How Can You Modify Algal Biomass Into Useful Biodiesel?

By Vic Garlington

One of probably the most discussed alternative fuel sources in the past few years has been algae biofuels. With the world-wide efforts to attempt to cut down on our reliance on fossil fuels, algal biofuels have been showing potential on being able to scale to the quantities of production to inexpensively replace our dependence on traditional oil sources. Beyond the benefits of currently being renewable, algal biofuels have also shown that they're considerably much better for the environment through the reduced quantities of Carbon Dioxide released at the time of their use. Bio-diesel from algae is one of the alternative fuel sources currently being explored for potential widespread usage. To comprehend this we must first answer the question of what is bio-fuel?

What Makes Up a Biofuel?

Biofuels could be in various forms to including liquid, gas, or solid materials. Biofuels are generally made from any biological carbon-based substances, with corn and soy beans being the most popular crops utilized for biodiesel manufacturing. Utilizing these crops needs the land normally used to grow food that we eat. As a result, the renewable fuels business has been investing time and effort into refining the method to extract biofuel from algal mass as a third generation biofuel.

Biodiesel Algae Positive aspects

Algae will grow at 50 to a hundred times faster than corn or soy, and don't need freshwater or farm land to be grown. Algae can be grown in non potable water or suspended containers located where the land can not be used to grow food. The traditional barriers to efficient use of algae as a biofuel have been the relative low price of oil when compared to the price of extracting the biofuel from algae, however, with improved technology and increased crude oil prices this distance has shrunk over the previous couple of years.

When developed in closed photo bioreactor systems, the algae growth process may be controlled leading to greater yields and increase bio-diesel manufacturing. One more advantage of the algae development process is the algae pulls carbon dioxide from the air and replaces it with clean oxygen. This makes biodiesel algae farms more attractive to place near manufacturing plants that produce excessive amounts of carbon dioxide to help decrease pollution but also benefit the algae grower.

Biodiesel algae has the potential to substitute all crude oil world wide. If algae farms can live up to their potential, then this could be completed 100 million acres in contrast it would take exponentially much more land to achieve the same effect with traditional bio-fuel crops.

How Is Algal Oil Removed from Algae?

Extracting the oil from algae has been the major cost barrier for the expansion of algae bio-diesel into the mainstream. Once the algae are harvested, the oils are then extracted from the algae cells. Probably the most rudimentary procedure to do this is to use an oil press which is similar to how an palm oil press works. The oil press has approximately a 75 percent extraction rate. Another technique employed to extract the oil is the hexane chemical extraction. This method results in approximately a 95 percent extraction rate of the oil from the algae.

The third method used is the supercritical fluids method which can get up to one hundred % of the algae oil out from the algae biomass. In this method, carbon dioxide is used to act as the supercritical fluid. The algae is pressurized and heated up to change it into a fluid and gaseous state. Then, the CO2 is mixed with the algae which turns it almost completely into oil. This method requires a considerable investment in equipment and incurs considerable expense. As soon as the algae oil is extracted, it is then processed making use of the transesterification method in which sodium hydroxide is mixed with ethanol to create biodiesel from algae biomass.

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Algae technology has kicked open the doors for Producing algae biodiesel, Using Pbr's look at this Algae Biofuel home study course... from this day forward is your turn.. This article, How Can You Modify Algal Biomass Into Useful Biodiesel? is available for free reprint.