1.3.1 Effect of Catalyst Loading

The data regarding effects of prepared catalysts at 623 K and 10 % loading on HDPE degradation into liquid, gas, residue, and waxy products yield are presented in Fig. 2 and Table 2. It is well noted that AlSBA-15 catalyst showed good degrada­tion activity to produce light hydrocarbon liquids while HZSM-5 catalysts having greater microporous surface area (Si/Al ratio 80 and 14) produced higher amounts of gaseous products. It is further explained that the primary cracking reactions might have occurred on the external surface which was in contact with the poly­mer. Meanwhile, the smaller fragments which were products of the initial reaction were mainly cracked within the microporous surface of the catalysts. However, the amount of coke was found to be lower as compared to the other degraded products.

In a previous study, Hwang et al. (2002) reported that the strong acid sites could accelerate cracking and deactivation reactions which resulted in the higher yield of coke as observed in case of prepared catalysts HZSM-5 and acid-treated SBA-15 in this study. Significant production of solid wax compounds using SBA-15 was also observed, and this could be due to insufficient number of acid sites in the material. Large wax formation after thermal degradation at the

Table 2 HDPE degradation-based product yield (%) by different catalysts

bottom of reactor could cause difficulty in the collection of other products such as liquid and gases. However, Mastral et al. (2006) reported that HZSM-5 pos­sessed an excellent stability that could effectively prevent the formation of coke due to its particular structure. Based on these findings, it could be concluded that the pore size, acidity, and shape are the important parameters that can affect the degradation activity of zeolitic catalysts. Similar findings have been reported by Hernandez et al. (2006) who observed that catalytic degradation using HZSM-5 yielded higher gas products during HDPE degradation. In another study con­ducted by Mastral et al. (2006) who carried out degradation process at different temperatures in a fluidized bed reactor, mesoporous materials such as SBA-15 did not show adequate degradation results. These observations confirmed our present findings as presented in Fig. 2. According to Urquieta et al. (2002), higher acidity in zeolitic catalysts might result in higher gaseous yield and a reduction in liquid yield. Again, the results confirmed findings made in this study.

The gas fraction compositions after HDPE degradation using different catalysts are shown in Fig. 3. It is noted that the catalysts HZSM-5(80) and HZSM-5 (14) exhibited the highest fraction for carbon chain C4 (37.1 and 30.2 %, respectively) and the lowest for carbon chain C5 (4.4 and 1.4 %, respectively). Meanwhile, SBA-15 and AlSBA-15 catalysts yielded the highest fraction for C3 (47.2 %) and C4 products. It should be noted that C1 products were not detected in the GC analysis. Both SBA-15 and AlSBA-15 catalysts produced more significant amount of C5 gaseous products (12.3 and 11.6 %, respectively). In the case of the mixture of HZSM-5 (80) and AlSBA-15 as catalyst, the gas carbon chain distribution was more uniform.

Findings and degradation trends using these catalysts for liquid product yield are shown in Fig. 4. The catalysts exhibited higher liquid products in favor of C8-Ci2, followed by Ci3-Ci6 and Ci7-C20. HZSM-5 (80) and HZSM-5(14) had

36.4 and 34.7 % liquid products, respectively, for C8-C12. Meanwhile, AlSBA-15 catalyst had the highest percentage of liquid products for C8-C12 (40.9 %). The pro­portion of liquid products for C13-C16 was also found to increase (37.3 %) when AlSBA-15 was used as catalyst instead of HZSM-5 catalysts as in the earlier case.

