In the road to sustainability, the treatment of post-combustion emissions is still far from being techno-economically viable. On one end, the low concentration of CO2 in these streams, precludes the use of current carbon capture (CC) technologies. On the other end, even if CC were successfully implemented, there are not plausible final uses, maybe except geological long-term storage. Our ambitious proposal aims to investigate the viability of a technology able to tackle these challenges at once. Our SUPERVAL technology will develop scientific solutions from low-cost, non-critical raw materials and processes, with the added value of removing/valorizing the NOx contaminants from flue gas. We propose to design and realize an autonomous, solar-powered installation able to capture harmful emissions from flue gas, and valorize them as commodities for the chemical industry, using water as sacrificial source of electrons and protons. The CO2 will be transformed into an organic, energy-rich molecule (formate). The NOx will be also captured and transformed, in combination with N2, into ammonia using the hydrogen obtained in the CO2 co-electrolysis processes. This integrated effort will offer the comprehensive capture and valorization of carbon and nitrogen components in post-combustion emissions, thus limiting pollutants and resulting in added-value chemicals. The corresponding techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment studies will help to shape the components and performance of SUPERVAL as a useful technological advancement in the search for zero net emissions.

Artificial photosynthesis (AP) is a promising approach for solar fuel production, but current systems are inefficient, expensive and unsuitable for industrial deployment. The interdisciplinary SUNGATE consortium of 12 partners from six EU countries and Turkey will overcome these limitations by combining the principles of AP with photoelectrocatalysis and flow microreactor technology, leading to the first modular full-cell continuous flow microreactor technology that requires only sunlight (as an energy source) plus water and CO2 (as simple, abundant feedstocks) for conversion into solar fuels such as methanol and formate. The technology will operate at room temperature and neutral pH using aqueous solutions. In contrast to state-of-the-art photoelectrochemical (PEC) technologies, SUNGATE will not use toxic or critical raw materials, and will combine efficient water oxidation catalysts, with biological components such as photosystem I and enzymes, novel CO2 reducing catalysts and nanostructured diamond-based cathodes to radically improve the efficiency of conversion. The unique modular and scalable design of SUNGATE technology will allow the decarbonised production of solar fuels by increasing the size of the microfluidic PEC device or by numbering up the PEC modules, thus providing the flexibility for diverse applications ranging from decentralised energy infrastructure to closed carbon cycles for industries that emit large amounts of CO2. SUNGATE aims to achieve proof of concept at TRL5, heralding a technology breakthrough that has the potential to secure the future global energy supply at an affordable cost. This meets the central goal of the European Green Deal and the European Climate Law to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. SUNGATE’s diverse mix of academic, RTOs and industry partners will allow the full validation of the technology, including life cycle assessment, as well as effective dissemination and knowledge transfer to accelerate industrial take up.

The Oil&Gas (O&G) industry is one of the 8 most water-intensive industries; indeed, it could be conceived as a water industry which delivers oil as a by-product. Specifically, by 2020 it is expected that over 500 million barrels/day of produced water (PW) and about 15 million m³/day of refinery wastewater (RW) are generated. Despite the necessity and potential beneficial impacts of reusing the water involved in extraction and refining activities, several significant barriers are hampering this opportunity. Firstly, the existent commercial water treatment technologies cannot be used directly in the O&G sector without an extensive adaptation, and they are not flexible and reliable enough to bear the complexity and variability of PW/RW composition. Moreover, there is no expertise or experience in the O&G sector in the design and operation of water treatment systems. The INTEGROIL project aims to develop and demonstrate a robust but flexible integrated solution for treating O&G water flows with variable compositions to different water qualities depending on the final reuse objective. This new solution will be readily designed with different modules each comprising innovative water treatment technologies that will be operated and optimized in an integrated manner through a novel Decision Support System, in line with 3 priorities of the EIP Water. The INTEGROIL approach ensures minimal design and operational efforts involved from the O&G end-user side and that the energy and chemical costs are kept to an absolute minimum for a certain target water quality. Its feasibility and long-term application will be assessed through demo activities in 2 real operational conditions, that will provide critical information for the commercialisation actions to be undertaken. The INTEGROIL consortium brings together 10 entities (6 SMEs) covering the full value chain, including technology developers, O&G end-users, a Sustainability Assessment firm and a professional association.

HyperCOG project “HYPERCONNECTED ARCHITECTURE FOR HIGH COGNITIVE PRODUCTION PLANTS” addresses the full digital transformation of the process industry and cognitive process production plants through an innovative Industrial Cyber-Physical System (ICPS). It is based on commercially available advanced technologies, that will enable the development of a hyper-connected network of digital nodes. The nodes can catch outstanding streams of data in real-time, which together with the high computing capabilities available nowadays, provide sensing, knowledge and cognitive reasoning to the industrial business. Furthermore, HyperCOG is deeply grounded in the last advances in Artificial Intelligence such as modelling for twin factories, decision-support systems for human-machine interaction and augmented reality for industrial processes visualization. It pursues self-learning from the process in order to deal with the typical dynamic fluctuations of the industrial processes and global optimization. The objective is to increase the production performance while reducing the environmental impact by reducing the energy consumption and the CO2 emissions thereof. Society will get profit of this project not only throughout the environmental impact, but through the lifelong learning of workers and vocational training for digitisation, and the available training modules for youth at schools such as ESTIA technological institute or U-PEC University. The breaking-edge system proposed in HyperCOG project will be validated on the productivity and environmental impacts, replicability and usability aspects on three use cases belonging to the SPIRE scope such us SIDENOR (steel making), CIMSA (cement), and SOLVAY (chemical) use cases.