CBE-JU Projects at Celignis

We are delighted to announce that Celignis has been successful in 4 project proposals submitted for funding to the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) programme. 

 

These projects will provide funding of 1.6m EUR to Celignis over the next few years and build upon the 3 projects (worth 1.5m EUR) we secured last year and the 4 previous CBE/BBI projects that Celignis participated in.

 

Details on the projects are provided below:

 

WoodVALOR - This RIA project concerns the valorisation of contaminated/post-consumer wood waste (WW) via: (i) thermal conversion to biochar; and (ii) fractionation followed by conversions to paints & coatings ingredients. Celignis is involved in the chemo-enzymatic fractionation of decontaminated wood (DW) to sequentially extract/purify lignin and hemicellulose, and in developing hemicellulose-based emulsifiers/stabilizers and binder monomers for industrial formulations. Additionally, Celignis is involved in metals/mineral recovery from decontamination wastewater using biochar produced in the project.

 

SOLRESS - This Innovation Action (TRL6) project concens the development of an integrated biorefinery to make a portfolio of bio-based solvents from 2G sugars and furans obtained from spent coffee grounds and woody biomass. Celignis's activities include (i) Design and optimisation of a high-cell-density, two-stage Clostridial process for butanol from hydrolysates; (ii) in-situ solvent recovery via membrane/ extractive set-ups; (iii) enzymatic hydrolysis of both feedstocks.

 

BIOS MATER - Also an Innovation Action (IA) project, BIOS MATER targets the development and demonstration of bio-based construction products (e.g., wall panels, flooring tiles, sandwich structures). Celignis leads materials development: chemo-enzymatic extraction and fractionation of lignin/xylan/cellulose from agri/forest residues, followed by advanced chemical modification of xylan and lignin (mixed-molecule grafting, acylation and silylation) to tailor hydrophobicity, flow/rheology (via DP control), mechanical strength, and fire resistance for injection-moulding/3D-printing.

 

LIGNOFUN - This IA project funnels lignin streams into high-value aromatics. Celignis leads WP4, putting crude low molecular weight (LMW) lignin through integrated membrane and solvent fractionation into fractions for bioactivity screening (antioxidant, UV-absorbance, antimicrobial, emulsion stabilization), followed by enzymatic/chemical grafting (e.g., sugars, fatty acids) to tune solubility/surface functionality and stability.

 

Celignis is a Full Industry Member of the Biobased Industries Consortium (BIC), which helps to steer the focus of research for the CBE-JU programme.

 

Click here to read about all of our current research projects and here to read about our completed research projects.

 

 

 

Celignis personnel are today attending the kick-off meeting of the CBE-JU project MANUREFINERY at the facilities of the project's coordinator (ITA) in Zaragoza, Spain.

 

MANUREFINERY concerns the development of a small, decentralised, modular biorefinery concept for farms that converts manure and ammonia emissions into seven marketable bio-ingredients (animal-feed proteins, caproic acid, and fertiliser salts/ashes). The solution integrates fixed/mobile units across three valorisation lines (gas, liquid, solid) and a digital twin for optimisation and scale-up, targeting TRL6-7 validation on four EU demo farms. 

 

Celignis has a number of key roles in the project, including:

- Comprehensive analysis of the feedstocks and products of the process.

- Technoeconomic analysis for the three valorisation lines.

- Development of an extraction technology for grass.

 

PROMOFER, is an Innovation Action project funded by the CBE-JU, under topic HORIZON-JU-CBE-2023-IA-03 (Improve Fermentation Processes (Including Downstream Purification) To Final Bio-Based Products).

 

This project started in June 2024 with Celignis, an SME partner and full industry BIC member, playing a pivotal role in the project. Our core activities include undertaking the pre-treatment and hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass at scaled-up (TRL7, 1 m3) volumes. The resulting sugars are then provided to other partners for downstream fermentations.

 

Today Celignis's CIO Lalitha is attending the kick-off meeting of the project, at coordinator AIMPLAS's headquarters in Valencia, Spain.

