CERESiS Workshop - 30th EUBCE: Squaring the circle between phytoremediation and biofuel production

Workshop aim

The aim of the workshop has been to discuss the regulatory and policy framework at the intersection of nature-based contaminated land/soil management and biofuels areas and highlight existing gaps and blind spots, with a view to develop proposals to overcome such gaps. The vision is to facilitate the use of biomass grown in contaminated land for the purpose of phytoremediation to produce clean biofuels for the transport sector.

The current policies and regulatory frameworks for management and clean-up of contaminated sites in Europe do not include biofuel production as a valuable, mutually reinforcing option to remediate sites and generate clean energy. At the same time, all energy and climate policies and their associated projections envisage an increasingly significant role for biofuels for transport up to at least 2030, creating therefore the need for mobilization of significant amounts of (sustainable) biomass feedstock.

Considerations related to the land use change effects, as well as the introduction of the low-iLUC risk feedstock concept, have sparked an interest on the exploitation of marginal and contaminated land for biofuels’ feedstock production. It is therefore necessary to identify and eliminate the policy and regulatory barriers that may hinder the use of contaminated land for biofuel production.

The workshop was organized on the basis of preliminary findings from three H2020 projects (CERESiS/GOLD/Phy2climate).

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