The biofuel industry has experienced remarkable growth over the last decade. Global production has tripled from about 18 billion litres in 2000 to about 60 billion litres in 2008 and has continued to grow after a slight pause in 2007-2008 (Kristoufek et al. 2012; Mandil and Shihab-Eldin 2010). However, production and consump­tion of biofuels worldwide returned to growth in 2010. According to US Energy Information Agency (EIA) data, total world biofuel production increased nearly six­fold over the 2000-2010 period, that is, from about 18 billion litres to about 104 billion litres. Supply is currently dominated by bioethanol, which accounted for approximately 75 % of total biofuel production in 2010 (Mandil and Shihab-Eldin 2010; Moschini et al. 2012). Similar figures are also reported for biofuel demand. Despite the growth in the biofuel industry, global consumption of biofuels in 2012 represented 3 % of total fuel consumption (IFPEN 2012), i. e. 55 million tons oil equivalent, of which 73 % is bioethanol consumption. Global production and con­sumption of biofuels, over the 2000-2011 period, are presented in Fig. 1.

At present, biofuel production and consumption are concentrated in a small number of countries or regions, with the United States, Brazil and the EU being particularly salient. Bioethanol has been the leading biofuel in the United States (from corn) and in Brazil (from sugarcane), whereas biodiesel is the preferred biofuel in Europe (from [1]

bioethanol production (thousand barrels per day) bioethanol consumption (thousand barrels per day) biodiesel production (thousand barrels per day) biodiesel consumption (thousand barrels per day)

Fig. 1 Global biofuels production and consumption (2000-2011) (US EIA 2013)

rapeseed oil) (Moschini et al. 2012). In 2006, the United States surpassed Brazil as the world’s largest bioethanol producer and consumer and, by 2010, was producing 57 % of the world’s bioethanol output. The EU follows as the third major producer (Mandil and Shihab-Eldin 2010; Moschini et al. 2012). By way of contrast, the EU is the largest producer and consumer of biodiesel. Over the period of 2009-2011, the EU accounted for about 60 % of global biodiesel production and about 70 % of global biodiesel consumption. The production and consumption levels in these three regions over the 2009-2011 period are summarized in Tables 1 and 2.

Of particular importance is that the industry is very much reliant on first — generation fuels (explained in Sect. 2 in chapter “Environmental Issues in the Liquid Biofuels Industry”). While these are generally produced from food crops (such as sugar cane, sugar beet or corn in the case of bioethanol, and vegetable oil derived from oleaginous crops in the case of biodiesel), they also have a variety of other commercial applications (such as stock feed in the case of corn, or use in industrial products such as cosmetics and engine lubricants, in the case of vegeta­ble oils). The cost-effectiveness of first-generation fuels is therefore closely tied to the global price of the feedstock used—a price set not only by demand for these feedstocks for energy, but also for other purposes.

HHI is defined by the sum of squares of the participation of each company when compared to the industry’s total size. This index considers all the companies in the industry and is calculated as follows:

N

HHI = £ Pi2 (2)

i=1

where P is the market share of firm i in the market and n is the number of firms. The Herfindahl-Index (H) ranges from 1/N to one, where N is the number of firms in the market. Equivalently, if percents are used as whole numbers, as in 75 instead of 0.75, the index can range from 10,000/n, when companies have an equalitarian participation in the market, up to 10,000 (monopoly). The HHI increases according to the increase of inequality among the companies belong­ing to the industry, thus being a good indicator of the market situation. Do note that the company size is considered by its squared participation (Pi), i. e., smaller companies have a smaller role in this index. Thus, the higher the index, the more concentrated the market is, and, as a consequence, smaller the competition among companies is.

According to Usdoj (1997), the market is not concentrated when the HHI value is under 1,000, it is moderately concentrated between 1,000 and 1,800, and it is highly concentrated when it reaches a value higher than 1,800. This research sought to use the companies’ integrality, where we used secondary data regarding the biodiesel production in m3 from January 2005 to December 2012.

