The potential of biodiesel production from<i>Botryococcus</i>sp. biomass after phycoremediation of domestic and industrial wastewater

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to investigate the capability of microalgae, known as Botryococcus sp. for wastewater phycoremediation and potential biodiesel production. The vertical closed photobioreactors (PBR) were employed and supplemented with domestic wastewater (DW) and food industry wastewater (FW) at different batch of study. The cultivation was conducted under natural outdoor condition for 12 days. The results revealed that the removal of pollutant and nutrients presence in both wastewaters with constantly decrease proportionate to the increase in cultivation time. The chemical oxygen demand (COD), total phosphorus (TP) and total organic carbon (TOC) were successfully removed up to 84.9%, 69.3% and 93.3%, respectively in DW while 96.1%, 35.5% and 87.2%, respectively in FW. The result on FT-IR analysis of microalgae oil was shown comparable with conventional palm oil based biodiesel in term of IR spectra. This study suggests that Botryococcus sp. has tremendous potential in pollutants removal and biodiesel production for renewable energy development.