Monday 25 April, 2016 at 10:00am
Title: “A Biorefinery Concept for Accelerated Commercialization of Algal Biofuel Production”
Speaker:
Dr. Philip Pienkos, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Abstract:
Although algal biomass is considered to be a potentially high value feedstock for biofuel production, the path to commercialization of low value products like biofuels is challenged by high production costs. This is largely due to high capital and operating costs for algal cultivation and harvesting. Although much effort is being devoted to improving algal productivity and designing novel cultivation and harvesting systems as a means to drive down costs, the economic hurdles for algal biofuel production remain high and the need for short term revenues has caused algae companies to move away from a biofuel focus towards high value products as a commercial strategy. This presentation will highlight a novel biorefinery concept based on detailed compositional analysis of algal biomass coupled with a fractionation and upgrading process developed at NREL that has identified multiple large volume co-products, capable of significant cost reduction to enable algal biofuel production.
Host: Dr. Yantao Li, Ph.D.