Bio-Oil Production from Sargassum Macroalgae: A Green and Healthy Source of Energy

Increases in fossil fuel consumption after industrial revolution has caused environmental problems and human diseases, and it is vital to replace fossil fuels by biofuels, not only for sustainable energy production, but also for the survival of earth and human lives. Today, algae have become a potential source of biofuels to supply sustainable energy. Sargassum species are among the most predominant brown macro-algae in seas. Hydrothermal liquefaction is a promising process in biofuel production from biomass, which uses less energy to produce biofuel compared to other biofuel production techniques. The main objective of this paper, is the extraction of bio-oil from Sargassum macro-algae. The hydrothermal liquefaction of Sargassum sp. was performed under three temperature conditions of 250, 300 and 350°C, both with and without using NiFe2O4 as a catalyst. The GC-MS and FTIR analysis performed to analyze the obtained bio-oil. Maximum liquefaction yield for the non-catalytic and catalytic process was 6.85 and 7.20%, which occurred at 300 and 350°C respectively. The obtained bio-oil has zero sulfur and low nitrogen (~4%) and oxygen (~10%) content, which implies that in terms of human health, the bio-oil will be healthy with some upgrading. The bio-oil was mainly composed of n-Hexadecanoic acid (57.86%) followed by tetradecanoic acid (5.12%). According to the obtained results from this research, obtained the bio-oil requires upgrading to be useful as biofuel. Also, NiFe2O4 nanoparticles increased the bio-oil yield and are useful to produce magnetic bio-char.