Inside Proycon's EIC Accelerator Project on Wastewater Digesters

Proyectos y Construcciones Pirineo, which trades as Proycon, is a metal fabricator in Sabiñánigo, a town in the Pyrenees of Huesca, that builds reactors, tanks, silos and steel structures for chemical and industrial plants. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 cut-off of 9 January 2019 it was selected as the partner in ANAERGY, a project led by the Zaragoza engineering firm Ingeniería de Obras Zaragoza (Ingeobras) to bring a compact wastewater digester for the food industry to market. The European Commission's list of SME Instrument Phase 2 winners gives both companies their own row for the same project. Ingeobras was to handle upgrades, sales and installation; Proycon was to manufacture the digesters, according to CORDIS.

The project ran from 1 June 2019 to 30 September 2021 with a total cost of €1,748,750 and an EU grant of €1,224,125, of which Proycon received €248,850. The final report describes a test bench, an upgraded digester and a set of manufacturing manuals. What it does not show is a factory line in Sabiñánigo turning out digesters, and Proycon's own website, which logs its finished jobs, has never mentioned the project.

What Proycon Does Today

Proycon is active. In 2026 it has posted ten finished jobs on its website, among them two titanium reactors in April, a titanium reactor for the Indian chemical industry in June and a vessel in nickel 200 finished in September 2026. The company register shows the same: its auditor and substitute auditor were re-elected in an act published on 20 March 2026, and the company is listed as active by both Empresia, which reproduces its acts in the Spanish commercial register gazette (BORME), and Iberinform.

The company's history page says Proyectos y Construcciones Pirineo, S.L. was set up in 1989 with Spanish private capital, following the tradition of Noguera Hnos., a family firm created in 1912, and that it now has 6,000 m2 of covered workshops and 4,500 m2 of open yard in Sabiñánigo. It claims more than 1,000 completed projects and 260 industries served; these figures are the company's own and could not be checked. Sanarto SL has been its sole shareholder since a declaration published in September 2015 (repeated in February 2021) and its sole administrator since September 2018, according to the BORME acts listed by Empresia.

How large the business is cannot be settled from free sources, and the databases disagree. Iberinform puts Proycon's sales in a bracket of €6 million to €15 million with 0 to 10 employees; Empresia says annual turnover is above €2.5 million; Infoempresa says sales are below €2 million with 1 to 9 staff. Its filed accounts are sold only as paid reports, so revenue, profit and headcount over time could not be verified for this article. A staff estimate under ten also sits uneasily with eleven workshop halls listed on the company's facilities page; neither figure could be confirmed.

The Technology: Digestion in Hours, Not Days

Food and drink plants produce wastewater with a heavy organic load that is costly to treat, and many small producers lack the space or budget for a conventional plant. Anaerobic digesters break down that load without oxygen and give off biogas, but even advanced high-rate digesters usually need an aerobic post-treatment step before the water can be discharged. The project's Phase 1 summary put typical removal of chemical oxygen demand (COD), the standard measure of organic pollution, at 60% to 80% for current technologies and the smallest conventional reactors at about €300,000.

ANAERGY combines an anaerobic digester, an aerobic stage and an advanced oxidation stage in one modular system that is sized to each customer. CORDIS says it reaches removal rates of 95% to 99% and can include the patented PUREMUST technology, which the final report says removes nitrates and sulphates. The final report claims a COD removal of 4,954 ppm within a hydraulic retention time of four hours and installation and assembly savings of up to 50%, and says that "at the moment there are no other alternative solutions like ANAERGY on the market". These are the consortium's own results; no independent test or peer-reviewed paper on the system was found, and CORDIS lists no publications for the project.

What the EU Paid For, and What the Record Shows

ANAERGY came to Phase 2 after a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility study from August to November 2018, coordinated by Ingeobras with Proycon listed as a participant receiving no EU money, according to CORDIS. That study set the commercial bar: "We target commercialisation by 2021Q1, starting with 26 units sold going up to 80 in 2024", at a price it then gave as €150,000 per unit. Its report later gave a price range of €150,000 to €1,500,000 depending on plant size.

Phase 2 had five milestones. The final report says the first four were met: an upgraded anaerobic digester, standardised connection modules to cure leaks, a test bench built and run with different wastewater streams, and "manuals and protocols developed for the manufacturing process", which it calls a "complete consistent industrial process". The fifth, a commercial department, "suffered significant variation in its strategy" because of the pandemic. CORDIS lists four public deliverables: a commercialisation plan, a test bench report, a promotional video and a dissemination plan. Ingeobras described a two-year project when it announced the grant in July 2019; CORDIS records 28 months. Whether the end date was extended is not stated.

1. Upgraded anaerobic digesterDeliveredSelf-reported: 4,954 ppm COD removed in 4 hours (CORDIS report).
2. Test benchDeliveredBuilt and tested; deliverable D3.1 listed on CORDIS.
3. Industrial manufacturing at ProyconPartlyManuals and protocols written; no series production by Proycon is public.
4. Installed plantsUnverifiedIngeobras cites a poultry firm in Spain and a mine in Ecuador, both unnamed.
5. 26 units sold, 80 by 2024Not achievedNo unit sales figure has been announced by either partner.

After the project, Ingeobras told the EU's research news service in February 2022 that the system had been installed at a poultry producer in Spain and at a mining company in Ecuador. Its own technology page, dated October 2022, repeats both examples and says the technology "ha alcanzado con éxito su fase comercial" (has successfully reached its commercial phase). Neither source names a customer, gives a number of plants or says who built them. The two installations rest on the coordinator's word alone.

Proycon's role was to build the digesters, and it is there that the record is thinnest. A search of all 206 posts on Proycon's website for "ANAERGY", "Ingeobras", "digestor" and "biogas" returns nothing; its project log from 2021 onwards shows silos for sewage sludge and storage tanks, but none described as an ANAERGY digester. None of its posts mentions the grant. Its only EU-funded projects on CORDIS are the two ANAERGY phases.

Since the Grant

No funding round, acquisition, new product line or certification linked to Proycon since 2019 was found. The company did not join the EIC Fund portfolio, which was not part of a grant-only award. Its published work since the project is the same kind it advertised before: equipment in titanium, Hastelloy, nickel alloys and stainless steel for the chemical industry, including pieces for chlorine cell plants and, in August 2026, a condenser in Alloy B3 for India. Its home page also links to IDM Pirineo, which sells wastewater treatment equipment such as gates and screens from the same address in Sabiñánigo; whether IDM Pirineo has sold any ANAERGY equipment is not stated on either site.

Why It Matters for Europe

The project's final report places ANAERGY under the European Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plan, with targets on water reuse and pollution. Since then the EU has tightened the rules for municipal plants: the recast Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, Directive (EU) 2024/3019, entered into force on 1 January 2025 and requires urban plants treating a load of 10,000 population equivalent or more to reach energy neutrality from renewable sources produced at the installations by 2045, according to the European Parliament's legislative observatory. ANAERGY targets industrial effluent from small food producers rather than municipal plants, but rests on the same idea of treating water while recovering energy as biogas. Small regional fabricators such as Proycon are the kind of supplier that could build such equipment in Europe; this project shows the EU paying for that step without public proof that it happened at scale.

The Verdict

Proycon and Ingeobras were not asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.