Biodiesel Production from Microalgal Biomass

This chapter describes the advances on biodiesel production from microalgae adopting diverse methods of cultivation, harvesting and algal lipid extraction to biodiesel conversion techniques. It reviews integration of metabolic engineering approaches to enhance the biodiesel production by microalgae, scale-up strategies and challenges to achieve commercial feasibility of micro algal biodiesel production. Open cultivation systems are used in many algal industries for large scale production of microalgal biomass for food, feed, nutraceuticals and value-added products. Open cultivation systems are easier to construct and operate as compared to closed cultivation systems. Scale-up is a process to enlarge the production quantities with similar or higher productivity. Scale-up of microalgal biodiesel production is a crucial step due to the difficulty in assessing the process parameter affecting the scale-up. Biodiesel production from microalgal biomass has promising potential for commercialization. Many companies and researchers have developed techniques for microalgal biodiesel production.