 

Lalitha is attending the kick-off meeting of our CBE-JU project BIONEER, located at the coordinator's (SINTEF) premises in Trondheim, Norway. 

 

BIONEER has the title "Scaled-up Production of Next-Generation Carbohydrate-Derived Building Blocks to Enhance the Competitiveness of a Sustainable European Chemicals Industry". It is a 4-year Innovation Action project with 7.5m EUR of funding provided by the CBE-JU.

 

Celignis plays a key role in BIONEER, being responsible for the scaled-up (TRL7) production of platform chemicals.

 

 

 

 

Today a new publication, covering results obtained in the VAMOS project, funded by the CBE-JU, has been published online.

 

This publication includes results of Celignis's analyses of project-dervived samples and also covers the use of the waste pulp for the production of composites.

 

Details of the paper are provided below:

 

Herrera, N., Ordóñez, D. F., Gaduan, A. N., Singkronart, K., Hayes, D., Puri, D., Lee, K.-Y. (2024) Valorisation of waste pulp from materials recovery facility rejects for composite applications, Composites Part A: Applied Science and Manufacturing 180: 108108

 

Click here to view the full publication.

 

 

 

 

We are pleased to announce that three of the proposals involving Celignis, submitted to the CBE-JU programme for funding collaborative biomass research in Europe, were successful. These projects will provide an additional funding of €1.5m to Celignis and build on our achievements in other CBE and EU projects. In particular, the projects are all at enhanced TRLs (6/7) and will use our existing Celignis Bioprocess infrastructure and will also fund further development of our bioprocessing capacities and the Bioprocess Development Services we offer our clients.

Details on the funded projects are provided below:

BIONEER - This project was funded under CBE-JU topic IA-06 and focuses on the TRL 6/7 production of biobased platform chemicals. Celignis's activities in the project focus on scaling up the work undertaken in our ongoing CBE-JU RIA project PERFECOAT and the Cluster 6 Horizon Europe project EnxylaScope.

PROMOFER - This project was funded under CBE-JU topic IA-03 and focuses on scaling up improved fermentation processes. Celignis's activities in the project are focused on the TRL7 (1m³ reactor) production of fermentable carbohydrates from lignocellulosic feedstocks.

MANUREFINERY - This project was funded under CBE-JU topic IA-01 and focuses on demonstrating small scale biorefining in rural areas. Celignis will be responsible for undertaking technoeconomic analyses of the integrated processes for valorising agricultural side-streams.

Celignis is a Full Industry Member of the Biobased Industries Consortium (BIC), which helps to steer the focus of research for the CBE-JU programme. On Feb 8th Celignis's Dan Hayes, Lalitha Gottumukkala, and Oscar Bedzo will be attending a BIC networking event in Brussels where we will discuss collaborations in the research programme topics recently announced for 2024.

The Circular Bioeconomy Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE-JU) is an organisation that funds biomass research in Europe at various Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). Since 2016 Celignis has been an active participant in a number of projects funded by the CBE-JU.

The Biobased Industries Consortium (BIC) is the steering committee that helps to steer the focus of research for the CBE-JU programme. In 2023 Celignis joined the BIC as a Full Industry Member and participated in several proposals submitted for different research topics in the CBE-JU's 2023 Work Programme.

On Feb 8th Celignis's Dan Hayes, Lalitha Gottumukkala, and Oscar Bedzo will be attending a BIC networking event in Brussels where we will discuss potential collaborations in the research programme topics recently announced for 2024.

If you are also attending that event then please get in touch with us, either through the Celignis website or via the event's networking platform, so that we can discuss potential synergies in proposals for the 2024 topics.

Today the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE-JU) released their annual work programme and budget for 2022. There is an indicative budget of 120 million Euros which will fund a total of 12 topics, comprising 5 Research and Innovation Actions (RIAs), 1 Coordinating and Supporting Action (CSA), 4 Demonstration-Scale projects, and 2 Flagships.

