For any the systems to be considered, the financial benefits have to be explored to see if it would be feasible. Due to the fact that this systems primarily reason is to recycle CO2 and convert it to biomass to be used by the CHP plant, the process isn’t actually going to make money but instead save money. For the first part of the study the biomass processed was assumed to be sold off at current prices (£1/kg), but in the second part, the power produced was used to offset the costs for heating from gas and also to offset the cost of equivalent use of wood (see Biomass section).
Cost |
|
Capital Cost of installing FPA reactor |
£547,200.00 |
Yearly Operational/Maintenance Costs |
£127,769.98 |
Algal Biomass Produced Per Year |
246,220kgs |
CO2 Captured in Algae Per year |
984,860kgs |
Value of Algal Biomass Per Year |
£246,215.77 |
Table 1 : Costs of microalgae system
The capital cost is projected from what microalgae plants cost on average per meter squared that has been found by Scottish Bioenergy. Once again the yearly operational and maintenance costs have been sized according to the system that has been designed, but it also includes the cost of heating the water used in the process (on average 189,451.23 liters flowing through the system) and the cost of harvesting the microalgae for biomass (Including the airlift system)
The Capital cost taken from Table 2 is taken as a loan with the same interest rates and loan period as the other schemes, which results in an annual repayment of £51,651.81.
|
Annual cost |
Loan repayment |
£51,651.81 |
Annual running and maintenance costs |
£127,769.98 |
Total |
£179,421.78 |
Table 2: The Economics Of Microalgae
With the loan and these costs, it turns out that there is only a yearly profit of £66,793.98 at the current price for algal biomass with an energy content on average of 25MJ/kg. This is not much profit considering the initial capital cost, it would mean that there would only be a total net profit of just over £300,000 over the total 20 years (assuming prices for biomass stay the same). So from these observations it’s not the most cost effective method if taking a loan for the 20 years.