SPIRE

SPIRE has been the contractual Public-Private Partnership active between 2014 and 2020 and dedicated to innovation in resource and energy efficiency enabled by the process industries. The cPPP has been launched under the Horizon 2020 Programme by A.SPIRE – as a private entity – and the European Commission.

Under the SPIRE Roadmap 2030, the Partnership has addressed three fundamental European challenges:

• The urgency to create growth and increase the competitiveness of Europe in a global market.
• Need to rejuvenate the European process industry that is at the basis of the European economy in terms of turnover, employment and generation of technologies for all industrial sectors.
• Imperative to reduce resource and energy inefficiency and the environmental impact of industrial activities.

SPIRE’s aim was to integrate, demonstrate and validate systems and technologies capable of achieving two key resource and energy efficiency targets across all A.SPIRE sectors:

• a reduction in fossil energy intensity of up to 30% from current levels through a combination of, for example, introduction of novel energy-saving processes, process intensification, energy recovery, sustainable water management, cogeneration heat-power and progressive introduction of alternative (renewable) energy sources within the process cycle
• a reduction of up to 20% in non-renewable, primary raw material intensity compared to current levels, by increasing chemical and physical transformation yields and/ or using secondary and renewable raw materials
• a significant contribution to the political and societal objectives of drastic efficiency improvement in CO2-equivalent of up to 40%

More than 140 projects have been funded under SPIRE cPPP, with some of them still under development. The successor of SPIRE is Processes4Planet, the co-programmed Partnership launched by A.SPIRE and the European Commission in June 2021.