Native extremophilic marine cyanobacteria strains from Qatar represent promising candidates for large scale outdoor cultivation in desert environments, taking advantage of the local solar, seawater and CO2 resources. In this study, a recently isolated pigment producing Pleurocapsa sp. strain was successfully cultivated in open ponds using urea as an inexpensive local nitrogen source, producing biomass with up to 12% dry weight of phycobiliproteins, predominantly phycocyanin. Following pigment extraction, the residual biomass was valorized via hydrothermal conversion, demonstarting the feasibility of obtaining bitumen-like oil fractions. However, this result that opens perspectives for optimized biorefinery, was shown to require a pigment extraction process allowing the simultaneous reduction of the ash content in the biomass, which is about three-fold higher than that of a spirulina biomass reference cultivated in France. Indeed, the reduction in biomass ash content had a significant impact on the hydrothermal conversion oil yield, but also on the oil's chemical composition in terms of molecular mass distribution, and on the resulting material's rheology. The bitumen-like thermo-rheological behavior of the oils appears to be associated with the presence of a significant fraction of molecules above 1000 g/mol, in addition to a dominant population around