Facilitation of High Value Products during Liquefaction of Wastewater Cultivated Algae

Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) of algae has shown to be a promising conversion technology to produce a renewable crude oil.  Subcritical water chemistries allow geomimetic conditions to breakdown biomolecules within algae cells to produce a black tar similar to what we drill out of the ground.  Key issues to commercializing HTL of algae include removing heteroatoms, particularly oxygen and nitrogen, increasing lower boiling point distillate fractions, and appropriating co-products into optimized value streams.  We have shown that wastewater cultivation provides a sustainable strategy for biomass production while achieving these goals.  This paper will describe the high value products we can exploit based off the growth conditions used for algae cultivation which provide the appropriate mechanisms to produce higher quality biocrude.