(516e) A Techno-Economic Assessment of Industrial Fish Feed Production System Using Microalgal Biomass: A Sustainable Perspective

In light of rising demand and concerns of the increasing prices of the conventional fish feed ingredients, microalgae biomass emerges as a suitable, non-conventional and sustainable alternative. A novel process by Yadav et al. (2020) for algal oil extraction uses sonic waves and carbon dioxide microbubbles. Although unique, it struggles to compete economically with other processes for biodiesel production. However, a small portion of the FAMEs and defatted algal biomass can be further processed into omega-3 fatty acids and protein rich pellets, which are nutraceuticals and fish feed, and sold at significantly higher prices than biodiesel. In this work, a commercial scale fish feed production facility is modeled so as to meet a 30% current fish feed demand in 2020. The inclusion of whole microalgae cells in aquafeeds will require sufficient processing to ensure maximum nutritional uptake, involving dewatering and cell disruption to remove the lipids, pelletizing for maximizing the bioavailability of nutrients. A model facility would produce 4.2 MM ton/yr. of algae derived feed. Such a facility would run 330 days/yr and generate average annual net income over the 20-year lifetime. Deployment of several such facilities in India would replace all domestic production of fishmeal, 10% of world production. The results show annualized capital costs decreased as production capacity increased. Thus, aquatic feed producers could use this tool to evaluate annual costs and benefits to determine processing economics. Producers will have to consider the ingredients used, though, as raw ingredients constitute the greatest cost for the production of feeds.