The start of the LIFE-DRY4GAS Project was held the 3rd of July 2017 with a consortium integrated by 7 partners. From the beginning, the project has suffered several hitches with the withdrawal of some partners, including the coordinator, which has led to a delay in the execution of actions and to the extension of the project until the end of 2022. CIEMAT was proposed as new coordinator by the rest of the remaining partners and as proposed coordinator was in charge of writing the Amendment with the new share of tasks and budget and its communication to the Commission. The 20th of December 2019, EASME accepted the Amendment of the project and CIEMAT is its official coordinator since the 8th of January 2020.

In this sense, the current consortium is very solid and has excitement, technical capacity and means for carrying out the actions included in the project, aimed at consecution of project objectives and results initially foreseen, guaranteed by the great expertise of the remaining partners. Therefore, the project is not negative affected in any aspect due to the change in the consortium.

The participation in new tasks in the framework of the project has led CIEMAT to carrying out unforeseen additional test runs in the solar drying and gasification pilot plants located at CEDER-CIEMAT (tasks A1, A2 and A3), aimed at the design of the prototype technologies to be installed in the WWTP located in San Javier (Murcia, Spain). With these tests and the tasks performed by all the project partners, the preparatory actions (A1-A6) have been finished.

The following works have been finished: commissioning of the dryer (B1), design of the gasification prototype (B2), installation of the energy recovery system composed by a syngas combustion chamber, a heat exchanger and an ORC (B4) and the connection of the dryer with the wet sewage sludge hopper of the WWTP (B6).

Currently, several tasks are been performed: environmental and agronomic study of the use of sewage sludge and ashes in agricultural fields (B5), connections between dryer and energy recovery system and between the heat exchanger and the ORC and auxiliary installations of compressed air and gas propane (B6), several preliminary tasks related to replicability and transferability of the technologies and the legal framework of sewage sludge (B7) and definition of the integrated control of the prototypes (B1, B2, B4 and B6).

Regarding actions related to the monitoring of the project impact, C1 and C2 are been developed, as well as dissemination action D1 and project management actions E1 and E2.

From the point of view of the project management, the Mid-term report was presented in July 2020. In June 2022 the monitoring meeting with the external monitor of NEEMO will take place in person, after two years of virtual meetings due to the situation derived from COVID-19. This will allow to check the commissioning of the prototypes in situ.