The Large Hadron Electron Collider Project

A Conceptual Design Report (CDR) for the Large Hadron Electron Collider, the LHeC, is being prepared, to which an introduction was given for the plenary panel discussion on the future of deep inelastic scattering held at DIS09. This is briefly summarised here. The CDR will comprise designs of the ep/eA collider, based on ring and linear electron accelerators, of the interaction region, designed for simultaneous $ep$ and $pp$ operation, of a new, modular detector, and it will present basics on the physics motivation for a high luminous Tera scale electron-nucleon collider as a complement to the LHC.