Process Design and Economics for the Conversion of Algal Biomass to Biofuels: Algal Biomass Fractionation to Lipid- and Carbohydrate-Derived Fuel Products
By R. Davis, C. Kinchin, J. Markham, Eric C. D. Tan, L. Laurens, Danielle Sexton, D. Knorr, P. Schoen, J. Lukas. 2014
146 citations recorded by the source corpus.
NOTICE This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States government. Neither the United States government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or any agency thereof. Executive Summary The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) promotes the production of a range of liquid fuels and fuel blendstocks from biomass feedstocks by funding fundamental and applied research that advances the state of technology in biomass production, conversion, and sustainability. As part of its involvement in this program, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) investigates the conceptual production economics of these fuels. This includes fuel pathways from lignocellulosic (terrestrial) biomass, as well as from algal (aquatic) biomass systems. Over the past decade, NREL conducted a campaign to quantify the economic implications associated with observed and aspirational performance for the conversion of corn stover to ethanol through techno-economic modeling. This effort served two important purposes: (1) to establish a benchmark representing the initial " state of technology " at the time, and (2) to set goals for near-term R&D and cost targets, as well as to track progress toward achieving these targets by periodically updating the models based on the latest research improvements. Beginning in 2013, NREL began transitioning from the singular focus on ethanol to a broad slate of products and conversion pathways, ultimately to establish similar benchmarking and targeting efforts. One of these pathways is the conversion of algal biomass to fuels via extraction of lipids (and potentially other components), termed the " algal lipid upgrading " or ALU pathway. This report describes in detail one potential ALU approach based on a biochemical processing strategy to selectively recover and convert select algal biomass components to fuels, namely carbohydrates to ethanol and lipids to a renewable diesel blendstock (RDB) product. The overarching process design converts algal biomass …
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Biology, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be094dd57c5f759eb49e20665712fd6d5e627f1c
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Process Design and Economics for the Production of Algal Biomass: Algal Biomass Production in Open Pond Systems and Processing Through Dewatering for Downstream Conversion (2016, methodology): “Such amount of detail for high mass closure is difficult to attain for most strains available in literature, particularly for presenting both the elemental composition (required for the HTL modeling basis [2]) and associated component composition (required for the ALU modeling basis [1]).”
- Lipid recovery from wet oleaginous microbial biomass for biofuel production: A critical review (2016, background): “According to a recent microalgal biofuel design report, in a bio-refinery process lipid extraction efficiency has the largest impact on the cost of microalgal biofuel [10].”