Algae biomass in EU

Meanwhile, 100 EU algae stakeholders are preparing to release a white paper, “European Roadmap for an Algae-Based Industry”, after a meeting co-organised by the European Algae Biomass Association, Miracles, FUEL4ME, Splash and the Algae Cluster (InteSusAl, BIOFAT and All-gas).

The White Paper will note:

• Further developments should be product driven. The development of marketable algae-based products is important for industrialization of the area.

• Algal strains should be further industrialized as sustainable green cell factories via strain improvement programs, allowing both GMO and non-GMO strategies.

• Advances in regulatory and standardization issues have been developed but still barriers remain for final applications of microalgae based products.

• More demonstration projects for specific markets at a production size of approximately 5 ha should be developed to push the field.

• Technological bottlenecks such as fouling and culture contamination need to be solved.

• Harmonisation is needed in terms of measurements and unit expression.

• Collaboration between algal and other industries should be enabled.

• Industrial and academic collaboration, education, communication to a wider audience about sustainability of the technology, consumers’ acceptance and legislation about products with algae inside need to be stimulated.

The EU partners also noted that developments of the last years in the algal field have been significant. Operational pilot and demonstration scale production facilities of up to 1 ha have been realized. The knowledge on fundamental biology develops rapidly, the technology for production matures and biorefineries that process algal biomass into multiple high quality products have been implemented.

The continued interest in advanced algae has produced numerous exciting technical advances on the laboratory, pilot and demonstration scales. However, attempts to translate these small scale successes into commercial technologies have been less successful. It is easy to blame lower oil and natural gas prices and opposition from special interest groups. However, nearly all commercialization projects have yet to produce significant quantities of algae on a continuing basis.

Algae needs a lot of water to live in and to make biomass with, but overwhelmingly its the habitat requirement that drives up the costs. If a 30-centimeter deep pond is producing 25 grams of algae per day, the algae are living inside 333 kilos of water.