effectively leveraged.

Deepbloo applies this logic nationally and internationally: the platform collects calls for tenders from hundreds of sources, analyses the content of documents to detect lots genuinely related to decarbonisation, and alerts the company to opportunities that match its activity. A hydrogen supplier, a heat network integrator, or an environmental consultancy can thus follow the progress of ZIBaC without missing anything.

In summary

Low-Carbon Industrial Zones are one of the major levers for low-carbon reindustrialisation in France. Funded by France 2030 and managed by ADEME, they pool decarbonisation infrastructure across the country’s largest industrial basins, and their phase 2 runs until 2028. For companies in the sector, they represent years of future public contracts. However, it is essential to identify them in time: this is where a tender monitoring platform makes all the difference.