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’.
Working methodology: 2D substrates for open sea cultivation
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 AT~SEA (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.
key breakthroughs to be achieved
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.
For more details on the project, please visit the MacroFuels website: www.macrofuels.eu
Text by : MacroFuels project
