5-01: Integrated algal biofuel baseline analysis: overview of NREL’s algae harmonization modeling effort

Credible modeling and analysis of micro-algae biofuels technology suffers from a dearth of public data and inconsistent use of such data to populate models leading to lack of agreement on today’s state of technology from an economic, sustainability, and resource standpoint.  Several national laboratories collaborated to establish a single set of assumptions intended to represent a plausible near-term pathway for algal biofuel production.  Independent models for resource assessment (RA), techno-economic analysis (TEA), and lifecycle analysis (LCA) were harmonized to understand the implications for cost, resource potential, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy consumption of producing 5 billion gallons per year of algal renewable diesel (RD) using a single algae growth and fuel production scenario.  The effort was conducted jointly between Argonne National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  To establish the basis scenario for algal cultivation and processing, the RA model was used to screen for site locations exhibiting an optimal combination of favorable productivity and low water consumption whose total potential RD production rate equates to 5 billion gallons per year.  The resulting spatial and temporal outputs were used as inputs to the respective LCA and TEA models to establish unit-level mass and energy balances, for estimation of greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption for the LCA model, as well as estimation of processing costs and associated product selling prices for the TEA model.  This presentation will identify the parameters that were considered for harmonization and will summarize the impact to the overall economic projections.