Biofuels & Bioenergy

An outlook on microalgal production and biorefinery, from sunlight to products will be given. Algal production needs to develop from a craft to a major industrial process for the production of commodities. Major challenges are to reduce production costs and energy requirements and increase production scale. Although microalgae are not yet produced at large-scale for bulk applications, recent advances – particularly in the methods of systems biology, genetic engineering, process control, and biorefinery – present opportunities to develop this process in a sustainable and economical way within the next 10 to 15 years. Production costs have been recalculated based on experimental data of pilot plant studies. In addition costs for biorefinery have been included. Total costs of the production and biorefinery chain have been compared to the market values resulting from different combinations of end products from microalgae to assess economic viability of an industrial production chain. A description of the model for cultivation will be provided. The outlook is given for different locations. Production costs have been done based on state of the art of technology. Improvement in production costs will be shown, supported by real production data and a more detailed insight on the process and technology. A research overview of various projects will be addressed to show examples of various approaches to improve productivity and decrease production costs. The effect of improvements were studied by means of a sensitivity analysis for the most promising systems. Industrial microalgae chains are within reach, a number of market combinations could already be possible if the systems are scaled up to industrial production units. Further reduction costs will allow more markets combinations.