BACKGROUND Microalgae are touted as an attractive alternative to traditional forms of biomass for biofuel production, due to high productivity, ability to be cultivated on marginal lands, and potential to utilize carbon dioxide (CO2) from industrial flue gas. This work examines the fossil energy return on investment (EROIfossil), greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and direct Water Demands (WD) of ...

Microalgae mass cultures can use solar energy for the biofixation of power plant flue gas and other concentrated CO2 sources into biomass that can be used to produce renewable fuels such as methane, ethanol, biodiesel, oils and hydrogen and for other fossil-fuel sparing products and processes. They thus can mitigate emissions of fossil CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Microalgae are currently us...

The present study has been undertaken to assess integrated algal harvesting in sewage wastewater for biodiesel feedstock. Chlorella minutissima microalgae are grown in wastewater from local hotel sewage drain and produced biomass is used to produce biodiesel. C. minutissima effectively removes the wastewater nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus with the 99.19% and 96% removal respectively. Content...

Disturbances are expected to increase variability and/or decrease predictability in ecosystems, while dispersal (or immigration) may have positive or negative effects on ecosystem stability. We conducted a mesocosm experiment with pelagic zooplankton to examine the independent and interactive effects of a nutrient pulse and immigration from neighbouring lakes on (a) temporal variation in the me...

The biorefinery concept integrates processes and technologies for an efficient biomass conversion using all components of a feedstock. Sargassum muticum is an invasive brown algae which could be regarded as a renewable resource susceptible of individual valorization of the constituent fractions into high added-value compounds. Microwave drying technology can be proposed before conventional etha...

1. Compared to lakes and streams, we know relatively little about the factors that regulate algae in freshwater wetlands. This discrepancy is particularly acute in boreal regions, where wetlands are abundant and processes related to climate change (i.e. increased permafrost collapse and soil weathering) are expected to increase nutrient inputs into aquatic systems. To investigate how accelerate...

algae have been proven efficient biological vectors for heavy metal uptake. in order to further study their biosorption potential, two strains spirogyra sp. and spirulina sp. have been studied under different initial metal concentrations. in recent years, the biosorption processes have been studied extensively using microbial biomass as biosorbent for heavy metal ions removal. in these studies,...

Algae grown in outdoor reactors (volume: 10 L and depth: 20 cm) were fed directly with filtered and sterilised municipal wastewater. The nutrient removal efficiencies were 86%, 90%, 89%, 70% and 76% for TOC, TN, NH4-N, TP and OP, respectively, and lipid content varied from 18% to 28.5% of dry algal biomass. Biomass productivity of ∼122 mg/l/d (surface productivity 24.4 g/m(2)/d) and lipid produ...

An algal bloom of Peridinium gatunenese generally precedes the annual maximum of methane release from the profundal sediment of Lake Kinneret. Therefore, we investigated the response of the sediment methanogenic microbial community to simulated algal deposition. Addition of algal biomass on top of sediment cores resulted in increased CH4 production rates and concentrations of the fermentation p...

The effects of a single pulse, 21-d exposure of the commonly used herbicide alachlor (2-chloro-2′, 6′-diethyl-N-methoxymethyl acetanilide) on an algal community from a typical agricultural stream in Nebraska were studied using 18 stream microcosms located in a greenhouse, at six alachlor concentrations (0, 1, 10, 30, 100, and 1,000 μg/L). Effects of alachlor exposure at 1.0 μg/L were not signif...