The Project
CERESiS - ContaminatEd land Remediation through Energy crops for Soil improvement to liquid biofuel Strategies is a Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme started in November 2020 with a duration of 42 months
This workshop was part of the activities of the BIKE project and CERESiS, in collaboration with other similar projects, participated to share key findings and outputs and to discuss the production of biomass feedstock with low ILUC risks. The overall aim of the workshop was to gather views and results from a series of ongoing and recent Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects, developing solutions to sustainably produce low ILUC risk biomass feedstock for industrial uses.
This Newsletter provides an introduction to project’s pillars with a special focus on the Field Trials (UK, IT, UKR, BR).
The CERESiS consortium partners have met both virtually and physically on November 10th and 11th 2022 at Viterbo, Italy. This meeting was organized and hosted by the University of Tuscia to discuss and communicate the work that has been done so far within the project. The main objective of this meeting was to perform a follow up of the project’s activities and actions up to Month 24 of the project and define the next steps in order to ensure its success.
In the context of the 30th EUBCE Conference, on May 12 (2022), CERESiS organized a policy workshop entitled “Squaring the circle between phytoremediation and biofuel production”.
This newsletter aims to present the progress made in the first 18 months of CERESiS project.
The focus of this first issue is on Regulatory & Legal issues.
Two trial sites in Ukraine with fuel and mineral oil contamination and pesticides contamination were planted with Reed Canary Grass (RCG) and Miscanthus in spring 2021. As of the end of summer, Reed Canary Grass has grown up to more than 0.8 meters and Miscanthus - up to more than 2 meters. Biomass harvesting is planned for February 2022, when the moisture content in plants is expected to decrease and reach 20-25%.
7th December 2021: Mechanized harvesting trials of Phalaris arundinacea by means of a disc mower began at the experimental site of the University of Tuscia – Viterbo, Italy.
During the harvesting process, data on soil compaction and harvest time were also acquired; moreover, the biomass to be used by the partners Karlsruher Institut für Technologie in Germany (KIT) and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Italy (CNR) of the CERESiS project was also collected, for Fast pyrolysis (FP) and Supercritical water gasification (SCWG) testing.
The CERESiS project aims to provide a win-win sustainable solution to (a) scaling up non-ILUC biofuels production and (b) cleaning contaminated lands by facilitating land decontamination through phytoremediation, growing energy crops and producing clean biofuels.
To do so, an open access, modular and expandable Decision Support System (DSS) is under development, 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.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 101006717.