AlSiCal is an ambitious Research and Innovation effort to make the mineral and metal industry more sustainable and environmentally sound. The project will further research, develop and de-risk a groundbreaking concept; the patented Aranda-Mastin (AM) technology. This technology enables the co-production of three essential raw materials (alumina, silica and precipitated calcium carbonate), using new resources - e.g. anorthosite, abundantly available worldwide - whilst generating ZERO Bauxite Residue and ZERO CO2. Today´s production of these raw materials is a long way from being environmentally friendly: they are obtained through traditional processes that generate large CO2 emissions, and bauxite residue in the case of alumina production from bauxite by the Bayer process. AlSiCal will research and develop the innovative AM technology that allows: • Green co-production of 3 essential raw materials, in a single process and from one source, with synergetic environmental and economic benefits • Efficient use of anorthosite, a mineral abundant in Europe and worldwide • Integrated CO2 use and capture for ZERO CO2 emissions from production • ZERO Bauxite Residue generation from alumina production AlSiCal will de-risk and develop (from TRL 3-4 to TRL 4-5) the AM technology under sustainability and efficiency principles. It will assess and quantify the: techno-economic feasibility, potential value creation for Europe, Life Cycle Analysis, impact and risks of this technology upon the key sustainability pillars: economy, society and environment. AlSiCal will be performed by a balanced team of R&D and industrial partners representing the whole value chain. AlSiCal will set a roadmap for exploitation of the project results, to foster the later commercialization of the technology. Targeted dissemination and communication actions will contribute to increasing social and industrial engagement for developing innovative sustainable technologies for mineral processing.

CICERONE brings together programme owners, research organizations and other stakeholders to create a platform for efficient Circular Economy programming. The priority setting and the organization of the future platform will be driven by Programme Owners (POs), involved either as project partners, or via a stakeholder network. Diversity of national / regional situations is reflected in the partnership. The work will be carried out in close cooperation with research & technology organisations (RTOs), which contribute with their expertise of the main scientific and technological challenges. Consultation mechanisms will also ensure that all stakeholders will be able to actively contribute (civil society, industry, innovative SMEs, startups, cities, investors, networks, etc.). An initial benchmarking exercise will be carried out for a deeper understanding of the state of the art, mapping stakeholders, existing RDI priorities as well as funding and legal mechanisms. A prioritisation methodology will be developed to support an analysis of the current performance: synergies, gaps and duplications will be characterised, and pathways for improvements will be formulated. Identified best practices will drive the definition of policy recommendations. Once the state of the art has been clearly mapped out, the actual prioritisation work will be carried out. This includes building a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), performing an ex-ante impact assessment of joint programming on circular economy R&I, and developing a policy toolkit to promote the priorities and foster adoption by policy-makers. The project will also set the grounds for the future PO platform, starting with defining its strategic role in the existing landscape. The next step will be to specify governance and possible legal frameworks, as well as creating a financially sustainable model. It is a key objective that the platform be sustained after the end of the project.

Climate change and population growth are expected to exacerbate the water crisis of Mediterranean African Countries (MACs), where agriculture accounts for 80-85% of freshwater consumption. The aim of MADFORWATER is to develop a set of integrated technological and management solutions to enhance wastewater treatment, reuse for irrigation and water efficiency in agriculture in three MACs (Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt). MADFORWATER will develop and adapt to three main hydrological basins in the selected MACs technologies for the production of irrigation-quality water from drainage canals, municipal, agro-industrial and industrial wastewaters, and technologies for water efficiency and reuse in agriculture, initially validated at laboratory scale. Selected technologies will be further adapted and validated in four field pilot plants of integrated wastewater treatment/reuse. Integrated strategies for wastewater treatment and reuse targeted to the selected basins will be developed, and guidelines for the development of integrated water management strategies in other basins of the three target MACs will be produced, considering climate change, population increase and economic growth scenarios. The social and technical suitability of the developed technologies and non-technological instruments in relation to the local context will be evaluated with the participation of MAC stakeholders and partners. Guidelines on economic instruments and policies for the effective implementation of the proposed water management solutions in the target MACs will be developed. The project will lead to a relevant long-term impact in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia in terms of increased wastewater treatment, wastewater reuse, food production and income in the agricultural and water treatment sectors, and decreased groundwater exploitation, water pollution and food contamination. The MADFORWATER consortium consists of 18 partners, 5 of which from the 3 MACs and 1 from China.

