## 4 R&D Investment in Recent Years  
This section collects information on relevant projects related to cellulosic ethanol funded under the European Union's Research and Innovation Funding programs in the last decade, namely the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) (that covers the 2007-2013 period) and the current Horizon 2020 program (H2020) (that covers the 2014-2020 period). The projects were collected for the purpose of the Low Carbon Energy Observatory (LCEO) project, an administrative arrangement executed by DG-JRC for DG-RTD to provide data and analysis on developments in low carbon energy supply technologies. One of the technologies under analysis is the 'Sustainable advanced biofuels' sector, where cellulosic ethanol is considered. The LCEO project (started in April 2015) produces its main reports on a two-year cycle: the first set of reports was produced in 2016 (not publicly available) while the second set was prepared in 2018 and will be publicly available in 2019. In the reports, an analysis, in terms of objectives and main achievements of projects related to advanced biofuels technologies (including 'fermentation') was performed to define the project impacts on the development of the technology [41; 42]. However, for the purpose of this paper, the number of considered projects has been limited exclusively to the projects which involve research on the cellulosic ethanol sector. Projects were collected from the European Commission's Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) [43], that is the primary source of results from the projects funded by the EU's framework programs for research and innovation, by adopting 'cellulosic ethanol' or 'fermentation' as keywords.  
Projects on cellulosic ethanol in both programs received the greatest amount of EU funding when considering all projects related to the advanced biofuel sector, with a share of around 27% in the recent H2020 program [42].  
Figure 3 shows the number of FP7 (started between 2008 and 2015) and H2020 projects (started between 2015 and 2017) and the corresponding total amount of EU public funding. In general, projects in the cellulosic ethanol sector are large projects in terms of total investment needed for their implementation.  
Figure 2: Production costs ranges of cellulosic ethanol from different studies. * Data extracted from Figure 18 of the report; ** Data from original source (reported for first commercial plants) has been converted from US dollar to Euro assuming 2015 exchange rate).  
Figure 4 shows the total amount of EU funding by project coordinator countries identifying the leading countries involved in the development of this technology. The projects are mainly coordinated by Italy, Germany, and France.  
In the US, the Department of Energy (DoE) is supporting R&D projects through the Biomass Research and Development Initiative (BRDI). In 2018, DoE announced up to $3 million in funding for advanced biofuels, bioenergy, and biobased products and two selected projects received between $1 million to $2 million to develop biofuels from cellulosic ethanol and ligno-cellulosic biomass, respectively. Other funding was made available under the BioEnergy Engineering for Products Synthesis program, with a total funding of up to $28 million (in 2018), supporting projects that are aiming to create efficient conversion processes for biomass and waste derived fuels (16 projects were selected for this program). Process Development for Advanced Biofuels and Biopower is another  
Figure 4: Total amount of EU funding by project coordinator country.  
Figure 3: Numbers of Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and Horizon 2020 program (H2020) projects and total amount of EU funding (million EUR) identified for cellulosic ethanol.  
program that supports 10 projects with $22 million. Some of the projects within this program are researching renewable fuels derived from domestic biomass feedstocks and wastes [44].