The natural resource footprint of producing protein rich algal meal for livestock feed applications in The Netherlands was examined. Microalgae were cultivated at pilot scale (500m² open ponds) and integrated in a biorefinery making use of waste heat and flue gases. The final products were electricity, digestate, heat available for a nearby bio-ethanol facility and algal oil and meal. The sustainability of this rather new biomass source for animal feed was compared with the more traditional route of soybean crop production. The soybeans were cultivated, dried and crushed in Brazil and the soy meal, which is commonly used as a protein rich animal feed ingredient, was transported to The Netherlands. An exergy analysis (EA) on the integrated algal biorefinery revealed the process inefficiencies of drying (44.01%) and inoculum production (54.98%). Attributional exergetic life cycle assessment (ELCA) methodology was used to determine the resource footprint of the (algae based) biorefinery and the linear (soybean based) economy. Therefore, the Cumulative Exergy Extraction from the Natural Environment (CEENE) method was used and system expansion was applied to avoid physical allocation. For the biorefinery, especially the digestion process had a big contribution to the total footprint (72.74%), mainly because of the high daily demand for biomass and electricity use of the dosage system. When comparing the resource footprint of algal meal and soy meal production, i.e. a young, small scale technology was compared to a mature large scale technology, a factor 10² difference could be noticed. First results of a sensitivity analysis indicated the importance of a higher areal algae productivity, more use of renewable resources (e.g. wind energy) and decreasing energy consumption to be competitive, from a natural resource point of view, with the import of soy meal by The Netherlands.