Project description
Growing crops without putting the planet at risk
Intensive agricultural practices pose a serious risk to human health and the planet’s ecosystem. For instance, emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) – poisonous, highly reactive gases – from agricultural soils can contribute to air quality issues. The EU-funded NOx Conversion project will analyse the situation in California, where agricultural soils are a dominant source of NOx pollution. This is based on a bottom-up spatial model of soil NOx emissions and top-down airborne observations of atmospheric NOx concentrations. To reverse this trend, the project will invest in management practices. It is developing a disruptive technology (currently patent pending) that will undergo thorough evaluation in the real environment to prove its efficacy in a quantified manner.
Objective
Crop Intellect Ltd have conceived and proved an innovative technique to capture NOx and convert it to nitrates for use
in agriculture. It is for the first time, NOx have been demonstrated as substrates for production of nitrate fertiliser directly
on crop foliage. Competitive advantages of the technology include: (i) leading to application of no N fertilisers to crops. This will
save money and increase crop yields whilst protecting the environment; (ii) generating cost savings of 68.70% to the farmer
compared to current practices of N fertiliser application as well as generating extra revenue of €1,616/ha to the farmer; and (iii)
using atmospheric NOx as substrates for production of N fertiliser can help mitigate nitrogen pollution.
Nitrogen pollution is a significant environmental problem in Europe and around the world as its impacts include contributions to
global warming. The total annual cost to the EU of nitrogen pollution’s environmental impacts is €70–320 Billion. To address this
problem the EU have introduced directives, such as 2001/81/EC and 2008/50/EC. In industrial facilities, there are severalmethods
for controlling NOx emissions. Although these technologies exist, they can’t directly be used in agriculture as methods for
controlling or mitigating NOx emissions or utilise NOx as resources for improving crop growth and yield.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energywind power
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringair pollution engineering
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterialsbiofuels
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020
See other projects for this callSub call
H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-1
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
LN2 2LG LINCOLN
United Kingdom
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.