SUBSOL – Bringing coastal SUBsurface water SOLutions to the market

Begin of project: September 1, 2015

End of project: August 31, 2018

Status of project: August 31, 2018

Sandtank experiment Source: BGR

Coastal areas are the most productive and economically dominant regions of the world, but climate change, sea level rise, land subsidence, population growth, urbanization and industrialization put tremendous pressure on freshwater resources. A sustainable freshwater management becomes increasingly important to secure water supply and ecosystem services. Coastal aquifers are often brackish or saline due to recent or past seawater intrusion, posing big challenges for water management. In the past years, partners of the SUBSOL project have developed a set of subsurface water solutions (SWS) to improve the efficiency of freshwater management in coastal settings.

The goal of the SUBSOL project is to encourage the implementation of these SWS in coastal areas by demonstrating their successful application, paving the way for implementation and guiding the route to market. Since the start of the project in 2015, the SWS were further studied and optimized at four already existing sites in The Netherlands (Work Package 1). To demonstrate the applicability of SWS in other geological settings, four additional SWS applications were established in Greece, Denmark, Mexico and The Netherlands (Work Package 2).

Field visit in Oman Source: BGR

An online knowledge environment was developed to provide information on what is available, what has already been applied and tested under different contexts, what were the main lessons learned and what are the key issues that need to be considered. An online toolbox and a market place should help practitioners in choosing an optimum application and design as well as link them with the technology providers (Work Package 3). Regional assessments were conducted in Mexico, Cyprus, Vietnam, China and in the Arab Gulf countries Bahrain, Oman, United Arab Emirates (UAE) to introduce the SWS technologies, evaluate their applicability under the local conditions and to establish a network of potential partners for future SWS projects (Work Package 4).

Within the SUBSOL project, BGR supports different tasks in WP3 and WP4. The online knowledge base was developed in cooperation with the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and UBITECH (Greece), regional assessments were conducted in Vietnam (Mekong Delta and Ho Chi Minh City) together with Adelphi (Germany), and additionally in the Arab Gulf countries Bahrain, Oman and the UAE.

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SUBSOL has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 642228