Background The lime and glass industries consume fossil fuels and produce significant quantities of CO2. By using an algae culture for carbon capture, it is estimated that up to 360 tonnes of CO2 can be captured and up to 2 460 GJ of fossil fuel consumption can be reduced per hectare of algae. If applied full-scale, such technology might reduce CO2 emissions related to lime and glass production industries by 25% and 15% respectively. It should also enable a significant reduction of fossil fuel consumption, by up to 45% for the lime industry and 15% for the glass industry. The demonstrated techniques may be applicable to other industries as well, and could be adapted for other production processes that use melting furnaces particularly and with high CO2 emissions (e.g. the steel or cement industries). Objectives The AGICAL+ project proposed to implement an innovative solution, based on algae culture and biomass production, which would allow for the CO2 capture of lime or glass furnace fumes and the production of biofuel that can be used within the furnaces during the production process. At pilot scale (1 ha of algae culture), the final aim of this project was to demonstrate that the environmental impact of industries can be reduced up to 360 tonnes/year of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and up to 2 460 GJ/year of fossil fuel in the case of lime and glass production processes. To reach these ambitious environmental objectives, two implementation steps were deemed to be necessary. Firstly, the project would launch a pilot prototype, and apply the experience gained from this, to further refine a second pilot. In the first step, the aim was to capture 270 tonnes/year of CO2, and produce 1 800 GJ/year of biomass. The project would demonstrate the technical economic viability in two representative industrial processes: (i) the implementation of the algae culture pilot for glass production furnace – the first pilot – would validate the process for fumes with moderate CO2 concentrations and high fume temperatures (600-650 °C) with many pollutants; and (ii) the lime application – the second pilot – would validate the process for high CO2 concentration and low temperature (100-125 °C) fumes. To optimise the overall environmental benefit, the energy consumption of the process aimed to be limited as much as possible and thermal energy that is available on the production site was to be used to power the pilot plants. This was expected to be especially critical for the lime pilot because of the limited amount of thermal energy available on the site. In order to limit the operational costs, water that was recovered when harvesting the algae would have been recycled and re-injected upstream. Results The project has been terminated on 1/09/2013 as it was concluded that the technology proposed is currently not economically sustainable.