The challenge of generating biofuels on contaminated land in a sustainable manner

Phy2climate advances with encouraging results for circularity challenges

The Serbian city of Novi Sad hosted the last Consortium Meeting of the Phy2climate project, an international phytoremediation and biofuel generation project. The meeting was held among the organizations that are part of the project and we have shared the updated results of the phytoremediation work implemented in a land affected by hydrocarbons and we have exchanged the progress and challenges encountered in the four pilots developed in contaminated sites in Spain, Serbia, Lithuania and Argentina.

After three years of work, the project has validated phytoremediation as a technology that allows combining the decontamination and restoration of impacted soils with the generation of biomass for the production of high quality biofuels, reinforcing the project’s potential to provide a framework on a global scale.

Currently, the project is focused on the evaluation of the quality of the biofuel produced and the scaling of the results to an integral project, which includes an evaluation of its sustainability parameters, through life cycle analysis, as well as the integration into a business model of biofuel refining from the biomass produced in the phytoremediation of contaminated land to, finally, determine the needs and opportunities that can impact the potential and attractiveness of this approach for all stakeholders involved. The project also takes into consideration the legal framework applicable to this type of strategies in order to contemplate them within the analysis of their viability on a commercial scale.

The event included a visit to the facilities where the Serbian partners carry out the work related to the project: the laboratories of the Faculty of Science of the University of Novi Sad, the facilities of the Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops, and the phytoremediation pilot site, where the third and last planting campaign has already been implemented.