Energy balance and environmental impact analysis of marine microalgal biomass production for biodiesel generation in a photobioreactor pilot plant

By E. S. Itoiz, C. Fuentes-Grünewald, C. Gasol, E. Garcés, E. Alacid, Sergio Rossi, J. Rieradevall. 2012

85 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A life cycle assessment (LCA) and an energy balance analysis of marine microalgal biomass production were conducted to determine the environmental impacts and the critical points of production for large scale planning. The artificial lighting and temperature conditions of an indoor bubble column photobioreactor (bcPBR) were compared to the natural conditions of an equivalent outdoor system. Marine microalgae, belonging to the dinoflagellate and raphidophyte groups, were cultured and the results were compared with published LCA data obtained from green microalgae (commonly freshwater algae). Among the species tested, Alexandrium minutum was chosen as the target marine microalgae for biomass production under outdoor conditions, although there were no substantial differences between any of the marine microalgae studied. Under indoor culture conditions, the total energy input for A. minutum was 923 MJ kg � 1 vs. 139 MJ kg � 1 for outdoor conditions.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Oceanography, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/137f4f12c7e15c4c80ca515bdd6f98117dd72e51

Citations in the corpus

• A simple spectrophotometric method for biomass measurement of important microalgae species in aquaculture (2015, unknown): “For this reason, great efforts have been made in research, development and commercialization of several aspects of microalgae production processes (Sevigné-Itoiz et al., 2012).”