Microalgae as a Potential Source of Biofuels and its Current Advances

Abstract

Sustainable production of renewable energy is passionately debated worldwide since it is progressively understood that first-generation biofuels are primarily produced from food crops. Mostly oilseeds do not contain enough amount of fat content to achieve targets for biofuel production. These concerns have increased the attention in developing second-generation biofuels produced from non-food feed stocks such as microalgae, which potentially offer high-fat content. The advantages of biofuel over fossil fuel are they are less toxic, biodegradable and lower emission greenhouse gases. This article reviews the current status of microalgae use for biodiesel production, including their cultivation, harvesting, and processing. The economic development of the world is hugely dependent on fossil fuel supplies which are constrained not only by partial availability but also generate high levels of pollution. Because of the limited fossil fuel, concerted efforts have been started to search for alternative bio fuels like biodiesel, bio ethanol and since the diesel is being used massively in industrial commercial, fisheries, agriculture, and other sectors. So, the production and consumption of biodiesel from oil seeds crops have been getting renewed interest in recent years in India to overcome the drawbacks of oil from oilseed crops. Biodiesel produced from micro-algae has several benefits over the above resources due to higher algal biomass and oil yields and the need of non-arable land for its growth. Industrial and municipal wastewaters can be applied for farming of microalgal oil that can be used for the production of biodiesel to entirely displace petro diesel. The micro algal biomass has been reported to yield high oil contents and has the diesel production. Accordingly, a lot of R & D work has been initiated for the growth, harvesting, oil extraction and conversion to biodiesel.