Microalgal Essay

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Introduction
Microalgal biotechnology has emerged due to the great diversity of products that can be developed from biomass. Microalgal are photosynthetic prokaryotic or eukaryotic microorganisms that grow rapidly and have the ability to live in different environment due to their unicellular or simple multicellular structure.Microalgal have a simple cellular division cycle which allows them to complete their development cycle in a few hours. Microalgal when subjected to physical and chemical stress can produce high concentration of certain compounds for example proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, polymers and pigments.To produce these products, microalgae are grown using carbon dioxide,sunlight and industrial wastes in open pond systems and photobioreactors . Usage of industrial wastes reduces cost of culture medium nutrients and also reduces environmental problems.The fuel that we obtain now are mostly from fossil fuels and they are not a renewable source of fuel. Thus it is important that we find another alternative source of fuel. The growth of Algae Oil is a recognised process due to its final products and the production of oil is a function of the selection and feeding of a specific strain of algae. The production of Algae Oil is primarily used in the process of producing biodiesel fuel. All Biofuels are made from biomass. These biofuels can all be produced from algae. Microalgae contains oil within its cell. This oil can be used to make biodiesel. There are many kinds of microalgae which contains oil. Once they are grown, the oil is removed from the microalgae using chemicals or by squeezing oil out of the cells using scientific equipment.The oil is used as an ingredient in biodiesel. This oil is changed chemically from plant o...

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...lgae cultivation and harvest process has been successfully established in Scotland, and the project is investigating ethanol production and methane generation from seaweed. Statoil and Bio-Architecture Lab(BAL) aims to commercialize the production of ethanol and co-products from microalgae in Norway and Europe.
2. In Asia, there is a project led by Mitsubishi Research in Japan which plans to start the demonstration of ethanol production with waste seaweed in 2012 to develop cultivation technologies by 2016. After which, they aims to set up a production process by 2020. The South Korea National ENergy Ministry has started a 10 year project with their aim of producing 400million gallons a year of ethanol by 2020. The Philippine government also has invested more than $5 million US dollars to build an ethanol plant with seaweed bioethanol technology from South Korea.

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