ECCSEL ERIC funding will give industry access to ‘new frontier’ facilities

ECCSELERATE is to launch two calls offering funding for access to ECCSEL ERIC’s world-class carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) research infrastructure.

The first call, to be launched in November*, will be for researchers from industry, including collaborations with universities; the second, due in 2022, will be open to both industry and research organisations.

Created in 2017, ECCSEL is the European Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Laboratory Infrastructure. It comprises more than 80 CCUS research facilities across the full value chain in its five member countries: France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway and the UK.

Organised as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) and headquartered in Trondheim, Norway, it coordinates development of facilities and their services to meet industry and the research community’s identified needs. It manages the ECCSELERATE project, which is funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme and which aims to increase access to ECCSEL’s outstanding facilities.

The new funding is transnational, with the condition that recipients must use facilities located in other countries. As well as providing free access to more than 70 of ECCSEL’s research facilities, the call will offer funding for travel, accommodation and subsistence.

“We hope these funding calls will be of interest to companies working in CCUS across Europe, including CCUS Project Network members,” said Sverre Quale, Director of ECCSEL ERIC. “It can be challenging for individual facilities or countries to upgrade their infrastructure to the extent needed to keep up to date with new frontiers within CCUS research. ECCSEL has invested around €100 million in upgrading our facilities and ensuring they remain world class.”

ECCSEL provides facilities for research into, for example, CO2 capture membranes, integrated CCUS systems, pressure and injection, CO2 migration, security and troubleshooting, CO2 pipeline transport and shipping, smart integrations with CO2 capture and re-use.

To address further the net-zero challenge, ECCSEL is in the process of adjusting its research strategy to add new fields, such as underground energy storage, bioenergy and CCUS and direct air capture. To this end, it is also part of StoRIES, a new European Green Deal project, which aims to accelerate innovation and advancement in the field of energy storage.

* Our original news story had a date of September for the first call. We updated this in mid-September after ECCSEL delayed the call due to the ongoing pandemic.