ACT4 – CO2 Capture, Utilisation and Storage

Undertakings and approved research organisations are eligible to apply. See the list of approved Norwegian research organisations.

Requirements relating to the Project Owner

The Project Owner must be an approved research organisation or an undertaking.

The research organisation or undertaking listed as the Project Owner in the application form must have authorised the submission of the grant application.

If the application is a collaboration between several research organisations, the Project Owner submits the application on behalf of all the partners.

Requirements relating to project managers

The project manager must be employed by the Project Owner or one of the partners. The project manager’s expertise and suitability to manage the project will be assessed by peer reviewers. There are no formal requirements for the project manager’s qualifications.

You can only be the project manager of one application submitted under this ACT4 call for proposals.

Requirements relating to partners

Undertakings, approved Norwegian research organisations and relevant partners from other sectors are eligible to participate as partners in the project and receive funding.

If the Project Owner is an undertaking, the project must have at least one partner that is an approved research organisation.

You can apply for funding to cover the costs necessary to carry out the project. The Project Owner must obtain information about costs from each project partner. These costs are to be entered in the cost plan under the relevant category.

The following cost categories must be used:

• Payroll and indirect expenses related to researcher time (including research fellowship positions) at the research organisations, and the partners’ personnel hours. For doctoral research fellowships, funding is limited to a maximum of three full-time equivalents. Funding for two to four years may be granted for post-doctoral research fellowships.
• Equipment, encompassing operating and depreciation costs for scientific equipment and research infrastructure necessary for the execution of the project.
• Other operating expenses, which comprise costs for other activities that are necessary to carry out the project. Procurements from subcontractors that exceed NOK 100,000 must be specified.

You will find detailed and important information about what to enter in the project budget on our website.

Scope of funding

The Research Council can provide NOK 3–15 million in funding per project under this call.

Calculation of funding

Research organisations can apply for funding of up to 100 per cent of the budgeted project costs.

• The following applies to undertakings applying for funding: This call is open to companies that have been issued an enterprise number under the Norwegian Register of Business Enterprises and that carry out economic activity in Norway. The applicant must either be a private company or a public enterprise that carries out activities of an industrial or business nature.
• Parts of the partner companies’ costs pertaining to R&D activities under the project qualify for funding. Article 25 of the state aid rules describes which activities qualify for funding.
• Undertakings can apply for funding to cover up to 50 per cent of the budgeted project costs.

Requirement for end user in the consortium

It is an absolute requirement that at least one end user must participate in the project as either a partner or project owner.

Conditions for funding

The project must start between 1 January 2023 and 1 April 2023. The latest permitted completion date for the project is 31 March 2026.

The Research Council’s requirements relating to allocations and disbursement of support for the first year and any pledges and payments for subsequent years are set out in the General Terms and Conditions for R&D Projects, available in their entirety on the information page ‘What the contract involves’.

Funding awarded to a research organisation is only to go to the organisation’s non-economic activity. It does not therefore constitute state aid. The Research Council requires a clear separation of accounts for the organisation’s economic and non-economic activities.

Funding awarded to an ‘undertaking’ constitutes state aid. In this context, an ‘undertaking’ is defined as any actor that carries out an economic activity consisting of offering products and/or services in a given market. When an undertaking receives support to cover a portion of its project costs as a Project Owner or partner in the project, this support must be awarded in accordance with Article 25 of the General Block Exemption Regulation for state aid (Commission Regulation (EU) No 651/2014). Read more about Conditions for awarding state aid.

The call for proposals has been approved as an aid scheme by the EFTA Surveillance Authority (ESA) with the reference: GBER 53/2022/R&D&I. 

If your project is granted funding, the following must be in place when you revise the application:

• From 2022, all grant recipients that are research organisations or public sector bodies (Project Owners and partners) must have a Gender Equality Plan (GEP) available on their website. This must be in place when they sign the grant agreement for projects awarded funding from the Research Council. The requirement does not apply to the business sector, special interest organisations or the non-governmental sector.
• The Research Council requires full and immediate open access to scientific publications; see Plan S – open access to publications.
• You must prepare a data processing plan for any research data that will be processed in the project in connection with the revised application. Research data must be made available in accordance with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).
• The Project Owner organisation is responsible for selecting which archiving solution(s) to use for storing research data generated during the project. This must be specified in the data management plan for the project.

Applications under this call must be linked to an international application to be sent to ACT as described on ACT’s website. The application’s project description must contain the title of the international application.

Please note that you must submit an application for the international ACT4 project by the deadline 12 September. The deadline for submitting the application for the Norwegian sub-project is two days later, i.e. 14 September 2022. Both these deadlines must be met. You can find full details about what to submit to ACT by 12 September on the ACT’s website (see the link above). Details about what to submit to the Research Council by 14 September are provided in the text of this call.

You may revise and resubmit your grant application form multiple times up to the application submission deadline. We recommend that you submit your application as soon as you have filled in the grant application form and included all mandatory attachments. After the deadline, it is the most recently submitted version of the grant application that will be processed.

• The application and all attachments must be submitted in English.
• All attachments must be uploaded in PDF format.

Mandatory attachments

• You must enclose a project description which must be identical to the project description submitted under the international ACT4 call.
• The CV of the project manager using the standard template available for download at the end of the call.
• The CVs of up to four project participants in addition to the project manager using the standard template available for download at the end of the call.

Applications that do not meet the requirements listed above will be rejected.

Optional attachment

• proposals for up to three referees who are considered qualified to assess the application

All attachments must be submitted together with the application. We will not accept attachments submitted after the deadline for applications unless we have requested further information.

We will not assess documents and websites linked to in the application, or other attachments than those specified above. There is no technical validation of the content of the attachments you upload, so please make sure that you upload the correct file for the selected type of attachment.

Grant applications will be assessed on the basis of the following criteria:

You can also see the description of the criteria in the international ACT4 call for proposals.

Priority will be given to projects

• with strong participation by industrial partners
• with a female project manager when the applications are otherwise considered to be on a par

We will assess the version of your application that you submit and will not take into account how an identical or almost identical application has been assessed in the past.

Once the grant applications have been received, the Research Council will conduct a preliminary administrative review to ensure that they satisfy all the stipulated formal requirements. Applications that do not meet the formal requirements will be rejected. The applications will then be distributed to thematic referee panels to be assessed in relation to the criteria Excellence, Impact and Implementation.

Once the applications for the Norwegian sub-project have been processed, the Research Council will meet with the funding agencies from the other countries participating in the international ACT4 call. Based on national evaluations from all countries participating in the ACT4 call, the funding agencies will prepare a list of projects that are recommended for funding. Each country will then follow their own national procedures to arrive at a decision on which projects to grant funding. CLIMIT’s programme board will make the final decision on which Norwegian actors will be granted funding.

For us to grant funding to an ACT4 application, all countries the project seeks funding from must have awarded the application good assessment scores. This means that an application for a Norwegian sub-project can only be granted funding if the application receives good assessment scores through the Norwegian processing of applications and the other national sub-projects also achieve good assessment scores in their respective countries.

The funding decisions are expected to be announced in December 2022.