Project description
Solving the food versus fuel debate
Grown from plants, biofuels help reduce transport’s impact on climate change. While biofuels have emerged as a key solution for the decarbonisation of transport, the risk of indirect land-use change remains the main issue. This is when agricultural land destined for food and feed markets is diverted to the production of fuels from biomass. The EU-funded CERESiS project will develop a sustainable solution by facilitating land decontamination through phytoremediation with a range of promising energy crops, and investigating novel biofuel conversion and contaminant separation technologies, to produce clean biofuels. By bringing together academia, organisations, research institutes and SMEs, the project will overcome the indirect land-use change risk issue by using and decontaminating formerly contaminated land.
Objective
Biofuels are one of few options for decarbonizing transport in the short to medium term. However, they are often criticised for indirect land use change (ILUC), which is critical due to lack of high quality agricultural land and increasing world population. At the same time, significant contaminated land areas remain unused.
CERESiS aims to provide a win-win sustainable solution to both issues by facilitating land decontamination through phytoremediation, growing energy crops to produce clean biofuels. In the longer term, this will increase the land available for agriculture, while producing non-ILUC biofuel.
The project is based on three pillars. The phytoremediation pillar will identify a range of promising energy crops, focusing on key contaminants worldwide. They will be trialed in North, South, Eastern Europe and Brazil, with samples characterised and converted to biofuels.
The technological pillar will optimize two clean biofuel conversion technologies, Supercritical Water Gasification & Fast Pyrolysis integrated with novel contaminant separation technologies, focusing on eliminating, stabilising or retrieving the contaminants in an easy to manage form.
The Decision Support pillar will develop an open access, modular and expandable Decision Support System able to identify optimal solutions for each application. It will incorporate land, phytoremediation, technological, economic, environmental parameters providing 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 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 collaborate for the development and assessment of the integrated pathways.
Fields of science
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
157 80 ATHINA
Greece