FACCE SURPLUS announces a call for research projects on small scale biorefineries

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FACCE SURPLUS (Sustainable and Resilient agriculture for food and non-food systems) is an ERA-NET under the Cofund scheme of Horizon 2020 of the European Union, formed in collaboration between the European Commission and a partnership of 15 countries in the frame of the Joint Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE-JPI). This ERA-NET is committed to improve cooperation across the European Research Area in the range of diverse, but integrated, food and non-food biomass production and transformation systems, including biorefining.

Following the update of the FACCE-JPI SRA (Strategic Research Agenda) in November 2015, this initiative elaborated a second Implementation Plan to start a set of new actions in the period 2016-2018. One of these actions, “Explore and exploit refinery concepts for the multiple use of biomass under climate change, taking economic and environmental implications into account”, was addressed by FACCE SURPLUS in the frame of a scoping workshop in May 2016. As an outcome from this workshop, the FACCE SURPLUS partners decided to launch a joint call for transnational research projects focused on the small-scale biorefinery concepts and their potential role in enhancing the sustainability and productivity of EU agriculture, as well as their scope to benefit the rural economy. “Small scale” covers a whole spectrum of levels, from farm level, over the local, to the regional level, in contrast to large-scale, centralised biorefineries developed in the BBI JU.

Figure 1. FACCE SURPLUS logo (extracted from FACCE SURPLUS web page)

The key information about the call is summarized in the table below. For detailed information on how to apply, you can visit this page and download the call announcement.

Countries participating in the call
Belgium - Flanders, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, Romania and The Netherlands
Indicative total available budget
6.25 M€
Submission process
Online on the FACCE-JPI Submission Tool.
In a two-stage submission process, at first the planned work is presented as a pre-proposal which will be checked for eligibility. Successful consortia at pre-proposal stage will be invited to submit a full proposal which will be evaluated by independent experts.
Timeline
05.01.2017: Call opening.
07.03.2017: Deadline for pre-proposal submission.
23.05.2017: Communication of eligibility check and evaluation outcomes to the research project coordinators.
17.07.2017: Deadline for full proposal submission.
30.11.2017: Communication of the evaluation outcomes and the funding recommendation to the research project coordinators and start of national procedures.
From 01.02.2018 to 01.04.2018: Expected start of research projects.
Project duration
Up to three years.

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