Abstract: Across EU-28, 1,54 million of potentially contaminated sites are estimated to exist and out of the 650.000 registered sites only 1 in 10 have so far been remediated. The management cost of European contaminated sites is estimated at €6 billion annually. Meanwhile, meeting the global challenge of feeding growing populations while still reducing greenhouse gas emissions would require less land used for dedicated bioenergy crops. CERESiS is a European Horizon 2020 project aiming at facilitating land decontamination through phytoremediation, i.e. growing energy crops to produce clean biofuels. In the longer term, this will increase the land available for agriculture, while producing non-ILUC biofuel (ILUC: Indirect Land Use Change) for use in the hard to decarbonize transport sector. CERESiS has three key objectives:

1. To demonstrate the suitability and effectiveness of various conventional and novel species of energy crops for phytoremediation purposes in contaminated land, against a variety of the most common contaminants globally.
2. Demonstrate the potential of two novel thermochemical processes, i.e. Supercritical Water Gasification (SCWG) and Fast Pyrolysis (FP), for the production of biofuels and key biofuel precursors suitable for further upgrading, from contaminated biomass.
3. Provide decision support to stakeholders and policy makers in order to achieve optimal win-win solutions for site-specific land decontamination through phytoremediation while simultaneously producing clean liquid biofuels.