The dry route aims at minimizing the energy consumption in
the dewatering process by combining several effective and complementary
dewatering techniques. The aim of the wet route is
to keep the entire microalgae to biofuel chain in the wet phase.
The main target product for both routes is diesel which is in liquid
form and can be mixed with fossil diesel for transportation applications.
Currently nearly all forms of transport still rely on liquid
fuels. This provides an easy and fair method to compare the performances
of the algal fuel with e.g. the first generation bio-diesels
and fossil diesel. In the dry route, transesterification is used as
the converting technology as it is commonly used in the production
of the first generation bio-diesels. While in the wet route,
hydrogenation is chosen because the self-produced hydrogen from
the supercritical gasification process will be sufficient for the
hydrotreating process, which may improve the economic feasibility
of the route. Both biodiesel (diesel from the transesterification
process) and green diesel (diesel from the hydrogenation process)
are very well comparable with conventional diesel or petroleum
diesel.