In the last decade, seaweed has received increasing
interest worldwide as potential source of advanced biofuels production, which
has resulted in a considerable attention from research, industry and policy
makers. However, no large-scale, commercial algae-to-biofuels facilities had
yet been implemented by the end of 2015. Over the next four years experts
from six European countries will concert their efforts to achieve breakthroughs
towards the commercially viable production of third-generation biofuels from
seaweed or macro-algae. In their efforts they will be financially supported by
the European Commission who funds the MacroFuels project with 6 million Euros
from their Research and Innovation programme ‘Horizon 2020’.
While current
biofuels compete for scarce cropland, fresh water, and fertilizers, seaweed
does not need fresh water, arable land or fertilizers to grow. In addition,
seaweed beds can serve as a significant CO2 sink resulting in environmental
benefits of seaweed derived biofuels and high value co-products.For improved
cultivation MacroFuels will use 2D substrates based on advanced textiles to
facilitate open sea cultivation. These patented and award winning substrates
have been developed in the previous project (funded by the European
Union under FP7) with the participation of several MacroFuels
partners, and yield 3-5 times more biomass than state of the art 1D rope based
systems. A rotating crops technology in combination with advanced textiles will
further increase the biomass per area yield.
MacroFuels will achieve the following urgently needed
technological and process-oriented breakthroughs which will make it possible
for seaweed-derived biofuels to eventually compete favourably with fossil or
older generation equivalent fuels.
· Improve the efficiency of the seaweed-to-biofuels
conversion technologies, which are currently in their infancy.
· Vital breakthroughs in terms of pre-treatment and
bioconversion of algae sugar to ethanol and butanol as well as thermal chemical
conversion to furanics based biofuels. Significant efficiency improvements will
be made by reducing the water through chemical and enzyme usage in the
pre-treatment steps. Water reduction of more than 50% and total elimination of
process steps will be achieved.
· Quadruple the output on the same amount of substrate
while decreasing the production cost of the seaweed raw material by a factor
10.
· Creation of about 15,000 jobs based on the EU target
of 2.5% biofuels which corresponds to 5000 km of cultivated seaweed area.
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