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Home / Horizon Europe / HORIZON-JU-CBE-2026-IAFlag-01

Boosting biorefinery competitiveness through biotech

Open now · HORIZON JU Innovation Actions · HORIZON-JU-CBE-2026-IAFlag-01

Next cut-off
22 Sept '26
in 16 days
Per grant
€171M
the call's own average
Grants expected
1
projects that will be funded
Funding rate
70%
the rest is your own money

In context of Horizon Europe

This grant€171M
The track runs to the largest grant in Horizon Europe (€171M). The median across the 482 calls we publish is €5.3M, this one is above it.

What this call funds

Expected Outcome:

Successful proposals will contribute to the implementation of the EU initiative on Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing, the EU Life Sciences Strategy, the updated EU Bioeconomy Strategy, the EU Biotechnology Act, the Clean Industrial Deal, the European Chemical Industry Action Plan and the upcoming EU Circular Economy Act.

Projects results are expected to contribute to the following expected outcomes:

  • Full industrial scale biorefinery and related value chain(s) for the sustainable production of bio-based products using biotech as a key enabling technology.
  • Availability of bio-based products meeting market and technical performance requirements as relevant for their respective application areas.
  • Improvement of sustainability, circularity and resource efficiency compared to relevant benchmark(s).
  • Contribution to increasing the EU’s strategic autonomy, resilience and competitiveness.

Scope:

Biorefineries integrating biotechnologies, underpinned by sustainably sourced bio-based feedstock, have a huge potential to transform the EU manufacturing landscape, spurring socio-economic growth, fostering job creation and contributing to defossilisation of the EU economy.

Europe is strong in life sciences including industrial biotechnology. However, research results often struggle to be deployed to the market; in most cases, scale-up needs de-risking and requires overcoming challenges in large-scale process and reactor design, cell productivity, efficient use of feedstock, operative condition stability, reactor sterility and efficient integration of downstream operations among others.

Proposals under this topic should:

Trimmed here, the full scope, expected outcomes and award criteria are on the official topic page ↗.

What applying costs you

ItemEstimateNote
Drafting effort6–8 weekssingle submission
Partner search4–8 weeksruns in parallel, and it is the part that slips
Your own money€73M30% of project cost, over the project's life
Time to first payment6–9 monthscut-off → evaluation → grant agreement

These are Bemzu's estimates from the call's structure (the number of stages and whether a consortium is required) not figures published by the Commission. Only the co-financing share is read from the call itself.

Where these conditions come from

Two kinds of row. Most are the sentence we read the condition from, quoted out of the call itself. Some say plainly that they are not a quotation but the programme's own rule for this type of action, the EU portal publishes a table of contents where the conditions should be, so for a Research and Innovation Action the rate comes from the rulebook rather than from the fiche.

ConditionQuoted from the call, or the rule behind it
Consortium sizeNot quoted from this call — Innovation Actions under the Horizon Europe rules are at least three independent legal entities from three different Member States or Associated Countries, at least one established in a Member State.
Funding rateNot quoted from this call — Innovation Actions under the Horizon Europe rules are funded at 70% of eligible costs for profit-making organisations, and 100% for non-profit legal entities — the rate shown here is the one that applies to a company.
MaturityProposals under this topic should: • Demonstrate (at TRL 8) a sustainable and robust biomanufacturing route to obtain bio-based product(s).

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