An updated comprehensive techno-economic analysis of algae biodiesel

Algae biodiesel is a promising but expensive alternative fuel to petro-diesel. To overcome cost barriers, detailed cost analyses are needed. A decade-old cost analysis by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicated that the costs of algae biodiesel were in the range of $0.53–0.85/L (2012 USD values). However, the cost of land and transesterification were just roughly estimated. In this study, an updated comprehensive techno-economic analysis was conducted with optimized processes and improved cost estimations. Latest process improvement, quotes from vendors, government databases, and other relevant data sources were used to calculate the updated algal biodiesel costs, and the final costs of biodiesel are in the range of $0.42–0.97/L. Additional improvements on cost-effective biodiesel production around the globe to cultivate algae was also recommended. Overall, the calculated costs seem promising, suggesting that a single step biodiesel production process is close to commercial reality.

Techno-Economic and Life Cycle Assessment for the Production of Green Composites

Botanically, green composites belong to an economically important seed plant family that includes maize, wheat, rice, and sorghum known as Saccharum offi cinarum. There are so many natural fibers available in the environment such as rice husk, hemp fibers, flax fibers, bamboo fibers, coconut fiber, coconut coir, grawia optiva and many others also. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a process to estimate the environmental feature and potential impacts related to a product, by organizing a directory of pertinent inputs and outputs of a product system, assessing the potential environmental impacts related with the said inputs and outputs, explaining the results of the inventory analysis and impact evaluation phases in connection to the objectives of the study. Particularly Bagasse, an agricultural residue not only becomes a problem from the environmental point of view, but also affects the profitability of the sugarcane industries. This chapter discusses the properties, processing methods and various other aspects including economic and environmental aspects related to green composites.

Bio-fuelling the Hummer? Transdisciplinary Thoughts on Techno-Optimism and Innovation in the Transition from Unsustainability

An overarching aim of this chapter is to offer an informed and critical analysis of ‘techno-optimism’, informed by an explicitly transdisciplinary approach. A transdisciplinary perspective is one in which knowledge production goes beyond the academy to include end non-academic stakeholders and users. In effect it seeks to ‘upstream’ the involvement of non-academic interests in research design and knowledge production, as opposed to limiting those non-academic interests to the dissemination end point stage of research, which is the dominant research model. Techno-optimism is understood as an exaggerated and unwarranted belief in human technological abilities to solve problems of unsustainability while minimising or denying the need for large-scale social, economic and political transformation. More specifically, techno-optimism is the belief that the negative environmental and social costs of high-consumption, affluent, consumer societies and associated ways of life within capitalist orthodox economic growth orientated socio-economic systems, can be solved or eradicated through technological innovation and breakthroughs. Business as usual can be ‘greened’; a capitalist, growth-based economy can be made more ‘resource efficient’, consumerism less ‘resource intensive’ (and maybe a little bit more ethical). Techno-optimism, to be deliberately provocative for a moment, can therefore be described as a ‘biofuel the hummer’ response to the challenges (and opportunities) of the crisis of unsustainability. What I mean by that analogy is the seductive promise and premise of techno-optimism of not questioning or doubting the status quo (the hummer), hence it’s putative (but entirely false) non-political character. The capitalist, consumerist, growth-based socio-economic system is thus removed from critical analysis (usually on the implicit or explicit assumption of either the normative rightness of this system, or on strategic political grounds that it is naive or utopian to envisage widespread support for a non or post-capitalist consumer system). Techno-optimism simply enables a different means (biofuel) to the same ends.