The overarching goal of CCUS ZEN is the accelerated deployment of CCUS throughout Europe, which will be achieved by: • Sharing knowledge and disseminating information important for stakeholders to make informed decisions on CCUS • Developing specific and actionable plans for the development of CCUS value chains As CCUS developments around the North Sea (NS) region are relatively mature, CCUS ZEN will leverage these developments as best practice for the development of new CCUS value chains in the currently underdeveloped Baltic Sea (BS) and the Mediterranean Sea (MS) Regions. While CCUS value chains, i.e., the entire pathway from CO2 capture to transport to its eventual storage or utilization, can today be realized, the industry is still in its infancy and many issues must be addressed to achieve the rapid deployment required. The consortium, consisting of 15 partners, including 2 associations with over 400 members in total, brings together entities with leading expertise on all aspects of CCUS value chains. 30 organisations, representing industry, RTOs, Associations, clusters, ports and municipalities involved in the development and deployment of CCUS value chains, will contribute their expertise as networking partners. Starting from an analysis of the technical and non-technical state-of-play in the BS and MS regions, CCUS ZEN will select at least eight value chains (four in each region) for detailed study and comparison with successful value chains from the NS region. One value chain from each analysed region will then be selected as most promising, with a detailed plan for further development. Through its knowledge-sharing activities and transfer of best practices from the NS region, CCUS ZEN will provide an information basis for the future CCUS value chains, including policy recommendations and a blueprint for CCUS value chain development, including easily accessible technology and CO2 source mapping, generic technical frameworks and business plan models.

The overall objective of WEDISTRICT is to demonstrate DHC as an integrated solution that exploits the combination of RES, thermal storage and waste heat recycling technologies to satisfy 100% of the heating and cooling energy demand in new DHC and up to 60-100% in retrofitted DHC. For this purpose, the focus of WEDISTRICT is large-scale replication of best practice: better valorisation of local resources, like renewable and waste heat by making District Heating and Cooling networks more efficient in relation to the use of new resources. In parallel, systems will evolve to provide even more flexible solutions by the integration of innovative molten-salts based thermal storage, the interaction with other energy networks (electricity and gas) and the involvement of end-users (operators and consumers) through ICT-based control and decision making. Finally, to enable significant expansion, cost-effectiveness will be enhanced by transitioning from handicraft to more industrialised solutions that integrate LEAN methodologies to optimise processes and lower costs.

The BRIDGITISE doctoral network will focus on the digitalisation of bridge management across the lifecycle through the development of innovative approaches to information management. The basic idea underlying the project is that the achievement of excellence in this field requires the development and validation onsite of innovative technologies for the cost-effective management of bridge information and their use to support decisions relevant to bridge integrity management across the lifecycle. To this aim, a network of 15+1 PhD projects is structured around three main research and training clusters focused on the development and validation of: -innovative low-cost, large scale and automatic technologies, to collect bridge information - Artificial Intelligence and IoT technologies specifically tailored to bridges to process and share information, - digital decision support tools able to manage bridges across their lifecycle The project will combine the expertise of six universities, one research center, and seventeen industrial companies and end-users who will provide case studies to apply and validate the project results thereby fostering the technological transfer of the research findings. This powerful combination of expertise from industry and academia will introduce the DCs to the topics of the project and add to their inter-sectoral employability, enabling Europe to build world-class competitive capacity in a strategic market. Deliverables of the BRIDGITISE DN will be technology-enhanced training and dissemination tools, international workshops, and Training Schools. Furthermore, an Open platform for sharing data related to bridge management will be built to develop collaborative and information-sharing skills of the DCs and to increase the impact of the project.