Biohydrogen production scenario for asian countries

Abstract

Despite continuous advancement in energy technologies, the greenhouse gas and pollutant emission due to combustion of fossil fuel is increasing day by day due to its growing demand. With the growing worldwide concern regarding increasing global climate change and depleting energy source, it has become the necessity of the hour to generate fuel with safer, efficient, economic, and reasonably environmental-friendly technology. To address this issue, a variety of efficient end-use technologies and alternative fuels have been proposed; this includes compressed natural gas; reformulated gasoline or diesel; methanol; ethanol; synthetic liquids from natural gas, biomass, or coal; and hydrogen. In this regard hydrogen has emerged as a promising option since it offers to solve various important societal impacts of fuel use at the same time. Hydrogen (H2) produced through wastewater treatment using biological routes (dark and photo-fermentation) can be considered as a renewable and sustainable resource. Negative-valued wastewater contains high levels of biodegradable organic material with net positive energy and minimizes the economics of H2 production and treatment cost. This chapter mainly focuses on the global biohydrogen research trend specifically in Asian countries. Bibliometric and scientometric analysis performed with ISI Web of Knowledge [Thomson Reuters] documented significant increments in publications wherein India stands top in biohydrogen production using wastewater. Current status and road map showed that China followed by other Asian countries have significantly contributed towards H2 production. Future perspective suggests for integrative H2 production strategies such as microbial electrolysis, polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) production, bioaugmentation, and metabolic engineering to overcome some of the limitations for process scale-up.