Gov4Nano will design and establish a well-positioned and broadly supported Nano Risk Governance Council (NRGC). Organizing, connecting and engaging are key activities in Gov4Nano and its creation of a sustainable NRGC. Gov4Nano will develop an operational trans disciplinary Nano Risk Governance Model (NRGM) for nanotechnologies, building on an established governance framework developed by the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC). Engaging stakeholders (including regulators) to proactively address nano-specific safety and seek dialogue for joint activities. NRGC and its precursor project Gov4Nano will engage, in order to support these activities, with the broad variety of stakeholders across all relevant nano-disciplines (chemical, biocides, food and feed, pharma and medical devices and materials development) and draft a review on our knowledge progress over the last decade whilst initiating dialog. To boost the quality of the dialog it will create a platform for dialogues between stakeholders in a “trusted environment” inclusive of civil society. The NRGC core business is to coordinate, guide and harmonize in order to overcome the fragmentation of current knowledge, information and needs over various sectors and disciplines (workers, consumers/patients, environmental safety) and to prepare the transfer of this knowledge. To that end, the NRGC will be equipped with a self-sustainable NanoSafety Governance Portal (NSGP) consolidating state-of-the-art and progressive nanosafety governance tools including ones for dialogues and measuring risk perception. Major efforts will be towards requirements for data harmonization and data curation to be defined and laid down in guidance on obtaining harmonized and standardized quality-scored data collections promoting a big data approach for nano-toxicology. Research activities will be initiated for regulatory sound knowledge in support of harmonized (OECD) guidance for characterization and testing of nanomaterials.

Global warming resulting from the emission of greenhouse gases has received widespread attention with international action from governments and industries, including a number of collaborative programs, such as SET-Plan, and very recently the International Climate Change hold 2015 in Paris. Key European Commission roadmaps towards 2030 and 2050 have identified Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a central low-carbon technology to achieve the EU’s 2050 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission reduction objectives, although there still remains a great deal to be done in terms of embedding CCS in future policy frameworks. The selective capture and storage of CO2 at low cost in an energy-efficient is a world-wide challenge. One of the most promising technologies for CO2 capture is adsorption using solid sorbents, with the most important advantage being the energy penalty reduction during capture and regeneration of the material compared to liquid absorption. The key objectives of GRAMOFON projects are: (i) to develop and protoype a new energy and cost-competitive dry separation process for post-combustion CO2 capture based on innovative hybrid porous solids Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and Graphene Oxide nanostructures. (ii) to optimize the CO2 desorption process by means of Microwave Swing Desorption (MSD) and Joule effect, that will surpass the efficiency of the conventional heating procedures. This innovative concept will be set up by world key players expert in synthesis, adsorption, characterization and modelling, as well as process design and economic projections.

Power supply and carbon-intensive industries account for a large share of CO2 emissions. Shifting towards a low-carbon economy requires cost-effective carbon capture solutions to be developed, tested and deployed. Current solutions do not offer sufficient performances. Adsorption processes are promising alternatives for capturing CO2 from power plants and other energy intensive industries as cement, steel, or petrochemical industries. In this regard, Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are a widely studied class of porous adsorbents that offer tremendous potential, owing to their large CO2 adsorption capacity and high CO2 affinity. However, the performances of MOF-based carbon capture technologies have not been fully evaluated. MOF4AIR gathers 14 partners from 8 countries to develop and demonstrate the performances of MOF-based CO2 capture technologies in power plants and energy intensive industries. After identifying the best MOFs in WP1 and validating them through tests (e.g. stability and selectivity) in WP2, the most promising will be produced at larger scale and shaped in WP3. WP4 will conduct simulations to study MOFs behaviours in two adsorption processes: VPSA and MBTSA and optimise them. Both solutions will be tested at lab scale in WP5. In WP6, 3 demonstration sites across Europe will prove the cost-efficiency and reliability of MOF-based carbon capture in CO2 intensive sectors: power supply, refineries and waste incineration. To ensure a wide development of the solutions developed, WP7 will focus on techno-economic analysis, LCA and WP8 on social acceptance and replicability. MOF4AIR aims to foster the uptake of CCS technologies by providing a TRL6-reliable solution matching end users' needs, notably by cutting CCS energy penalty by more than 10%. The solutions developed will be highly replicable thanks to the consideration of a wide range of carbon intensive sectors and clusters, notably through the project's Industrial Cluster Board.