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Life Cycle Assessment of Biofuel from Algae

Researcher: Mike Franke, Vidia Paramita
Principal Investigator: Professor Jefferson Tester

The potential use of algal oil to be processed to biofuel is currently widely recognized. One of the key reasons why algae are used as biofuel feedstock is that the oil yield per area of microalgae cultures could greatly exceed the yield of oilseed crops such as soybean or rapeseed. Another big advantage is they can be grown in seawater or brackish water on non-arable land, thus they do not compete for resources with other types of agriculture. Despite this promising potential, producing biofuel from microalgae is still not economically viable and there is no mature technology for the process, which is why it has not been realized in an industrial scale.

Conducting a life cycle assessment (LCA) on this emerging microalgal biofuel field would provide a proper evaluation of the process viability and its overall environmental impact. LCA is a "cradle-to-grave" approach for assessing industrial systems. "Cradle-to-grave" begins with the gathering of raw materials from the earth to create the product and ends at the point when all materials are returned to the earth.In this case, it begins with algae cultivation and ends at the biofuel combustion. The impacts of interest include energy use, nutrient inputs, water handling, co-products available for other uses, and pollutant outputs from the system. Monte Carlo sampling techniques and sensitivity analysis would be integrated in the LCA to reduce uncertainties within the current available data. This project aims to give an impact evaluation on different technologies used in biofuel production from alga