Sludge, Hydrogen, and a Digital Twin: Here Are the Projects That Received Funding in December

Exploiting Resources in Salt Water Sludge from Fish Farms

The release of phosphorus and nitrogen from aquaculture poses a significant environmental challenge – greater than all land-based sources combined. At the same time, sludge from aquaculture, composed of feed residues and salmon feces, represents an underutilized resource with significant potential for value creation. The BLÅNE project aims to develop three radically different processes to convert the resources in the sludge into pure phosphorus for use in mineral fertilizers, organic fertilizer with high bioavailability, and biostimulants.

In the long term, the project opens up opportunities to produce more sustainable feed in the future, where nutrients from aquaculture can be returned to the cycle. The project will help make it practically possible and attractive to collect sludgeby establishing a new, circular value chain. This will increase value creation along the coast while also reducing the current environmental impact of the sediment.

Type: Green platform, financed by The Norwegian Research Council
Amount: 90,000,000 NOK
Contact: Gro Bjerga, Research director, Marine biotechnology

Want to Develop Low Emissions Hydrogen Value Chains

Pure hydrogen is essential for reducing emissions in industry by replacing fossil fuels, for example in steel production. However, when it comes to the use of pure hydrogen for industrial products, there are several barriers related to cost, efficiency, and product utilization. In the HyCarbon project, researchers at NORCE, together with the company SEID AS and other partners, will optimize, pilot, and develop cost-effective and low-emission value chains from natural gas or biogas to industrial products with improved quality and a reduced carbon footprint.

A test platform will be established at the NORCE Technology Park Risavika (NTR), and the existing infrastructure and internal expertise, in addition to the combined competence of the HyCarbon partners, will form the basis for process optimization and scaling up the technology.

Type: Green platform, financed by The Norwegian Research Council
Amount: 73,000,000 NOK
Contact: Ying Guo, Special Adviser, Business Development, Subsurface Flow Laboratory

Sustainable Extraction of Rare Earth Elements

Europe and Norway currently have no significant extraction, production or refining of Rare Earth Elements (REE), which are critical for the green transition. With Fensfeltet in Telemark, Norway has Europe's largest known deposit of REE.

The company SAGA Rare Earths AS and the consortium behind the REEUNiTe project ('Rare Earth Elements - Unlocking the green Transition') will realize Europe's first sustainable and technologically leading value chain for the extraction and processing of Rare Earth Elements (REE) and thorium from Fensfeltet. NORCE is an R&D partner in the project and will develop new methods to monitor, predict, and demonstrate how industry impacts the environment, allowing for optimized operations and strengthened trust. The project includes innovative resource mapping and geological modeling, electrified and environmentally-friendly mining, maximum resource utilization through circular and closed processes, and environmental monitoring and decision support based on real-time data.

Type: Green platform, funded by the Research Council of Norway
Amount: 80,000,000 NOK
Contact: Hege Indresand, Senior Researcher, Energy & Technology

Will develop Flexible System for Replacing Large Components on Offshore and Floating Wind Turbines

The company MHWirth AS is leading the project 'OCX – Scalable, Flexible, and Green Solution for Offshore Wind Turbines.' Here, NORCE, along with several companies, will develop a solution for replacing large and heavy components on floating offshore wind turbines without the need for large crane vessels. NORCE will contribute with modeling and simulation of the system for dynamic analyses, risk assessment, and research-based validation.

Type: Green Platform, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Amount: NOK 46,000,000
Contact: Rune Schlanbusch

Developing a Digital Twin for Municipal Emergency Preparedness Scenarios

Municipalities face increasingly complex risk and emergency preparedness challenges related to climate change, demographic shifts, geopolitics, and society’s growing dependence on critical infrastructure. At the same time, it is impossible to practice many of the most serious scenarios in real life.

In the project ‘Sosial digital tvilling for samfunnssikkerhet og beredskap,’ researchers from Health and social sciences, in collaboration with NORCE Analytics and NORCE TTO, will develop and test a social digital twin for municipal emergency preparedness in three different municipalities. This will provide municipalities with a new basis for knowledge and decision-making by enabling them to test "what-if" scenarios digitally before a crisis occurs. This strengthens society’s ability to prevent, plan for, and manage severe incidents, thereby increasing safety for both residents and authorities.

