What Makes Up a Biofuel?
Biofuels may be in different forms to including liquid, gas, or solid materials. Biofuels can be made from any biological carbon-based substances, with corn and soy beans being the most popular crops utilized for biodiesel production. Working with these crops needs the land normally used to grow food that we eat. As a result, the renewable fuels industry has been investing time and energy into refining the method to remove biofuel from algal mass as a third generation biofuel.
Algae Biodiesel Benefits
Algae will develop at 50 to a hundred times faster than corn or soy, and don't need freshwater or farm land to be developed. Algae may be grown in non potable water or suspended containers located exactly where the land can not be used to grow food. The conventional barriers to successful use of algae as a biodiesel have been the relative low expense of oil when compared to the cost of extracting the biofuel from algae, however, with enhanced technology and increased crude oil costs this distance has decreased over the past couple of years.
When developed in closed photo bioreactor systems, the algae growth process may be controlled leading to greater yields and increase bio-diesel manufacturing. One more advantage of the algae development process is the algae pulls carbon dioxide from the air and replaces it with clean oxygen. This makes biodiesel algae farms more attractive to place near manufacturing plants that produce excessive amounts of carbon dioxide to help decrease pollution but also benefit the algae grower.
Biodiesel algae has the potential to replace all crude oil world-wide. If algae farms can live up to their potential, then this could be completed 100 million acres in contrast it would take exponentially much more land to accomplish the same effect with conventional biofuel crops.
How Is Algal Oil Removed from Algae?
Extracting the oil from algae has been the major cost barrier for the expansion of algae bio-diesel into the mainstream. Once the algae are harvested, the oils are then extracted from the algae cells. Probably the most rudimentary procedure to do this is to use an oil press which is similar to how an palm oil press works. The oil press has approximately a 75 percent extraction rate. Another technique employed to extract the oil is the hexane chemical extraction. This method results in approximately a 95 percent extraction rate of the oil from the algae.
The third technique used is the super critical fluids approach which can get up to 100 percent of the algae oil out from the algae. In this method, carbon dioxide is utilized to act as the supercritical fluid. The algal biomass is pressurized and then heated up to change it in to a liquid and gaseous state. Then, the CO2 is mixed with the algae which turns it almost completely into oil. This technique demands a significant investment in equipment and incurs substantial cost. Once the algae oil is extracted, it's then refined making use of the transesterification process where sodium hydroxide is combined with ethanol to create biodiesel from algae.