Celignis is a partner in 3 ongoing CBE projects: UNRAVEL and PERFECOAT are RIA (Research and Innovation Action) projects, whilst VAMOS is an Innovation Action project. Additionally, Celignis was a partner in the BIOrescue RIA project which was completed in 2019. Click here to read more about our involvements in these projects. They were funded as part of the Biomass Based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI-JU) programme. The BBI-JU was the precursor to the CBE-JU for which 2022 will be the first year of operation.

We believe that we can make valuable contributions to projects covering a large number of the topics in the 2022 CBE work programme. These contributions are summarised here and there are also individual Celignis webpages for each of the call topics.

If you are preparing a CBE proposal this year and would like to engage with the Celignis team during the proposal preparation period then feel free to contact us and we will be happy to discuss in more detail how we can potentially contribute to the proposal and consortium. Celignis's Lalitha and Dan have years of experience putting together and writing proposals for EU funding and have also both worked as Expert Evaluators for the BBI-JU and so are very familiar with what is required for an excellent proposal and improved chances of being funded.

Celignis's BBI/CBE Projects

We are happy to announce that Celignis received two awards in the 2021 Irish Lab Awards. These awards are detailed below:

Innovation of the Year Award - for our technological developments for polysaccharide extraction and modification and our advances in the provision of Bioprocess Development Services for clients.

Laboratory Staff Member of the Year Award - For Laitha, our Chief Innovation Officer, recognising the massive constributions she has made to the company in the last year in terms of innovations, enhanced services to our clients, and business development.

Click here to see the list of finalists and awardees in each category.

Celignis's Lalitha and Dan are, together with Andre Zomeren (from coordinator TNO), today representing the BBI project UNRAVEL at the BBI JU Stakeholder Forum 2019 being held at the Egg Congress and Meeting Center in Brussels. This event provides BBI projects' partners the opportunity to meet each other, and the wider public, to facilitate collaboration opportunities and commercial progress of the technologies being developed.

We are happy to discuss with you the advances made by partner TNO on the project's FABIOLA pretreatment/fractionation progress and by Celignis on the characterisation and removal of extractives, targeting recovery and purification of an identified high value component, and on the rapid analysis models developed by Celignis for the inputs and outputs of the process. We will also be happy to discuss the important work in the project being done by other partners.

We are located at Stand 5C so come say hello!

Click here to read more about the UNRAVEL project.

ICT-BIOCHAIN is a BBI-JU (Horizon 2020) project that targets the identification of opportunities for ICT to increase the efficiency of biomass supply chains for the bio-based industry.

On the 16th of October, as part of Bioeconomy Ireland Week 2019 the project's Irish partners hosted a Knowledge Transfer Demonstration Day where companies with novel ICT, IoT and Industry 4.0 solutions for the bio-based sector demonstrated their technologies in a real operating environment.

Celignis was one of those demonstrating companies and we welcomed visitors to our labs where we provided a demonstration of our Near-Infrared Spectroscopy rapid biomass analysis models, using proprietary software, as well as our provision of biomethane potential (BMP) data for the anaerobic digestion sector.

Click here to read more about the event.

Today marks the first day of the BBI-JU project VAMOS. It is a €13.7m Innovation Action (IA) project, funded as part of the EU's Horizon 2020 research programme, that involves 11 partners.

The project is based on the Fiberight process for the valorisation of municipal solid waste. In particular, VAMOS will focus on using the separated paper-waste fraction as a substrate for conversion to sugars which are then subsequently fermented to lactic acid.

The process involves a number of stages, including pretreatment, hydrolysis, and fermentation. At each stage there will be an input and a number of output streams. For example, the enzymatic hydrolysis process will produce a liquid fraction containing the hydrolysed sugars and a solid fraction containing the non-hydrolysed portion of the biomass.

