Biofuels and Bioenergy

Biohydrogen

Biohydrogen is described as hydrogen produced biologically, most often by algae, bacteria and archaea. Biohydrogen is a potential biofuel attainable from both cultivation and from waste organic materials. Recently, there is a huge demand for hydrogen. There is no record of the production volume and use of hydrogen world-wide; however utilization of hydrogen was predicted to have reached 900 billion cubic meters in 2011. Refineries are large-volume producers and consumers of hydrogen. Today 96% of all hydrogen is extracted from fossil fuels, with 48% from natural gas, 30% from hydrocarbons, and 18% from coal and about 4% by electrolysis. Oil-sands processing, gas-to-liquids and coal gasification projects that are existing, require a vast amount of hydrogen and is presumed to raise the requirement notably within the next few years. Environmental regulations administered in most countries, increase the hydrogen demand at refineries for gas-line and diesel desulfurization. A significant future aspect of hydrogen could be as a replacement for fossil fuels, once the oil deposits are exhausted. This application is however dependent on the advancement of storage techniques to enable proper storage, distribution and combustion of hydrogen. If the cost of hydrogen generation, distribution, and end-user technologies decreases, hydrogen as a fuel could be penetrating the market in 2020. Industrial fermentation of hydrogen, or whole-cell catalysis, requires a finite amount of energy, since fission of water is accomplished with whole cell catalysis, to reduce the activation energy. This permits hydrogen to be manufactured from any organic matter that can be copied through whole cell catalysis as this process does not rely on the energy of substrate.