April 2013: EU Project EuroPruning started with ATB participation
The European Union currently creates more than 25 million tonnes of agricultural wood prunings each year, but only a marginal percentage is used as solid biofuel.
The EuroPruning project seeks to turn prunings into a valuable fuel source by developing solutions for their harvesting, transportation and storage that will create growth in the European biofuels market. Horticultural pruning by-products are an essentially unexploited biomass resource. In order to modify this, new logistics need to be developed to make the collection and use of prunings economically, technically and environmentally sound.
EuroPruning will develop new machinery for harvesting and treating prunings from the field, provide solutions for cost-effective storage options, and develop a decision-support tool to improve logistics from farm to final user. EuroPruning will monitor the value chain in terms of economic performance, biomass quality, sustainability, and conservation of soil properties. Demonstrations of the identified value chains for Mediterranean, Oceanic and Continental climates will be held in Spain (peach, almond), France (wine), and Germany (apple, cherry) to show their feasibility and to evaluate the performance of the project results.
The ATB is responsible for the field trials in Germany and simultaneously involved in the investigation on the Spanish and French experimental plots. ATB research focusses on investigating soil effects of pruning waste when used as organic fertilizer and on measuring of greenhouse gases from soils.
EuroPruning is funded by the EU for a period of three years. 17 partners from 7 countries are involved. The project is coordinated by the Research Centre for Energy Resources and Consumption (CIRCE), Spain.
