Ah, Sebastiano led me in the right direction, after all.
The command that one should use in this particular case is dbms_lob.substr() - but it has a little quirk ... the syntax is upside-down compared to the regular substr() that you use for varchar.
If you want to return a string ranging from the first character to the eleventh, this is the synatx for VARCHAR:
substr(cee.description,1,11) as element_desc
For CLOB it goes like this:
dbms_lob.substr(cee.description,11,1) as element_desc
Anyway, thanks to all for giving suggestions!
/Ola
