Objective
Past and present human activities which introduce contaminants to the soil and groundwater have resulted in some 750,000 sites across Europe with suspected co ntamination. A clear need exists to remediate these sites through effective and timely solutions at a viable cost to society. This project focuses on soft soils with contamination 10 20 m below the land surface. Preferably, in situ techniques are applied to decontaminate these sites. The alternatives, ex situ treatment or containment, are too expensive or socially an improper solution. H owever, the low soil permeability often limits application of in situ technique s. In situ techniques can be enhanced by improving this permeability for instan ce through soil fracturing. Fracturing can be induced by injection of gas or li quids into the contaminated area. Cost effective soil fracturing techniques using gas were already developed in the USA, but are not exploited in the E.U. This proposal describes a workprogramme to develop a prototype for a new type o f fracturing system: the LIQIT technique. LIQIT will introduce soil fracturing in the E.U. and will use liquefed gas. This will improve results from existing fracturing techniques. The objective of a Danish German Dutch Belgium consor tium of SMEs is to develop the LIQIT process. A prototype LIQIT process will be constructed and extensively tested in field tests. Development will be based o n demands and constraints from in situ techniques that could be enhanced by LIQ IT. The consortium combines know how on injection of liquid gas with core busin esses in preparing and executing in situ soil remediation projects. The consort ium is supported by two large Dutch organizations involved in soil remediation. Contract research is performed by a Danish Dutch combination which provides an unique combination of know how on geomechanics and in situ soil remediation te chnologies. Application of the LIQIT process will reduce both the clean up t ime and total costs when using insitu techniques by some 25%. The soil remediat ion market will have a value of over 3.0 billion ECU in 2000 for just Germany a nd The Netherlands. More than 35% or about 1.1 billion ECU of this market will be covered by in situ techniques. Thus, development of the LIQIT process has po tential savings of over 0.27 billion ECU annually. According to the CARACAS tas k force of the E.C. such savings will contribute to a reduction of some seriou s economic and social problems that are caused by the contamination of (former) industrial and living areas. Also, the cost reduction of remediation could be an argument for authorities to call for remediation of a higher number of conta minated sites.
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.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CRS - Cooperative research contractsCoordinator
4200 AK Gorinchem
Netherlands