In the ARBAHEAT project an existing 731 MWe Ultra-SuperCritical coal-fired power plant will be transformed into a biomass-fired Combined Heat and Power plant by repowering with thermally-treated biomass produced on-site. This demonstration encompasses: (1) Transformation into CHP: This will be demonstrated by delivering a minor amount of heat to the on-site biomass treatment process, while envisaging large-volume heat delivery to nearby industry. This will provide renewable local heat, enhancing the overall efficiency of the plant from 46% electricity-only to 70-90% in CHP mode, (2) Biomass feedstock: An integrated thermal pre-treatment process will enable utilisation of diverse sustainable biomass feedstock. This will minimise investment and operating cost while broadening the possibilities in term of geographical feedstock sourcing and quality (3) Biomass pre-treatment: The thermal biomass upgrading process of ARBAFLAME will deliver biomass fuel with handling and milling characteristics approaching that of coal, allowing for retrofitting with minimal adaptations to the existing power plant. The technical capacity of the demonstration plant will allow for maximum flexibility in upscaling the technology for future replication, (4) Integration into power plant: The biomass pre-treatment and heat delivery system will be physically integrated within the existing power plant. Eliminating several cost and energy intensive steps (steam production, pelletizing) will be investigated, towards more cost-effective final design. This demonstration of an integrated very low-costs concept in large-scale energy production will pave the way to subsequent multiplication in commercial industrial projects, thus increasing the EU capacity for renewable power and heat generation. The renewable ARBAHEAT solution therefore has the potential to significantly contribute to the replacement of fossil-fuel in the heat and power sectors and increase the decarbonisation of the energy market.

Oxygen functionalities are key functional groups in many of today’s chemicals and materials. The efficient introduction of oxygen-functionalities into raw materials are key chemical transformations in bulk and fine chemicals. Innovative bio-catalytic oxidation routes using molecular oxygen (from air) under benign and mild (pH) conditions such as ambient temperature and pressure can greatly improve the sustainability and economics of processes, but were so far mainly been applied in the pharma segments. In this segment, the enzyme-catalyzed step often represents the highest added value and the high price of the end-product (> €1000/kg) justifies less than optimal enzyme production and limitations in its catalytic efficiency. In order to achieve the widening of industrial application of enzymatic bio-oxidation processes to also larger volume but lower price chemical markets, ROBOX will demonstrate the techno-economic viability of bio-transformations of four types of robust oxidative enzymes: P450 monooxygenases (P450s), Baeyer-Villiger MonoOxygenase (BVMOs), Alcohol DeHydrogenase (ADH) and Alcohol OXidase (AOX) for which target reactions have already been validated on lab-scale in pharma, nutrition, fine & specialty chemicals and materials applications. ROBOX will demonstrate 11 target reactions on large scale for these markets in order to prepare them for scale up to commercial-scale plants. ROBOX is industry-driven with 2 major industrial players and 6 SME’s. It will assess the potential of technologies applied to become platform technologies technologies (multi-parameter screening systems, computational methodologies, “plug bug” expression systems) for broad replication throughout the chemical industry. The markets addressed within ROBOX represent a joint volume of over 6.000 ktons/year. The introduction of bio-oxidation processes is expected to bring substantial reductions in cost (up to -50%), energy use (-60%), chemicals (-16%) and GHG-emissions (-50%).