Celignis plays a key role in the project with regards to the analysis of the solid fractions at a number of stages in the process. Our initial work focuses on the development of rapid analysis models, using near infrared spectroscopy equipment located in our labs, that allow the composition of the material to be predicted based solely on the NIR spectra collected from it. This allows the analysis time to be reduced from weeks to seconds.

Developing these models requires that we first analyse, via standard chemical approaches, a wide variety of samples, covering the variability expected from the process. Once a suitably large dataset has been built then the first iterations of the models can be developed. This is an approach we have successfully demonstrated to date in other BBI projects (BIOrescue and UNRAVEL) at the RIA (up to TRL-5) level for both feedstocks and process outputs.

Excitingly, VAMOS gives Celignis the opportunity to demonstrate its NIR models at a higher TRL level (TRL-7). As part of this, later on in the project, once the demo-scale biorefinery has been built and is operational, we will install similar NIR equipment within the demo plant (which is expected to be located in the UK) and set up customised software that will allow plant operators, with no technical expertise in NIR or chemometrics, to routinely analyse the inputs and outputs of the process.

We will then work with plant operators over the course of a year, devleoping incremental improvements in the accuracy of the models and in the performance of the customised software. This work is expected to lead to the development of an integrated software package and commercial proposition for replicating this approach at other biorefineries, operating at demonstration or commercial scales.

Click here to read more about the project and Celignis's involvement in it.

Today a workshop, entitled 'Building sustainable value chains for the bio-based industry', is being held at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany.

The event is being organised as part of our Biomass Based Industries Joint Undertaking project BIOrescue.

Click here to see the agenda for the workshop and here to register.

Dan's presentation can be downloaded here.

Over the next two days Celignis will be hosting the other 9 project partners of the Biomass Based Industries Joint Undertaking project UNRAVEL in Limerick for the month 9 review meeting.

UNRAVEL addresses topic 2017.R2 of the 2017 BBI Work Programme - "Innovative technologies for the pre-treatment and serparation of lignocellulosic feedstock and complex composition streams into valuable fractions while maintaining key characteristics".

Celignis is leader of Work Package 2 which concerns the detailed analysis of selected feedstocks, with a particular focus on extractives composition, and the optimisation of a pre-extraction process that could improve the yields and product qualities in subsequent pre-treatment. Intial studies have shown that this pre-extraction is particularly effective in increasing the homogeneity of the feedstock composition and the purity of biorefinery products.

Click here to read more about our involvement in UNRAVEL.

The headquarters of project partners ECN (now part of TNO) was the venue for the kick-off of new research project UNRAVEL. This project is funded by the Biomass Based Industries Joint Undertaking and will run from June 2018 until May 2022.

The project addresses topic 2017.R2 of the 2017 BBI Work Programme - "Innovative technologies for the pre-treatment and serparation of lignocellulosic feedstock and complex composition streams into valuable fractions while maintaining key characteristics". Celignis is leader of Work Package 2 which concerns the detailed analysis of selected feedstocks, with a particular focus on extractives composition, and the optimisation of a pre-extraction process that could improve the yields and product qualities in subsequent pre-treatment.

The kick-off meeting took place between June 12-13 in Petten, The Netherlands and involved all 10 project partners.

Click here for more information on the project and Celignis's involvement.

Daniel Hayes is today at the info day for the Biomass Based Industries Joint Undertaking. The event is located in the Alcide De Gaspari Room in the Charlemagne Building of the European Commission, which is situated at Rue de la Loi 170, 1040 Brussels.

If you are also attending this event and would like to meet Daniel Hayes then please get in touch by email or by phone at (+353) 89 455 5582.

Our Director Daniel Hayes and biomass analyst Daniel Hickey are in Pamplona, Spain for the kick-off meeting of "BIOrescue" a collaborative research project funded by the European Union's Biomass Based Industries scheme.

We will be involved in project-related discussions with the 10 other BIOrescue partipant organisations at the Second Generation Biofuel Centre of CENER, the coordinator of the project.

Click here to see the press-release for this kick-off meeting.