The ‘environmentally friendly’ rhetoric with respect to biofuel production and consumption, such as that advanced by Shapouri et al. (1995, 2002), has often been disputed, most emphatically by Henke et al. (2005) and Patzek et al. (2005). Some have suggested that, up until this point, the net contribution of biofuels to reducing global GHG emissions might have been negative (Eggert et al. 2011), mainly as a result of (1) land-use changes (LUC) and (2) deforestation in tropi­cal areas, particularly so as to allow the planting of biomass used for biofuel pro­duction (Searchinger et al. 2008; Fargione et al. 2008). Moreover, Anderson and Fergusson (2006) contend that biofuels, regardless of type, cannot be regarded as truly carbon neutral (or even carbon negative) when the stages of production, transportation and processing are taken account. Patzek et al. (2005) accepted this contention after a meta-analysis of a wide array of previous studies.

To gain a deeper insight into whether biofuels represent an improvement over conventional liquid fuels with respect to their overall GHG footprint, it is necessary to consider the entire biofuel life cycle, including the production phases. In addition to the tailpipe emissions discussed earlier, these include (1) type of feedstock, (2) processing of feedstock and (3) the cultivation and harvesting of the feedstock.

Traditionally, yeasts have been used in the food and beverage industry, so the major­ity of yeasts have been adapted to meet these procedures. The ability to accumu­late lipids above 20 % of its weight is achieved by only 5 % of the known yeasts (Beopoulos et al. 2011). Lipid accumulation in oleaginous yeast occurs under excess of carbon sources, being scarce the nitrogen source, so the carbon excess is channeled into triglycerides (Ageitos et al. 2011). Similar to other microorganisms, yeast is able to consume different sources of carbon and nitrogen, from waste to laboratory-pure sources. However, to take advantage of this technology, the use of widely available waste is a key parameter. According to this, the main by-products of the rapeseed oil-based biodiesel industry, glycerol (carbon source) and rape — seed meal (nitrogen source), were used as culture medium for the oleaginous yeast Rhodosporidium toruloides Y4 and the accumulation of oil was analyzed. Results showed that the accumulation of oil reached up to 19.7 g/L, higher than 16.2 g/L achieved when a medium composed of glycerol and yeast extract as nitrogen source was used. Besides, the oil fatty acid composition comprised a high content of mon­ounsaturated fatty acids, which makes it suitable for biodiesel production (Uckun Kiran et al. 2013). Many authors have proposed the use of glycerol as carbon source to grow different oleaginous yeasts, i. e., Cryptococcus curvatus (Liang et al. 2010), Rhodotorula glutinis (Saenge et al. 2011), Rhodotorula graminis (Galafassi et al. 2012), and R. toruloides (Xu et al. 2012). In all cases, it was considered a suitable carbon source for lipogenesis. Also, the hydrolyzate from lignocellulosic materials has been considered an interesting substrate due to the availability and economic feasibility (Yu et al. 2011; Gong et al. 2012; Uckun Kiran et al. 2012).

The culture conditions, such as C/N ratio (close to 100), substrate, culture mode, microelements, and inorganic salts, are crucial in lipid accumulation (Ageitos et al. 2011). While the ratio C/N plays the most important role in lipid accumulation, the culture mode is also of special interest. For this reason, Zhao et al. (2011) used dif­ferent feeding strategies with yeast R toruloides Y4 and concluded that the fed-batch strategy exhibited the largest oil accumulation potential under large-scale production plant, while keeping the residual glucose concentration to 5 g/L of carbon source and the fed-batch cycles were multiple times repeated. Authors removed the majority of the mature culture at the end of each cycle, keeping 900 ml of the culture in the bioreactor. Then, fresh media were added and a new cultivation cycle was initiated. As a result, the highest amount of lipids reported in the literature, 78.7 g/L, was achieved (Table 7).

The main disadvantage of oleaginous yeast is the extraction of the oil, due to the resistance of the cell walls to different solvents. In most cases, a chloroform methanol stream has been used, although this solution is not environmentally friendly because of the toxicity of reagents. An interesting alternative is provided by an enzyme-assisted method, consisting in a microwave-aided heating pretreat­ment, further enzymatic treatment with the recombinant P-1,3-glucomannanase and plMAN5C, and later oil extraction with ethyl acetate. The percentage of extraction with this method is close to 96.6 % of the total oil (Zeng et al. 2013).

