1st International Symposium on Phytoremediation for Energy and Element Developments (SPEED)

Remediating contaminated land is a priority that has to be addressed to resolve the trilemma of food production, environmental protection and energy crops. Exploring the production of biofuel feedstocks that are not in competition with food production is of paramount importance to the future development of bioenergy sector. Global estimates indicate there are 385-472 million hectares of abandoned land unsuitable for agriculture due to contamination, in particular toxic metals/metalloid elements. Potentially, up to 1,840-2,253 Mtoe (million

tonnes of oil equivalent) of energy crops can be grown on this land area, equating ~10% of world total energy production in 2012 with suitable plants. Additionally, this has the potential to address land remediation challenges achieving pollution control and or remediation of contaminated sites.

Expansion of research activities has arisen from commercial interest in the significant scale of this opportunity. There is a plethora of environmental and technological challenges in using contaminated land derived biomass including; plant uptake of the elements, advances in thermochemical biomass conversion, emission of contaminants during energy production processes, and recovery of metal(loid)s by processing solid residuals.

Further research and development adopting a multidisciplinary approach is needed to exploit improvements in phytoremediation to improve the opportunities for energy production and metal(loid) element recovery. The SPEED event is intended to bring together leading researchers and policy makers working in this area to discuss the current state-of-the-art, an analysis of future vision for this sector and innovative technologies arising from their work.

The conference will include keynote presentations, panel discussions and poster presentations. Our aim is to further enhance communications between scientists and engineers

from both academic institutions and industrial companies, and to foster new and substantial collaborations.

Conference flyer: SPEED 2016.

To register please visit: http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/speed2016