Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - SPIRE - EPOS

H2020 LEIT SPIRE

With the aim of reinforcing competitiveness of the EU industry, it is the ambition of EPOS (Enhanced energy and resource Efficiency and Performance in process industry Operations via onsite and cross-sectorial Symbiosis) to gain cross-sectorial knowledge and investigate cluster opportunities using an innovative Industrial Symbiosis (IS) platform to be developed and validated during the project. The project is coordinated by prof. Greet Van Eetvelde (Ghent University, Belgium) and will run for 4 years, from October 2015 until September 2019. 

Out of the community created by SPIRE covering industrial and research actors throughout Europe, the EPOS project brings together 6 global process industries from 6 key relevant sectors: steel, cement, minerals, chemicals, bio-based/life science products and engineering. Together they represent 166 bn € in sales with 75% of their production located in Europe. The 6 industries joined forces with 2 excellent science institutes and 4 highly R&I minded SMEs, building the EPOS consortium with Ghent University as coordinator.

The main objective of EPOS is to enable cross-sectorial IS and provide a wide range of technological and organisational options for making business and operations more efficient, more cost-effective, more competitive and more sustainable across process sectors. The expected impact is clearly in line with the SPIRE roadmap - and sector associations, city councils (in the districts where EPOS is deployed), the SPIRE PPP as well as standardisation bodies are committed to participate in the EPOS transdisciplinary advisory board.

The EPOS project spans 48 months and its structure builds on activities that ensure the project challenge is addressed in an optimal way, including cross-sectorial key performance indicators, sector profiles and cross-sector markets, IS toolbox development, training and validation of the (simple and single) IS management tool in 5 clusters strategically located throughout EU (i.e. France, Poland, Switzerland and UK). An entire work package is dedicated to define realistic business scenarios for the exploitation of the EPOS tool and the proven, overall cost-reducing IS cluster activities, in view of a wide uptake and a broad EPOS outreach.

Objectives

These are the objectives of EPOS:

  • develop a generic tool to analyse & optimise the resources & energy management of intensive industries;
  • achieve cross-sectorial understanding and integrate material & energy resources into clusters;
  • develop a management methodology towards industrial symbiosis in the clusters;
  • demonstrate and monitor the performance scenarios of the industrial sites/clusters;
  • facilitate the sites/clusters collaboration and reduce the residues & costs in intensive industries.

    Role of Ghent University

    Next to the EPOS project management, the PhD research at UGent aims to investigate and integrate non-technical methods and know-how on industrial symbiosis in business and district clusters with existing tools for resource and energy optimisation into an integrated management platform for sustainable cross-sectorial industrial symbiosis.

     

    WEBSITE: to be announced

    Contact

    Prof. dr. ir. Greet Van Eetvelde - Coordinator
    Department of Civil Engineering
    greet.vaneetvelde@ugent.be