Table 7 shows the fatty acid composition of yeast oil. Although it varies depending on the species and substrate, it is mostly composed of palmitic and oleic acid, the lat­ter being preferred for the biodiesel industry due to its high unsaturation degree (Pinzi et al. 2011). Wahlen et al. (2012) compared biodiesel properties, performance, and emissions in a diesel engine, biodiesel being produced from soybean, algae, bacteria, and yeast oil. Only small differences in terms of exhaust emissions were detected, as biodiesel from yeast oil emitted lower hydrocarbon but higher NOx emissions.

4 Conclusion

Many studies have demonstrated that the use of oleaginous macro — and microor­ganisms has a great interest to the biodiesel industry, as an alternative to first — and second-generation biodiesel. Although each species has its own characteristics that make it suitable to the production of biodiesel, insects posses the ability to recycle organic waste like manure and produce high amount of good-quality oil, while micro­organisms may be fermented on conventional bioreactors, which is a very attractive feature. In the improvement of these technologies, genetic engineering provides a key tool, besides the increase of knowledge about organisms, i. e., culture media and growing conditions. Moreover, the oil composition of oleaginous organisms may be genetically modified to meet the ideal biodiesel requirements, but also it can be modi­fied in pursuit of the best combination of substrate, species, or culture mode. It may be concluded that yeast is the preferred oleaginous microorganism among those ana­lyzed in this chapter, due to its rapid growth, ability to be scaled up, production of lipids, and suitable fatty acid composition to be transesterified into biodiesel.

Acknowledgments This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (ENE2010-15159) and the Andalusian Economy, Innovation and Enterprise Council, Spain (TEP-4994).

1.2 EU Biofuel Policy Scenario

In the European context, two political decisions have had a fundamental role in the biofuels expansion: the Directive 2003/30/EC and Directive 2009/28/EC (RED). The objectives of RED policy in 2009 included the following: increasing farm income, improving environmental quality, and increasing national energy security.

A large variety of biofuel support policies are in place in EU member states, rang­ing from command and control instruments such as standards and shares, economic and fiscal measures, such as tax exemptions, to information diffusion. This implies that market demand is created by policies, as the production costs of biofuels lie above those of fossil fuels. This can be done through basically two instruments: sub­sidization or prescription of a mandatory production. Under the first scheme, biofuels are subsidized in order to reduce the price level to that of fossil fuels (or below). The second approach consists of prescribing a specific quantity of biofuels to be supplied by fuel suppliers on an obligatory basis (blending or use target mandates).[9]

The first option is implemented by the following: (a) tax reduction scheme, which has proven successful although it has caused important revenue losses for the government and (b) support to the cultivation of agricultural feedstock production by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Unfortunately, in 2011, both of measure budgetary support were deleted. The second option (use target mandates) provides that fuel suppliers are obliged to achieve a certain biofuel share in their total sales. Currently, the latter measure is working.

The European Union climate and energy package from 2008 nullifies or updates much of the previous legislation. Its implementation will have a profound impact on how biofuels are used and the level of market penetration achieved in the future. The package aimed achieving the 20-20-20’s objectives: 20 % reduction in emissions, 20 % renewable energies, and 20 % improvement in energy efficiency by 2020.

Within the package, the Renewables Directive (RED) has arguably the high­est significance with regard to biofuels. The Directive deals with biofuels in sev­eral ways, of which the most noteworthy is the mandatory target which states that 10 % of final energy consumption in transport should be met by renewable energy by 2020. Another important aspect of the Directive is the mandatory sus­tainability criteria to which all biofuels are subject. This aspect, in particular, has received high publicity, and its detailing in the Directive has left serious questions open regarding indirect land-use change and potential clashes with trading laws (Amezaga et al. 2010; European Federation for Transport and Environment 2009).

