BAMBOO aims at developing new technologies addressing energy and resource efficiency challenges in 4 intensive industries (steel, petrochemical, minerals and pulp and paper). BAMBOO will scale up promising technologies to be adapted, tested and validated under real production conditions focus on three main innovation pillars: waste heat recovery, electrical flexibility and waste streams valorisation. These technologies include industrial heat pumps, Organic Rankine Cycles, combustion monitoring and control devices, improved burners and hybrid processes using energy from different carriers (waste heat, steam and electricity) for upgrading solid biofuels. These activities will be supported by quantitative Life Cycle Assessments. In order to maximize their application and impact to plant level, flexibility measures will be implemented in each demo case towards energy neutrality and joined in a horizontal decision support system for flexibility management. This tool will analyse, digest and interchange information from both, the process parameters and the energy market, including the BAMBOO solutions. As a result, the operation of the plants will be improved in terms of energy and raw materials consumption, and will lay the foundation of new approaches in the energy market. BAMBOO will empower intensive industries to take better decisions to become more competitive in the use of natural resources in a broader context, in the spirit of facilitating the use of larger variability and quantity of RES. BAMBOO consortium comprises strong industrial participation; 6 large companies as final users and 3 SMEs as technology providers, working with experienced RTOs and supporting entities. The private investment associated to BAMBOO is over 7M€ along the execution of the project. Lastly, the transferability potential of BAMBOO is extremely relevant as targeted process and plant improvements offer very high potential applications in other intensive industries.

The main objective of the project is to develop solutions to recover the waste heat produced in energetic intensive processes of industrial sectors such as cement, glass, steelmaking and petrochemical and transform it into useful energy. These solutions will be designed after an evaluation of the energetic situation of these four industries and will deal with the development of Waste Heat Recovery Systems (WHRS) based on the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) technology. This technology is able to recover and transform the thermal energy of the flue gases of EII into electric power for internal or external use. Furthermore, a WHRS will be developed and tested to recover and transform the thermal energy of the flue gases of EII into mechanical energy for internal use (compressors). In order to reach this objective several challenging innovative aspects will have to be approached by the consortium. It is planned to design and develop a multisectorial direct heat exchanger to transfer heat directly from the flue gases to the organic fluid of the ORC system and to develop new heat conductor and anticorrosive materials to be used in parts of the heat exchanger in contact with the flue gases. These aspects will be completed by the design and modelling of a new integrated monitoring and control system for the addressed sectors. The consortium consists of 8 partners from 4 European countries. They cover several relevant sectors of the energy intensive industry, namely cement, steel, glass and petrochemical sectors. The industrial involvement in the project is significant and the project addresses the implementation of a full demonstration of the WHRS for electrical energy generation in one of the industrial partners (CEMENTI ROSSI) and a semi-validation of the WHRS for air compressors energy supply system at pilot scale.

RESTORE proposes a radically innovative solution for DHC, based on the combination of two key innovative technologies (TCES+ORC), that allows integrating a wide variety of renewable technologies combined with competitive seasonal storage in DHC networks, allowing them to be 100% renewable to radically improve their environmental sustainability. The first technology the project aims to develop is an innovative thermal energy storage system based on Thermo-chemical reactions, the Thermo-Chemical Energy Storage (TCES), that provides daily and seasonal competitive energy storage due to its high energy density, very low energy losses and its low-cost. The system represents a key development due to the fact that it allows harnessing the enormous amount of energy that is normally wasted due to the mismatch between energy demand (loads) and energy generation (related to the availability of the renewable resource or waste heat), mainly occurring between seasons. In addition, the project aims to develop a second technology that is based on Heat Pump and ORC and is combined with the TCES system. This second technology adapts the energy provided by different renewable technologies to feed the storage system, thus a wide variety of renewable technologies as well as waste heat can be integrated into the whole system to finally supply the energy demand under the specific conditions laid down by each DHC. This radically innovative solution would tackle the main barriers for a wide deployment of renewable energy technologies and waste heat in the existing and future DHC networks. The projects consider the experimental validation of the RESTORE concept and also the demonstration of the concept replicability potential, adapting and optimizing the proposed solution to different real sites (different network conditions and local particularities as the available renewable technologies/waste heat) spread over the EU, and quantifying its potential benefits via virtual use-cases.