Algae and Seaweed Compositional Analysis
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Description
The Algae and Seaweed Compositional Analysis team offers industry and academic partners detailed and custom analysis of biomass derived from microalgae, macroalgae or seaweeds, and the derived fractions for feedstock quality (carbohydrate, protein, lipid, inorganics) and carbon efficiency assessment in the bioeconomy. The NREL algae team has built a robust, standardized analytical pipeline with streamlined data management, maintains equipment, including advanced liquid and gas chromatography with advanced mass spectrometry, with elemental analysis, and dissolved and entrained organic and inorganic carbon procedures. Each approach leverages custom algae molecular databases (lipid and carbohydrate/saccharide focused), and has decades of sample handling and preparation experience. Mature, high-throughput methodologies are available and can be customized, based on advanced machine learning quantitative prediction models, and leverages quantitative chemical signatures in infrared spectroscopy, are available accelerate the rapid in situ monitoring or biomass quality.
Capability Bounds
Algae and seaweed composition procedures, chemical speciation, and data dissemination is standardized and customized over more than a decade of and is applied to small quantities (<1 g) of dry biomass or representative subsamples from bulk materials, and conversion fractions (lipids, protein or carbohydrate), the high-throughput methods can record composition of up to hundreds of samples.
Unique Aspects
Algae biomass characterization in concert with sourcing and tuned for highest value in custom conversion process is a unique laboratory capability and highly sought after by academics and industry partners; demonstrated to wastewater biomass; temporal and seasonal quality dynamics of 7+ years of testbed cultivation; seaweed industry support for niche polysaccharide extraction and characterization; seaweed harvest carbohydrate chemical composition
Availability
The compositional analysis pipeline is available either through collaborative opportunities, and training on methods and procedures, as well as on a fee-for-service basis through the rapid, standard agreement (Biomass Compositional Analysis Services Agreement, BCASA)
Benefit
The biomass source agnostic standard algae analytical pipeline can be applied to all third party biomass supplied to the team from various supply sources, aiming to support the standardized reporting on biomass quality and help predict the respective biorefinery streams and fractionation effectiveness
Capability Expert(s)
Lieve Laurens, Stefanie Van Wychen
