(Finance) – The Chairman of the Board of Directors of EniGiuseppe Zafarana, and the CEO of the company, Claudio Descalzi, welcomed today at the Eni Research Center in Bolgiano the visit of the Minister of Economy and Finance, Giancarlo Giorgetti, the President of the Lombardy Region, Attilio Fontana, the Councilor for Economic Development of the Lombardy Region, Guido Guidesi, and the Mayor of San Donato Milanese, Francesco Squeri, to illustrate the technological solutions at the heart of the company decarbonization strategy.
The Eni Research Center in Bolgiano has been a space dedicated to innovation since 1985. The center includes a cluster of scientific laboratories that work on the research and development of new technologies in fields ranging from geosciences to engineering, from chemistry to materials science, aiming to achieve new goals of efficiency and greater sustainability to be applied at an industrial level. Eni internally promotes proprietary and “breakthrough” technologies for decarbonisation with reference to the three main corporate research areas: renewables and new energies, solutions for decarbonisation, circular and bio products.
During the visit, the most significant results achieved by Eni’s R&D including projects and technologies for the decarbonisation of the transport sector through the development of agro-energy and the EcofiningTM process which also make it possible to obtain biofuels from waste and raw materials of biological origin that do not compete with food use. From a circular economy perspective, Eni is strongly committed to using waste material as a primary source of energy and in addition to the use of Waste & Residues, such as, for example, spent frying oils, animal fats and PFAD (Palm Fatty Acid Distillate), it has developed a “Biofeedstock Database”, in which bio raw materials of different types are characterized and studied to predict their effectiveness in the production of biofuels. The Eni Database, which currently contains more than 400 biofeedstocks, is one of the first in the world and one of the richest in terms of variety of characterized biomaterials.
In addition, innovations in the field of robotics to automate and digitize environmental monitoring and asset integrity activities, research on new renewables and energy storage, as well as systems and products in the field of CO2 capture, storage and use were presented. Particular attention was paid to technologies that could prove to be “technological breakthroughs” and to scientific collaborations with the main universities and research centers in Italy and around the world, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), ENEA and CNR with which Eni is engaged in research on fusion energy, which could represent a real “game changer” in the field of decarbonised energy because – once brought to an industrial level – it would make it possible to generate large quantities of energy with zero emissions, with a safe and virtually unlimited process.
Eni with its 7 research centers in Italy, over 1,000 researchers and 8,000 patents is a company with a strong technological content. Innovation is the tool with which Eni faces the complexity of the challenges posed by the energy transition, with the aim of offering increasingly decarbonised solutions, services and products, also through the creation of new business models. Each new achievement
obtained from Eni Research contributes to the achievement of the Net Zero goal by 2050, with an approach based on the principle of technological neutrality, according to which there is no single solution to achieve the energy transition, but it is necessary to have a technological mix that can be adapted to different applications and needs.