Proposals under this topic should:

• Demonstrate large scale cultivation of low-ILUC-risk oil crops, providing environmental gains and enhanced ecosystem services at local scale, to:
  1. validate sustainable agronomic practices and cultivation schemes (including where applicable cultivation on marginal and/or contaminated soils) in view of further integration of the crops in scope into current practices; implement measures to ensure avoidance of potential negative effects of large-scale cultivation systems (e.g. impact of monocultures/risk of habitat destruction, introduction of invasive species etc);
  2. prove high yield/productivity maximising land use efficiency, taking into account where applicable any trade-offs between lower yield with additional social and environmental benefits (including long-term effects), and break-even costs.

Proposals may also include a limited amount of activities at lower final TRL, e.g. small field trials, on crop breeding approaches adapted to local pedo-climatic conditions, including via gene editing, to speed up the crop and trait optimisation, in view of further upscale beyond the project duration.

• Demonstrate innovative biorefinery processes at large scale to convert oils from the targeted crops into bio-based SSbD chemicals and materials. The demonstration should include aspects related to optimisation of oil extraction and treatment, conversion of oil into intermediates and products, process(es) yield and selectivity as well as resource efficiency. Chemical, biotech and physical-chemical approaches are in scope.
• Address downstream processing (separation and purification) to ensure that biorefinery products meet final application requirements. The scope should also include cascading valorisation of co-products, residual biomass and side streams considering all steps of the value chain, to benefit the overall business case.
• Assess the replication potential of the demonstrated value chain(s) across Europe, taking into consideration different environmental and cultivation conditions.
• Perform an assessment of environmental impacts including aspects related to land use, required inputs, CO2 footprint from cultivation and harvesting and further processing of targeted crops, biodiversity impacts.
• Moreover, include a task to integrate assessment based on the safe-and-sustainable-by-design (SSbD) framework, developed by the European Commission, for assessing the safety and sustainability of demonstrated bio-based chemicals and bio-based materials. Under this context, projects are expected to contribute to and develop recommendations that can advance further the application of the SSbD framework.
• Depending on the selected type of soils, measures for ensuring the safety for the operators and end-users as well as the environment should be ensured (in particular but not exclusively in case of contaminated soils).
• Develop guidelines for recommendations to farmers, biorefinery operators and policy makers (in particular local and regional authorities) to ensure mutual benefits.
• Address any regulatory bottlenecks or related issues relevant to the targeted end market(s), ensuring compatibility in the perspective of potential future scale-up.
• Maximise the socio-economic impact, by identifying strategies for engaging local communities and stakeholders and providing support training, and proposing incentives and/or other schemes for adopting sustainable oilseed crops for biorefineries in a value chain approach, for example (but not exclusively) in case of areas facing environmental pressures such as drought, biodiversity decline, etc or socio-economic difficulties such as depopulation, disadvantaged communities and others.