Review on the direct air CO2 capture by microalgae: Bibliographic mapping

Increasing energy demand along with the environmental effects of fossil fuels have created serious environmental, economic, and social challenges. To respond to these, greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction strategies such as diffusion and adoption of renewable energy (RE) and carbon-capturing techniques are two important solutions. Among different RE sources, the third generation of biomass, microalgae, has absorbed the special attention of researchers. Microalgae uses sunlight and CO2 to grow and produce O2 based on the photosynthesis process. Therefore, it has a great potential for CO2 capturing and utilization directly from the air. However, there are some techno-economic challenges for the wide commercialization of microalgae. On the other hand, Microalgae has the potential to produce different value-added products that can be used in various markets such as food, drug, health, cosmetics, and energy which can be used for commercializing and reducing the costs of CO2 capturing. Therefore, the objective of this research is to give insight about the current status of microalgae research and development as a RE resource with carbon-capturing potential. Data-mining analysis based on the bibliometric method has been used to find the research progresses, trends, and existing gaps to look at microalgae as a carbon-capturing technology. Also, in this paper by using Patent analysis, the commercialization and technological level of carbon-capturing by microalgae technique have been investigated. Results showed that the increase in the number of patents registered by companies points out the commercialization and economization; however, having research gaps in multiple areas shows further investigations should be done in this field. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

With increasing energy demand and the environmental effects of fossil fuels, microalgae as a third-generation biomass has great potential for reducing greenhouse gases and commercial development. However, commercializing microalgae faces techno-economic challenges and requires further research.