Improvement of energy recovery from organic wastes by the biohydrogen followed by biobutanol fermentation using Clostridium acetobutylicum MTCC 11276

摘要

This rising concerns over energy security and climate change is now attracting many researchers to focus on exploring renewable energy resources. The advent of biofuels technologies such as biohydrogen, ethanol, butanol, etc. have gained importance in recent times. Use of ethanol as an additive in gasoline has been implemented in many countries to reduce dependency on petroleum fuels. But use of ethanol as fuel has been marred with many challenges. One such challenge is hygroscopic nature of ethanol thereby causing damage to the IC engines. Use of biobutanol as a fuel has shown many advantages as compared to ethanol since it is less hygroscopic and less corrosive. Biobutanol is produced by acetone-butanol-ethanol type (ABE) fermentation process. Hydrogen is also produced in microbial ABE fermentation which has the highest energy content and there is no emission of greenhouse gases during burning of hydrogen. The main objective of the present study was to integrate biohydrogen production process with biobutanol production process for improvement in energy recovery.