Regarding the sustainability criteria, the RED ensures that the production of raw materials for biofuels does not lead to losses of high carbon stock land such as wetland, forested areas, and peatland; and high land biodiversity such as primary forest and other protected areas including grassland. EU production shall, in addi­tion, comply with certain agricultural and environmental requirements. In particu­lar, biofuels are required to ensure a saving of greenhouse gas emission of at least 35 % when compared to the replaced fossil fuel. This minimum saving would be increased by 50 % in 2017 and by 60 % in 2018 for new installations. The emis­sions shall be calculated over the entire life cycle of the biofuels and include, if any, carbon losses from conversion of land for biofuel crop production.

Currently, similar sustainability requirements were set in the Fuel Quality Directive 2009/30/EC on the specification of petrol, diesel, and gas oil, which pro­vided also a 6 % reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from road trans­portation fuels by the blending with biofuels.

Only sustainable biofuels, domestically produced or imported, will be eligible to be counted against the target and for any other public support.

In June 2010, the European Commission announced a set of guidelines explain­ing how the Renewable Energy Directive Verification, on compliance with the sustainability criteria for biofuels and bioliquids, should be implemented (COM (2010)160/01; COM (2010) 160/02; and Decision 2010/335).

In addition, the European Commission was asked to come forward with propos­als by the end of 2010 to limit indirect land-use change. The RED criteria, in fact, exclude some important GHG emissions such as the indirect effects, for example, on land use. For this reason, on October 17, 2012, the Commission published a proposal of directive issued as COM (2012) 595 aiming at limiting global land conversion for biofuel production (include indirect land-use change, ILUC) and to raise the climate benefits of biofuels used in the EU.

The proposal (named ILUC proposal) should amend both the Renewable Energy Directive (2009/28/EC) and the Fuel Quality Directive (98/70/EC). With these new measures, the Commission would limit the use of food-based biofuels and include ILUC2 emissions when assessing the greenhouse gas effect of biofu­els. The use of first generation of biofuels to meet the 10 % renewable energy tar­get of the Renewable Energy Directive will be limited to 5 %. The intention of the proposal is to introduce three ILUC emission factors (for cereals 12 g CO2 eq/MJ, sugars 13 g, and oil crops 55 g). The high ILUC factor especially for oil crops could disqualify most biodiesel made from rapeseed, soybeans, as well as palm oil (first-generation biofuels).

The sustainability criteria proposed by the EU, which aim to combat the envi­ronmental problem, have been subject to widespread criticism and extensive dis­cussion. Social criteria and indirect land-use change are hot topics, both of which are not dealt with in the Directive and face similar difficulties (Amezaga et al. 2010). Both are recognized struggles but how to quantify their effects and incorpo­rate them into policy remains a serious issue. For this reason, the proposal ILUC, nowadays, is largely called into question by European stakeholders.

This article conducted qualitative descriptive research, using the case study research method. The case under analysis in this study is the agricultural link of the biodiesel production chain in Brazil, with a focus on oil palm family farmers. Thus, the study can be classified as multi-cases with personal and in-depth interviews.

The primary data collected included interviews with 27 professionals, con­ducted from February 2010 to February 2011. Of these key players, six respond­ents were from public agencies, two were bank professionals, three represented the opinions of the biodiesel companies, five were companies producing oil palm and other derivatives, two were representatives of family farmers’ associations, and nine respondents belonged to the agricultural production chain.

Starch is a polysaccharide composed of glucose units (monomers). This poly­saccharide requires acidic hydrolysis to release the glucose monosaccharide to be fermented by S. cerevisiae yeast to produce 1G ethanol. The starch chemical structure is presented in Fig. 3. Examples of starch-containing plants include corn, potato, cassava, wheat, and barley (Table 4).

