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Algae Based Biofuels are too expensive
Manufacturing biofuels from algae is currently too expensive.
Algae based biofuels would offer renewable energy source that does not compete with agricultural food products. Culturing algae does not require using the fresh water, but wastewater can be used instead or algae specie can be chosen that can live in saline water. Also algae cultures do not need fertile land, but they can be grown in places that have low economical and ecological value, or cultures can be placed in the sea.
Algae can be used to produce different energy products, where biodiesel, biogas and bioethanol are most common and most researched. Hydrocarbon and hydrogen production through algae has also been researched. Problem with all of the algae based biofuels is that their production costs too much to be economical.
To make production of the algae biofuels commercially profitable, the production cost should be lowered by optimizing the production. This would require improvements in culturing, harvesting, concentrating and processing.
Harvesting and concentrating are usually biggest energy consumers in algae cultures. It is said that these can cover even one-third of total expenses of making biomass. Also if centrifuge is used as primal concentration method production price could rise even higher, but centrifuge is mostly recommended to be used after some other concentration method.
To make algal biofuels appealing to customers, and therefore producing companies, price of production needs to be lowered to be affordable and competitive with the traditional fuels. Research needs to be made in all the stages of the production.
FAO. 2009. Algae-based biofuels. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Rome, Italy.
Research question: Algal biofuels are too expensive to be competitive with the traditional fuels. Production cost needs to be lowered.
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