Although microalgae are a promising biobased feedstock, industrial scale production is still far off. To enhance the economic viability of large-scale microalgae processes, all biomass components need to be valorized, requiring a multi-product biorefinery. However, this concept is still too expensive. Typically, downstream processing of industrial biotechnological bulk products accounts for 20–40% of the total production costs, while for a microalgae multi-product biorefinery the costs are substantially higher (50–60%). These costs are high due to the lack of appropriate and mild technologies to access the different product fractions such as proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids. To reduce the costs, simplified processes need to be developed for the main unit operations including harvesting, cell disruption, extraction, and possibly fractionation.

尽管微藻是一种有前途的生物基原料，但工业规模的生产距离还很遥远。为了提高大规模微藻工艺的经济可行性，需要对所有生物质成分进行增值，这需要多产品的生物精炼厂。但是，这个概念仍然太昂贵了。通常，工业生物技术大宗产品的下游加工成本占总生产成本的20％至40％，而微藻类多产品生物精炼厂的成本则高得多（50％至60％）。由于缺乏适当而温和的技术来获取蛋白质，碳水化合物和脂质等不同产品馏分，这些成本很高。为了降低成本，需要为主机操作开发简化的过程，包括收获，细胞破碎，提取以及可能的分级分离。