Posted by Christopher
This paper's worth a read:
http://www.scipub.org/fulltext/ajbb/ajbb43250-254.pdf
I've copied over some parts of the paper so you can get an overview.
"Microalgae can provide several different types of
renewable biofuels. These include methane produced
by anaerobic digestion of the algal biomass[6] biodiesel
derived from microalgal oil[11,12,13] and
photobiologically produced biohydrogen[14,15]."
Paper details methods of extraction, and even an efficiency over two species of fresh weight -> dry weight -> mass of oil extracted!
Table from paper:
"
Fresh weight Dry Extracted weight extracted oil Biomass
Spirogyra sp. 24.5 (g) 8.09 (g) 1.8 (g) 3.5 (g)
33.0 (%) 7.3 (%) 43.3 (%)
Oedogonium sp. 32.4 (g) 11.3 (g) 3.0 (g) 3.8 (g)
34.8 (%) 9.2 (%) 33.6 (%)
"
I've come across lots of these tables too. One I can remember put Chlorella as the highest oil productivity per area. But a lot depends on whether we will go for GM options and tweaks to CO2, Nitrogen, light levels to optimise production. We'll have to either pick one from a promising paper, or look at what companies are doing and possible contract the work out.
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