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Introduction

Global warming is a major issue that will lead to several harms such as extreme weather conditions and sea-level rise (Peter, 2018). Increase in fossil fuel use results in high carbon dioxide emissions and contributes significantly to global warming. Measures to reduce fossil fuels use are under way for the past few decades via renewable energy development such as solar, wind, hydro and biofuels (Iqbal et al., 2019). While other energy forms could replace the fossil fuels in several sectors, higher fossil fuel energy use in transport sector could only be reduced by few substitution options among which biofuels are the most promising (Leiserowitz et al., 2020). With increase in policy reforms in the transport sector to replace fossil fuels by biofuels, there has been a tremendous interest in the development of biofuels across the world for the past two decades (Andersson et al., 2020). 

Biofuel use has shown a significant decline over time. More than 20 years ago, biofuel was depicted and championed to be the hope of renewable energy development. The Americas and Europe were significantly the largest producers of feedstock for biofuels during that time (Ruan et al., 2019). Everything changed at the turn of the 2010s when there was a major inflation in the cost of biofuel feedstock, leading to global outrage against the use of food sources as a means to satisfy the energy demand. Thus began debates on whether it is reasonable to use food substitutes as sources of renewable energy (Alizadeh et al., 2020).

Further technology development resulted to mass production and, of course more oil consumption. Disaster reduction or even checkout fossil fuel resources threatening the whole world in near future. In other side oil combustion increases greenhouse gases, Ozone layer depletion and environmental pollutants such as unburned hydrocarbons (UHC), Nitrogen compounds (NOx), Carbon monoxide (CO), Carbon dioxide (????????₂) and of course respiratory disorders in large cities. In addition, dependency of consuming countries to oil exporting countries greatly increased and caused oil price boosting (Bos and Gupta, 2018).

Biofuels could be majorly derived from edible oil seed crops such as sunflower, palm, rapeseed, soybean, coconut, etc. which are considered as first-generation feedstock for biofuel production (Giakoumis, 2018). However, use of such feedstock for biodiesel production has received numerous backlash due to the fact that they compete with food production. The non-edible seed crops of various plants and waste cooking oil, grass, grease, animal fats, etc. have gained recent significance as second generation feedstock for the production of biofuels (Araujo et al., 2017).  However, these logical substitutes are not entirely sufficient to meet the global renewable energy demands (Negm et al., 2017). 

Thus, the third generation biofuels, which are derived from micro- and macro-algae have an edge over the previous two categories and the fourth generation biofuels are based on metabolic engineering of water flora, with a potential of fixing significant amounts of atmospheric Carbon dioxide when producing about a ton of  biomass (Chowdhury and Loganathan, 2019).

There is a recent global shift towards  microalgae as a third generation feedstock. This viability has been demonstrated in its high photosynthetic efficiency and significantly large biomass production. Microalgae do not compete for areas of vegetation and are quite prolific even under harsh geographical conditions (Nanda et al., 2018). Global renewable energy research efforts have been concentrated on increasing the lipid content in microalgae and the effective culturing of algae. In order to establish the potential of microalgae biomass as an alternative for the production of biofuels, more concentrated attempts are needed for detailed characterization of algae biomass, algae oil and algae biodiesel as very little information in literature is available on the same (Chowdhury et al., 2019).

The present study deals with three different species of algae i.e. Chlorella, Spirulina and pond water algae in order to assess their potential for biodiesel production. The natural pond water algae biomass is expected to be a cheaper feedstock for biodiesel production as compared to pure cultures of Chlorella and Spirulina (Khoo et al., 2019). The growth patterns of the three algae species would be studied with the aim of determining the maximum productivity of algae species (Mu et al., 2017). The algae biofuel production would be attempted via oil extraction and transesterification both in single stage and two stage reactor units in order to get the maximum biodiesel yield (Yew et al., 2019). The present work would investigate the usefulness of techniques like FTIR, NMR, GC and proximate and elemental analyses to understand the chemical properties of algae biomass, algae oil and algae biodiesel. The fuel properties of algae biodiesel would also be investigated (Loftus and Johnson, 2017). The results would then be compared with that of karanja biodiesel and conventional diesel in order to establish the potential of algae biomass for biodiesel production (Laurens et al., 2017).

Problem Statement

The reason for the study is to find an alternative source of fuel instead of the non-renewable sources. The use of non-renewable sources are the major sources of the extreme weather conditions and the rise in the sea level (Carneiro et al., 2017). Algae is a third-generation biofuel and the reason for choosing it as a source of biofuel is that it is abundant in the environment and its replacement of the first and second-generation biofuels (Tu et al., 2017). The presence of algae poses as a threat to the growth of plants in the water bodies as a result of algal blooms. Therefore, there is no threat to the environment by using algae as a source of biofuel (Baudry et al., 2018).

The characterization and analysis of algae and biofuel products and also its comparison to conventional diesel and many other algae species (Pal et al., 2019).

Aim and Objectives

The aim of this study is to analyze and characterize algae and biofuel products with the following objectives;

• Objective 1: Analysis and characterization of algae for optimum production of locally produced biofuel.
• Objective 2:  Analysis and characterization of biofuel from two different algae species with high lipid yields.

Research Questions

The identified research questions for this project are provided below:

• How do we analyze the chemical properties of algae oil, algae biomass and algae biofuel?
• How do we determine the maximum productivity of the chosen algae species?
• How does the biofuel products from the chosen algae species compare to the conventional fuel?

Deliverables

The deliverables of these project are a project report, samples of the synthesized products and gotten results. The synthesized products would be tested according to industry standards and literature to see how they compare with required standards.  Also, the report should contain a complete documentation of how the laboratory experiment was carried out, how the various algae biomass and biofuel products were characterized, how various process variables were gotten, how the desired products were synthesized and how the results were arrived at.

Relevance

The global craving for bioenergy as replacement for petroleum fuel on the grounds of sustainability, renewability and carbon neutral alternative cannot be realistically achieved with the use of oil crops (Kumar et al., 2020).  Oil-rich microalgae have been reported by many to be a promising alternative source of lipids for biofuel production (Varela et al., 2020).

This study is majorly focused on characterizing certain algae species as a viable source of third generation biofuel production (Elegbede et al., 2017).

Methodology

This project focuses on secondary research, laboratory experiments and process analysis, and they are discussed below:

Secondary research

The secondary research in this project will utilize a systematic approach (Johnson et al., 2016) to review the works of literature. The steps involved in the systematic review of the literature are provided below:

• Step 1: Identify the research questions that can be used for the project.
• Step 2: Identify the keywords that should be used to research the works of literature.
• Step 3: Extract the journals and books that are appropriate for this project.
• Step 4: Write the literature review chapter.

Laboratory experiments

The laboratory experiments would cover a large chunk of this project. They would be carried out in stages, and as such described below;

• Stage 1:  Sourcing for the required feedstock (the chosen algae) and other required raw materials.
• Stage 2:   Characterization of the various biomass
• Stage 3:  Developing an appropriate process route and optimal equipment arrangement for an efficient process setup (Photaworn et al., 2017)
• Stage 4:  Carrying out the process reaction.
• Stage 5:  Analyzing the process reaction.
• Stage 6:  Carrying out the phase separation.
• Stage 7:  Characterization of the resultant biofuels.
• Stage 8:  Results Testing.

Process Analysis

The totality of the process reaction would be analyzed and this would also occur in stages;

• Stage 1:  Process Testing
• Stage 2:  Process Control
• Stage 3:  Process Optimization

Evaluation

The risk assessment conducted for this project is provided in the table below:

Table 1:  Risk assessment