Sustainability Assessment

The MacroFuels project aims to advance the technologies for producing liquid transportation biofuels from cultivated seaweed (or macroalgae), thereby providing a sustainable solution for the provision of transportation fuels for heavy goods transport and the aviation sector.

Seaweeds are amongst the fastest growing plants in the world, producing large quantities of biomass over a short timespan. They do this without the use of fresh water, fertilizers, pesticides, and farmland, that are all needed for land-based cultivation. In order to grow, seaweed needs only carbon dioxide (CO2), sunlight and the nutrients already present in the ocean.

To validate the benefits of the seaweed biofuel concept and, ultimately, to provide a basis for the development of incentivising policies, a sustainability assessment is an integral part of the MacroFuels project. The assessment is a multi-criteria appraisal that evaluates the impacts of seaweed-derived transport fuels with respect to the environment and society and their technical and economic viability, as well as health, safety and risk aspects of the seaweed biofuel production system.

These different pillars of sustainability are assessed in individual work tasks. In order to facilitate the integrated sustainability assessment, to ensure consistency and to allow for consolidation and overall conclusions to be drawn, it is necessary that each work task is conducted on the basis of common criteria, where this is possible and appropriate. To this end, this report:

 Defines the approach taken for the integrated sustainability assessment;

 Presents the results of an integrated sustainability assessment of the MacroFuels concept; and

 Provides options to improve the sustainability performance of the MacroFuels concept.