Award of the CERESiS H2020 proposal and announcement of the kick-off meeting, 19-20 November, 2020

The CERESiS (ContaminatEd land Remediation through Energy crops for Soil improvement to liquid biofuel Strategies) H2020 proposal has been recently awarded a contract (Grant Agreement No. 101006717) to run for 42 months and the kick-off meeting is scheduled to take place virtually on November 19-20, 2020.

CERESiS involves academia, industry, organizations, institutes, and SMEs in a joint effort to tackle the indirect land use change (ILUC) risk while producing biofuels, as well as the fact that – at the same time – significant contaminated land areas remain unused. The project aims to provide a win-win sustainable solution to both issues by facilitating land decontamination through phytoremediation, i.e. growing energy crops to produce clean biofuels. In the longer term, this will increase the land available for agriculture, while producing non-ILUC biofuel. Identified promising energy crops will be trialed in North, South, Eastern Europe, and Brazil and their products will be converted into biofuels via the optimization of two clean biofuel conversion technologies (i.e. Supercritical Water Gasification and Fast Pyrolysis) integrated with novel contaminant separation technologies. Having ensured the proof of concept, the project will go beyond the selected case studies and also develop a Decision Support System able to identify optimal solutions for each application. Its operation will rely on land, phytoremediation, technological, economic, and environmental parameters and provide critical information to stakeholders & policy makers on the suitability of combinations of phytoremediation strategies and conversion technologies for particular sites, contaminants, environmental restrictions, etc. It will also include techno-economic analysis of pathways, LCA & LCC, supply chain optimization, and performance assessment against SDG goals.

Partners from five EU countries, Ukraine, Brazil and Canada representing the entire value chain join forces for the development and assessment of the integrated pathways.

CERESiS consortium

12 partners from 8 countries:
6 Universities
2 Research
2 Companies/Industry
2NGOs

The project leading to this application has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101006717