Techno-economic analysis of microalgae-based lipid production considering the influence of microalgae cell characteristics

Abstract

For economical and sustainable production of microalgal biofuels, it is important to determine optimal combinations of microalgae species, processing pathway, and products. Several approaches, such as techno-economic analysis and superstructure optimization, have been developed to identify such combinations in a systematic manner, but without paying much attention to the selection of optimal species. Thus, the incorporation of such selection into the superstructure optimization framework is an open problem to be explored. However, such a problem is extremely difficult to be addressed, if not impossible, given a large number of microalgae species and process technologies which can be adopted in microalgal biorefinery. Therefore, developing a versatile superstructure is required for considering the influence of different cell characteristics on the process through modeling and parameters. In this work, economics of microalgal biorefineries utilizing different species are analyzed by applying models and parameters which consider the influence of cell characteristics on several process technologies. Also some insights on the superstructure modeling are provided based on the results of economic analysis, together with sensitivity analysis results.