Summary: | Now days renewable biofuels are needed to displace petroleum derived transport fuels, which contribute to global warming and are of limited availability. Biodiesel is a potential renewable fuel that has attracted the most attention. Biodiesel from cyanobacteria seems to be a renewable biofuel that have the potential to displace petroleum-derived transport fuels, to accumulate significant amounts of lipids without affecting supply of food and also can use non-arable land. Cyanobacteria has attracted the attention of researchers because unlike crop plants their energy is converted to lipids and not fibers in the process of photosynthesis, so they are able to synthesize vegetable oils in large quantities, which can be converted into biofuels through transesterification, but there is necessary a rigorous evaluation to determine whether this type of fuel is competitive to the fossil fuels or not.
This paper presents an overview of the possibility to obtaine biodiesel from cyanobacteria. The final aim of the study is to control growing factors, aiming to develop procedures to increase the biomass of cyanobacteria and fat content which could serve as a source of biodiesel production. A main objective is to develop techniques to achieve productivity closer to the photosynthesis maximum efficiency.
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