Fig. 4 Lignin structure (left) and its precursors (right): (I) p-coumaryl alcohol, (II) coniferyl alcohol, and (III) sinapyl alcohol. Author Silvio Vaz Jr

As of today, it has been shown that it is scientifically and technically possible to derive the desired energy products from algae in the laboratory. The question lies, however, in whether it is a technology that merits the support and development to overcome existing scalability challenges and make it economically feasible (Mcgraw 2009). Additionally, the basic economic motivation for biofuels is that they are a convenient, low-priced, domestically producible, and a substitute for oil; an energy source that is getting costlier; and it is mostly imported from politically volatile regions (Castanheira and Silva 2010). Economic feasibility is believed to be currently the main hurdle to overcome for this technology. Current costs associ­ated to both the state of the science and technologies are sizeable and represent a main factor hampering development.

High costs often prevent the market diffusion of novel and efficient energy technologies. As microalgae biofuel is not a mature technology, it becomes important to provide a revision of technological innovation and diffusion aspects to enlighten some available options that may help overpass the barriers found by innovative technologies (Ribeiro and Silva 2013).

It is widely recognized that modern economic analysis of technological innova­tion originates fundamentally from the work of Schumpeter (1934), who stressed the existence of three necessary conditions for the successful deployment of a new tech­nology: invention, innovation, and diffusion. His seminal work has been constantly referred (Soderholm and Klaassen 2007), and each of the keywords represents differ­ent aspects; in particular, invention includes the conception of new ideas; innovation involves the development of new ideas into marketable products and processes; and diffusion, in which the new products and processes spread across the potential market.

Emergent technologies are relatively expensive at the point of market intro­duction but eventually become cheaper due to mechanisms such as learning-by­doing, technological innovation and/or optimization, and economies of scale. The combined effects of these mechanisms are commonly referred to as technological learning. Over the last decades, learning theories in combination with evolutionary economics have led to the innovation systems theory that expands the analysis of technological innovation, covering the entire innovation system in which a tech­nology is embedded. In particular, “an innovation system is thereby defined as the network of institutions and actors that directly affect rate and direction of techno­logical change in society” (Junginger et al. 2008).

In the emerging energy technologies field, there is a strong need to influence both the speed and the direction of the innovation and technological change. With that in mind, policy makers are putting their efforts on lowering the costs of renewable energy sources to support the development of renewable technologies, either through direct means such as government-sponsored research and devel­opment (R&D), or by enacting policies that support the production of renewable technologies. It is well documented (Johnstone et al. 2010; Popp 2002) that both higher-energy prices and changes in energy policies increase inventive activity on renewable energy technologies (Popp et al. 2011).

As noted by Popp et al. (2011), the higher costs of renewable energy technologies suggest that policy intervention is necessary to encourage investment. Otherwise, in the lack of public policy favoring the development of renewable energy, production costs remain too high and they do not represent an option in replacing fossil fuels.

Policies to foster innovation should not only focus on the creation and sup­ply of new technologies and innovations, but also on the diffusion and take-up of green innovations in the market place. Such policies need to be well designed to ensure that they support, do not distort the market formation, and should be aligned with competition policies and international commitments (OECD 2011).

With this purpose, several government policies have been introduced in the energy markets worldwide in an effort to reduce costs and accelerate the market penetration of renewables. Although the effectiveness of alternative policies to encourage innovation still needs to be tested empirically, it is expected that these policies will stimulate innovation in renewable energy (US DOE 2010).

In the next section, some of the policies that could enhance the development of microalgae biofuels are, therefore, revised.

Biodiesel, which is also known as fatty acid methyl ester (FAME), is produced from the transesterification of vegetable oils or animal fats with the addition of methanol (Lin et al. 2009). This type of biofuel contains no petroleum products, but it is compatible with conventional diesel engines and can be blended in any propor­tion with fossil-based diesel fuel to create a stable biodiesel blend (Lin et al. 2011).

Commercially, these blends are named B5, B20, or B100 to indicate the per­centage of the biodiesel component in the blend with petrodiesel (these percent­ages are 5, 20, and 100 %, respectively). Some of the main countries in grain production have established various stages of implementing or expanding the man­datory blending of biodiesel in motor fuels. This type of policy is crucial for the establishment of the biodiesel industry (Janaun and Ellis 2010).

