Last year, the collaborative project between IATE and Antofénol, led by Christian Jay-Allemand, Luc Bidel, and Fanny Rolet, focused on the eco-extraction of natural compounds from vine wood with antifungal properties for the development of natural antifungals for the agri-food industry.
This year, young researcher Irène González Salgado received both the Young Researcher Award and the Grand Prix for Partnership Research.
In 2023, the Grand Prix Carnot for Partnership Research was awarded to Dr. Irène González Salgado, a researcher at the Toulouse Biotechnology Institute (TBI), for her doctoral work on ammonia recovery from digestates and urine using Transmembrane Chemical Absorption (TMCS) technology. This research, conducted under the supervision of Mathieu Sperandio, was part of an OMIX project in collaboration with the company Nereus. The project aimed to develop a technology for fractionating digestates through nanofiltration techniques. Dr. González Salgado’s work led to the creation of a new expertise combining nanofiltration and TMCS, facilitating the production of nitrogen fertilizers from biogas digestates .
Over four years, the project progressed from laboratory-scale research to the establishment of an industrial facility, enabling Nereus to design a production unit for recycled nitrogen fertilizer (ammonium nitrate) derived from methanization digestate. This advancement addresses the significant challenge of nitrogen fertilizer production in France, which consumes over 2 million tonnes of nitrogen annually. The recycling of nitrogen has become a European priority, particularly due to the tripling of fertilizer costs in the past two years. The market is expanding rapidly, and thanks to this TMCS technology, Nereus has become the first French SME to offer such an installation.
