Aquaculture 2022

February 28 - March 4, 2022

San Diego, California

SUSTAINABLE AQUAFEED: PRODUCING MICROALGAE WITH ATMOSPHERIC CO2 AND SOLAR ELECTRICITY

Colin M. Beal1,2* , Leda Van Doren2,3 , David Hazlebeck4 , Amha Belay5 ,  B. Greg Mitchell6

* Corresponding author. Tel: +1 540-230-5049, E-mail address : colinmbeal@gmail.com

 



 Global seafood demand (including wild capture and farmed aquaculture) has increased from roughly 100 million tonnes per year to nearly 200 million tonnes per year since 1990.  To meet this need, the global farmed aquaculture industry has increased 527% since 1990 [FAO, 2018].  As a result, there is a significant need to supply sustainable feed ingredients for the global aquaculture industry, leading to investigations of using marine microalgae to replace plant-based ingredients (corn, soy, wheat, and potato) and fish-based ingredients (fishmeal and fish oil).  Marine microalgae have the potential to r educe the environmental impact of feed production with respect to land use, freshwater consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and global fishery sustainability .  However, c onventional micro algae production uses a large amount of fossil-fuel electricity  and  requires liquefied carbon dioxide  that is bubbled into cultivation ponds.  P rior analysis indicates that the cost and greenhouse gas impact of  marine  microalgae can be  around $700 /t and 3.7 kg CO2e/kg, respectively [Beal, 2018], as compared to those for corn/soy, which are roughly $200/t and 0.4 kg CO2e/kg (see Table 1).  In this study , we compare  the conventional model of Beal, 2018  (CONV) with a scenario that replaces fossil-fueled electricity with solar electricity and liquified CO2  with Direct Air Capture (DAC) of atmospheric CO2 directly into high-pH cultivation ponds (DAC-SOL), which is a technique that has been developed by Global Algae Innovations (see Figure 1) .   The DAC-SOL scenario assumes productivity of 18 g/m2-d as compared to 23 g/m2-d for CONV [Beal, 2018].

 

Preliminary results indicate that the  DAC-SOL approach can generate algal biomass at roughly half the cost of fishmeal and  reduce the GHG  impact to be less than terrestrial plant-based ingredients and fish-based ingredients.  In addition, using solar power and DAC allows for much greater flexibility in siting algal biomass facilities independent of the power grid or sources of CO2.