The main objective of this Marie Curie RISE action is to improve and exchange interdisciplinary knowledge on applied mathematics, high performance computing, and geophysics to be able to better simulate and understand the materials composing the Earth's subsurface. This is essential for a variety of applications such as CO2 storage, hydrocarbon extraction, mining, and geothermal energy production, among others. All these problems have in common the need to obtain an accurate characterization of the Earth's subsurface, and to achieve this goal, several complementary areas will be studied, including the mathematical foundations of various high-order Galerkin multiphysics simulation methods, the efficient computer implementation of these methods in large parallel machines and GPUs, and some crucial geophysical aspects such as the design of measurement acquisition systems in different scenarios. Results will be widely disseminated through publications, workshops, post-graduate courses to train new researchers, a dedicated webpage, and visits to companies working in the area. In that way, we will perform an important role in technology transfer between the most advanced numerical methods and mathematics of the moment and the area of applied geophysics.

This project aims to apply the new exascale HPC techniques to energy industry simulations, customizing them, and going beyond the state-of-the-art in the required HPC exascale simulations for different energy sources: wind energy production and design, efficient combustion systems for biomass-derived fuels (biogas), and exploration geophysics for hydrocarbon reservoirs. For wind energy industry HPC is a must. The competitiveness of wind farms can be guaranteed only with accurate wind resource assessment, farm design and short-term micro-scale wind simulations to forecast the daily power production. The use of CFD LES models to analyse atmospheric flow in a wind farm capturing turbine wakes and array effects requires exascale HPC systems. Biogas, i.e. biomass-derived fuels by anaerobic digestion of organic wastes, is attractive because of its wide availability, renewability and reduction of CO2 emissions, contribution to diversification of energy supply, rural development, and it does not compete with feed and food feedstock. However, its use in practical systems is still limited since the complex fuel composition might lead to unpredictable combustion performance and instabilities in industrial combustors. The next generation of exascale HPC systems will be able to run combustion simulations in parameter regimes relevant to industrial applications using alternative fuels, which is required to design efficient furnaces, engines, clean burning vehicles and power plants. One of the main HPC consumers is the oil & gas (O&G) industry. The computational requirements arising from full wave-form modelling and inversion of seismic and electromagnetic data is ensuring that the O&G industry will be an early adopter of exascale computing technologies. By taking into account the complete physics of waves in the subsurface, imaging tools are able to reveal information about the Earth’s interior with unprecedented quality.

HYFLIERS will develop two prototypes for the first worldwide hybrid aerial/ground robot with a hyper-redundant lightweight robotic articulated arm equipped with an inspection sensor, together with supporting services for efficient and safe inspection in industrial sites. Energy savings will be achieved by minimizing the time of flight and by performing the inspection while attached to the pipe. To ensure accurate positioning, guidance, landing and rolling on constrained surfaces such as pipes, the robot will rely on a control system also integrating environment perception, particularly for landing on the pipes, and aerodynamic control taking into account aerodynamic effects of the pipes. The system will also have multi-media interfaces for teleoperation, automatic collision detection and avoidance; a trajectory planning system that will take into account aerodynamic effects in addition to kinematic and dynamic models; and a mission planning system to optimize the use of the robot in the inspection. The technology results will be validated in the inspection of pipes, which is a very relevant short-term application. HYFLIERS will decrease the cost and risks of current human inspection in production plants, such as oil and gas, where it is estimated that about 50 000 pipe thickness measurement points are needed within a 3 to 5 years interval. HYFLIERS will eliminate the risks of accidental falls and the cost associated to the use of man-lifts, cranes, scaffold or rope access, which is many orders of magnitude larger than the measurement cost by itself. Taking into account that about 60% to 75% of inspection costs in this type of facilities is dedicated to ultrasonic thickness measurements, the project will concentrate on these measurements. The results of the project could be also applied to other industrial scenarios, such as power generation plants.

NEASQC is devoted to the emergence of practical applications of quantum computing in its NISQ era, and to the construction of a strong community. NEASQC is use-case centric and organized around 10 real use cases (UC). These UC have been defined by the industrial members and validated by the academic members as NISQ compatible. Each use case will be investigated with a rigorous methodology by an integrated team made of at least one industrial and one academic: 1-Algorithm research and design 2-Development of a prototype software 3-Qualification of the prototype with real data on real or simulated NISQ device 4-Benchmark against state-of-the-art techniques. NEASQC is coordinated by Bull, the Atos subsidiary in charge of Quantum Computing, developer of the QLM/myQLM quantum programming platform. Bull will act as the integrator of NEASQC software deliverables and will guarantee their industrial quality. An important objective of our project is to build an active European community of applied QC. As such, much attention is paid to dissemination, with a significant number of actions toward a large number of end-user communities. The project will welcome associate end users all along. NEASQC will build quantum computing open source libraries out of the use case developments. These libraries will be delivered to the European QT community all along the project, through the project portal. A ready-to-install quantum programming environment (QPE) will be built and made available for free to the community, starting from year 2. NEASQC will work with the flagship funded hardware projects to ensure the QPE is compatible with their platforms. In particular, our libraries will be optimized for each platform. NEASQC does believe in HW/SW co-design, and will define a series of use-case specific benchmarks, to help guide the hardware effort toward the highest efficiency on applications

The STRATEGY CCUS project aims to elaborate strategic plans for CCUS development in Southern and Eastern Europe at short term (up to 3 years), medium term (3-10 years) and long term (more than 10 years). Specific objectives are to develop: •Local CCUS development plans, with local business models, within promising start‐up regions; •Connection plans with transport corridors between local CCUS clusters, and with the North Sea infrastructure, in order to improve performance and reduce costs, thus contributing to build a Europe-wide CCUS infrastructure. As recommended by the SET Plan Action 9, the STRATEGY CCUS project will study options for CCUS clusters in Eastern and Southern Europe, as at present the CCUS clusters being progressed are concentrated in Western Europe around the North Sea. Therefore, the project is timely for the strategic planning for CCUS development in the whole of Europe. Strategic planning will consider 8 promising regions, within 7 countries (ES, FR, GR, HR, PO, PT, RO) representing 45% of the European CO2 emissions from the industry and energy sectors. These regions satisfy CCUS relevant criteria: presence of an industrial cluster, possibilities for CO2 storage and/or utilization, potential for coupling with hydrogen production and use, existing studies, and political will. The methodology starts with a detailed mapping of CCUS technical potential of the regions together with a comprehensive mapping of local stakeholders and a process for their engagement. This will pave the ground for CCUS deployment scenarios including assessment of 'bankable' storage capacity, economic and environmental evaluation. The project strength relies on of a highly skilled consortium with experience on the whole CCUS chain as well as key transverse skills. CCUS development plans will be elaborated in close cooperation with stakeholders, through the Regional Stakeholder Committees and the Industry Club, to ensure plans can be implemented, i.e. socially acceptable.