Biodiesel From Microalgae: Recent Progress And Key Challenges

 

Venktesh Kumar
Page No.56-62

Microalgae biodiesel (BD), which has a substantial amount of lipids and a powerful ability to compensate for CO2, is a potential environmentally friendly fuel. However, the first generation of BD development's intricate and energy-intensive culture, pretreatment procedures, and BD conversion approaches have hindered the commercialization of BD from being accomplished. By meticulously analysing recent technological advancements in the microalgae BD production process, this work resolved the problems and provided encouraging suggestions for future research. Base-catalyzed transesterifications, which were developed from the first generation of BD technologies, are extensively employed in the the microalgal BD synthesis methods nowadays in use. However, the base-catalyzed suffers from the procedure of saponification and a low yield of production since microalgae have a high water content and free fatty acid content. Due to the high yield of microalgae BD synthesis, this technique is not financially viable since it requires substantial pretreatments such drying, esterification to result of fatty acids that are free, and filtration. In an effort to create novel transesterification platforms, new methods that can tolerate contaminants have been suggested, such as dynamically produced non-catalytic transesterifications. Within a minute of a response at 350 °C, thermally induced reactions enable the in situ conversion of microalgae lipid into BD (95 wt%). This technique is robust to the presence of water and free fatty acids and does not require a lipid extraction procedure. It was hypothesised that lowering the reaction temperature for thermally induced transesterifications might improve the efficiency of this approach. A pilot study, thorough life cycle assessment, and economic analysis were also recommended in order to explore the economic viability and environmental effects.
Keywords: biodiesel, microalgae, environment, economic, biofuels, emission