ALCHEMIS - Algae for chemicals and emission abatement

MIP

Industrial partner

Research partner

Project leader

Synopsis

A project on the production of algae. Algae can be used as alternative raw material, but the problem is the use of energy and nutrients in the production. In the ALCHEMIS project the production of algae based on flue gasses and waste water is examined. Besides the production of algae also the harvesting is examined and an assessment is made of the market for algae.

Objectives

Scarcity in fossil based resources and the need for climate change mitigation face the chemical sector to find alternative resources and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Algae have the potential to solve part of these issues.
Analysis of algae production shows that energy use and use of fossil based nutrients have a very big impact from both the perspective of production costs and sustainability. The energy costs need to be reduced by improving the photobioreactor and harvesting technology. Regarding the nutrients, the only solution is the use of “waste“ nutrients. This project aims at demonstrating the production of algae on flue gasses and waste water in an algae farm with a production surface of approximately 500 m². This farm will have a production volume of approximately 4000 kg algae dry matter (DM) per year. This size allows to demonstrate the feasibility of larger scale algae production, to produce large enough quantities of products for functional testing and at the same time to keep the algae quantities manageable. In this configuration an algae farm closes the loop by using waste to produce new, high value materials.

The most important issues that will be addressed in the project are:

• Developing and building of a large-scale demonstration installation for algae biomass production in Flanders.
• Use of CO₂ and NO_x from waste gasses and “waste” nutrients from wastewater for algae production and determination of the influence of contamination on the use of the algae and thus on the product development.
• Combination of different concentration methods to achieve the best and most economical concentration method.
• Research on recycling of the effluent of the harvesting installation as growth medium in the reactor. Influence of metabolites of the algae on the growth of the algae.
• Development of downstream processing based on available technologies for other biomass resources and research on wet downstream processing and based on market opportunities.
• Design of a marketing plan for algae biomass in different production quantities.

Start

1/04/2010

Duration

30 months

Budget

Industrial partners: EUR 543000
Research partners: EUR 500000

Industrial partners

Research partners

Project leader

Bert Lemmens (VITO)