Type: Innovation project in the public sector (IPO), funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Amount: 21,500,000 NOK (in addition to contributions from the partners)
Contact: Roger Normann, Chief Scientist, Health & Social sciences

Recruitment of Individuals from Marginalized Groups to the Health and Care Sector

Many people in Norway are outside of employment, education, or training. At the same time, there is a shortage of labor in the health and care sector. The project ‘Helt i mål’ aims to further develop and evaluate a model for recruitment and inclusion of labor in municipal health and care services by qualifying and including individuals from marginalized groups into permanent education and employment.

NORCE is a partner in the project, which is led by Kristiansand Municipality. NORCE will assist with further developing the Workforce Manager Model, create a decision-making tool for leaders to help with the distribution of responsibilities and tasks in the municipality, develop courses and the test scheme "Norsk i helse" to strengthen language skills and offer an alternative to the B2 language requirement, as well as document the sustainability of the model over time through benefit realization and socio-economic analysis.

Type: Innovation project pilot within the announcement 'Research and innovation to strengthen the sustainability in municipal health and care services, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Amount: 14,857,000 (7 000 000 to NORCE)
Contact: Siv Merete Kjenes Arnesen, Researcher II, Health & Social Sciences

Investigating Biodiversity in Areas Relevant for Deep Sea Mining

Miriam Brandt, together with Thomas Dahlgren, Aud Larsen, Andrea Bagi, and Sigrid Mugu, will collect samples from the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge to get a picture of what the fauna on the seabed looks like. The Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge is one of the areas relevant for deep-sea mining because it contains underwater vents that create massive sulfide deposits containing valuable metals. Brandt and colleagues will investigate, among other things, whether there are endemic species here, i.e., species that are confined to a specific geographic area and do not occur naturally elsewhere, and to what extent this fauna is resilient. They will classify organisms based on morphology and use environmental DNA (eDNA) to characterize biodiversity in these areas. The project is being conducted in collaboration with industry and research organizations in Norway.

Type: Competence and Collaboration Project (KSP), funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Amount: 15,987,000 NOK
Contact: Miriam Brandt, Researcher II, Climate & Environment

Reconstructing Virus DNA Using Ancient DNA

In the ‘REPUTATION’ project, environmental scientists at NORCE will reconstruct virus DNA and phytoplankton by examining ancient DNA in sediment cores. The research team will develop new methodologies to document any variations in the quantity and diversity of viruses in past climate periods. This will provide a better understanding of the effects climate changes have had on the diversity of viruses and the interaction between viruses and the host organisms they need to reproduce.

Type: Groundbreaking research, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Amount: 2,000,000 NOK
Contact: Kyle Mayers, Researcher II, Climate & Environment

Developing AI Tools to Identify Escaped Farmed Salmon

Escaped farmed salmon that breed with wild salmon pose a significant threat to the genetic survival of wild salmon. Therefore, it is important to monitor and, when possible, remove these escaped farmed salmon from the natural environment. However, this is complicated by the fact that escaped fish can be difficult to distinguish from wild salmon, especially without specialized expertise. Moreover, many changes between wild fish and farmed fish disappear over time as the escaped fish become better adapted to their new environment. Hence, there is a need to develop tools to ensure rapid and accurate identification of these escaped fish. In this project, environmental scientists, together with technology researchers, will develop an AI tool to make it easier to identify escaped farmed salmon.

Type: ICT (Enabling Technology), funded by the Research Council of Norway
Amount: 5,528,000 NOK
Contact: Simon Menanteau-Ledouble, Senior Researcher, Climate & Environment

Studying How Offshore Wind Power Affects Fish

In the UrbanOcean project, researchers at LFI - The Laboratory for Fresh Water Ecology and Inland Fisheries - along with partners, will investigate how large-scale offshore wind power development affects biodiversity in the open sea. NORCE is leading the empirical data collection on migratory fish and studying how offshore wind farms impact migration routes, behavior, and the risk to commercially important species. The project aims to provide new knowledge necessary to balance the development of renewable energy with the conservation of biodiversity, fisheries, and coastal communities in Europe.

Type: Biodiversa+ (Biodiversity and Transformative Change), funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Amount: 1,800,000 NOK (to NORCE)
Contact: Knut Wiik Vollset