Figure 4 presents an estimate of biodiesel production, consumption, exports, and imports for 2013 and 2020.

In 2010, the European Union (EU) was the leading biodiesel market with a pro­duction share of 52.8 %, and it was followed by the Americas with 33.9 % and Asia with 3.5 % (Sawhney 2011). Thus, the EU is the world’s largest biodiesel industry and market (Yusuf et al. 2011). Currently, each state has set different targets and regulations, but the average biodiesel blend is estimated at 5.75 % (IEA 2011).

The US production of biodiesel is smaller than the European production and shows important differences. Soybean oil is the most commonly used feedstock in the USA, and it is followed by rapeseed oil and soy oil. A stable consumption of 1 billion gallons per year is estimated from 2013 to 2020, and the production will tend to increase. This pattern will ultimately create export opportunities for the US biodiesel industries.

Argentina is a major exporter of biodiesel, which is produced almost exclu­sively from soybeans. The country has an export-oriented industry that is respon­sible for the estimated increase of biodiesel production and exports from 2013 to 2020. B7 was recently introduced in the domestic market (IEA 2011). However, the country’s exportable surplus is projected to increase 13 % from 2013 to 2020.

In Brazil, most of the biodiesel production is meant to satisfy the domes­tic demand, which is motivated by government policies. Nevertheless, a slight decrease in domestic consumption can be expected by 2020, as shown in Fig. 4. Biodiesel producers expect to gradually increase the demanded biodiesel volume from B7.5 to B10 in 2014 and to B20 by 2020. Currently, the net exports’ projec­tions remain at modest levels and will not exceed 60 million gallons by 2020.

The dominant feedstock is soybean oil, although Brazil is investing in alternative vegetable oils to produce biodiesel.

The source for biodiesel production is chosen according to the appropriate raw materials’ availability in each region or country. In Malaysia and Indonesia, coco­nut oil and palm oils are used for biodiesel production. The combined biodiesel production in Indonesia and Malaysia is expected to increase approximately 20 % by 2020, and both countries are net exporters. Their domestic production growth is limited by small domestic demand, high feedstock prices, and strong competi­tion from the Indonesian availability in the export markets. The Malaysian govern­ment has started to implement a B5 policy (IEA 2011). However, the domestic consumption is expected to remain stable.

A few other countries are considering the introduction of biofuels policies, which could create an additional global demand for vegetable oils and grains. This new demand would potentially influence both the grain and oilseed processes and these commodities’ availability for food, livestock, dairy, and poultry production.

In this context, algae may represent a promising alternative to grain oil, as they can be produced in many locations with enough sunlight. The most significant dis­tinguishing characteristic of algal oil is its conversion into biodiesel: The conver­sion rate is up to 50 % (Demirbas 2007). For traditional biodiesel, key areas for improvement include more efficient catalyst recovery, improved purification of the coproduct glycerin, and enhanced feedstock flexibility (IEA 2011).

The world biodiesel price (Central Europe FOB) and the biodiesel price for this fuel when it is bought directly at a plant show similar trends in Fig. 5.

From 2007, when approximately 3 million gallons of biodiesel were produced, to 2012, an increase of 104 % was observed in the total produced amount. In the same period, the world biodiesel price increased by 49 %. The cost of biodiesel

fuels varies depending on the feedstock, the geographic area, the variability in crop production from season to season, the price of crude petroleum, and other fac­tors (Demirbas 2007). Increasing crude oil prices and the mandates in Argentina, Brazil, the EU, and the USA have led to price increases throughout the period under consideration. In 2011, a high biodiesel price ($5.75) per gallon occurred, and there was a small decline in 2012. Below, we briefly outline the history of the two major producers of biofuels that stand out in the current scenario: Brazil and the USA.