Promote Europe’s availability, affordability, sustainability and security of supply of essential chemicals and materials (IA)

Expected Outcome:

Europe needs to strengthen its capacity to produce materials and chemicals in a sustainable and competitive way. Moreover, the recent crisis has shown the importance for Europe’s chemical and material industry to increase its flexibility, and to adapt quickly its production capacities to the changing supply needs^[1].

Projects are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Foster global competitiveness of EU companies. Helping Europe to overcome its reliance on imports of chemicals, in particular for essential products, while boosting Europe’s economic and social recovery in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis;
• Deliver new modular production concepts for the chemical industry (e.g. base ingredients for pharmaceutical or other essential societal products) that would significantly decrease process development time through the standardisation, modularisation and application of novel process intensification technologies;
• Produce highly efficient, flexible, and stand-alone production units that could be shipped to places where the need would be the highest;
• Enable decentralised and continuous processing of high added value chemicals and materials;
• Improve flexibility in products customisation with a faster response to supply chain/customer demands, creating opportunities of new business models enabled by digital technologies.

Achieve a significant impact on reducing production costs, design efforts time-to market and logistic efforts.

Scope:

Building on the experience gained from flexible production units^[2] it would be possible to equip base chemicals production containers with modular and standardised units capable to facilitate a swift shift in the final production outcome. The focus on the proposals under this topic should thus be the development of adaptable chemical plants with flexible outputs.

Innovation actions within this topic may include:

• Improving flexibility and modularity of the equipment;
• Adaptation of process analytical technologies for modular production, to support process control, automation, predictive maintenance and process coordination;
• Smart equipment in intensified up and downstream processing;
• Increasing safety of fully automatic operations and reducing occupational health related risks;
• Enabling decentralised and continuous processing of high added value chemicals and materials;
• Standardisation of modular production concepts, including international standards.

Chemicals and materials play a major role in society, and hence sustainability and life cycle of those products have a major impact on and provide solutions concerning the health and well-being of our citizens.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination.

This topic is open for international cooperation where the EU has reciprocal benefit, while excluding industrial competitors from countries where the safeguarding of IPRs cannot be guaranteed.

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[1] Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability COM(2020) 667 final

[2] F3 Factory, Copiride and Synflow projects in FP7