📋 Tender Overview
COUPLED
Grant agreement ID: 101235724
DOI
10.3030/101235724
EC signature date
29 August 2025
Start date
1 November 2025
End date
31 October 2029
Description
European industry is a source of CO2 emissions; decarbonisation requires a transition to renewable fuels. As current fuel production methods are costly and fail to fully capture carbon emissions, achieving European Union (EU) climate and energy targets will be difficult. Industrial-scale adoption of renewable fuels faces technical, economic and societal barriers. Funded by the EU, the COUPLED project will combine chemical looping syngas generation, in situ CO2 capture with novel membranes, and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis using modified Fe-based catalysts. The aim is to convert CO2 into fuels with 92 % efficiency while reducing production costs by 20 %. Designed for industrial demonstration, COUPLED targets sustainable aviation fuel, renewable methanol and high-value fuels for steel manufacturing.
Objective
COUPLED is a holistic interdisciplinary project designed to demonstrate renewable fuel production seamlessly integrating three advanced technologies. The project encompasses optimal integration the demonstration in industrial settings (TRL7), detailed considerations of safety, environmental, societal, policy and business aspects for widespread adoption in the European energy sector.
At its core, COUPLED combines: a) Chemical Looping Syngas generation thermally sustained, operated at high pressure, b) In-situ CO2 recovery using new class of membranes and c) Fischer Tropsch synthesis process, leveraging a structured reactor with a novel Fe-based catalyst optimized for CO2-rich feedstock.
In combination, the proposed technologies will target an overall CO2-to-fuel conversion up 92% and the reduction of the production costs by 20% with respect to existing solutions for different industrial scenarios. Hence, the deployment of the technology at scale will support refineries, biogas and waste-to-energy processes in producing sustainable aviation fuels and renewable methanol production, and supply high-value fuel for steel manufacturing, contributing to the decarbonization of heavy industry. COUPLED includes research and technology organizations, relevant end users, catalyst suppliers technology specialists, fuel technology licensors and consultancy company ensuring expertise across the entire value chain.
To maximize the industrial impact, the project will assess techno-economic, environmental a social acceptance, will develop an exploitation plan aiming to generate a sound business close to 60 b€ in revenues by 2050 given the market potential. The technology has the potential to use 6 mtpa of CO2 conversion into fuels from project partners by 2050, approximately 3% of the EU target in industrial CCU and carbon management by 2050.
