Renewable Fuel from Algae
Microalgae biotechnologies have been subject of great interest in the last 40 years with many research groups devoted to study different species and different potential applications. At commercial level, most of the products reaching the market have been directed either to 'health food' for human consumption as food additives or to 'added value' compounds. The focus has been on small-scale (< 50 hectare) and high priced products (> 5 Euro/Kg).
With the increase in fossil fuel prices and looming global warming, the potential of algal biomass as a renewable source of energy has been re-discovered.
Microalgae have several favorable characteristics over other biofuels feedstocks, such as: 1) high productivity; 2) high oil content; 3) high CO2 mitigation capacity; 4) growth on marginal land with seawater or low quality water.
The challenge is to develop large-scale (> 500 ha) and low cost (< 0.5 Euro/Kg) production processes that will make the production of renewable fuel economically viable and sustainable.
Evodos is participating in the EU funded BIOFAT program. The role of Evodos in this project is to provide its industrial scale algae harvesting equipment that makes low cost harvesting possible.