Читать книгу Sustainable Solutions for Environmental Pollution - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Tae Hyun Chung and Bipro Ranjan Dhar*

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Abstract

Many countries have set up policies to decrease fossil fuel dependency and petro-based synthesis of commodity chemicals. Fermentative biofuels and bioresource recovery processes are expected to assist considerably in this context of sustainable transition to a bio-based economy. The utilization of renewable resources such as waste biomass is often considered an attractive feature of fermentative bioprocesses. However, limitations regarding the robustness of process and selectivity of target products are often considered bottlenecks to their sustainable commercialization. Particularly, in conventional fermentation processes, microorganisms produce undesired by-products to attain intracellular redox balance, which leads to a low yield of target products. Recently, electro-fermentation has emerged as an innovative approach for changing metabolic pathways of fermentative microorganisms towards target products with higher yields and productivities by changing intracellular redox potential. Lab-scale EF studies have successfully demonstrated superior performance over conventional fermentation to produce a wide variety of biofuels and commodity chemicals. This book chapter provides an overview of fundamental and applied aspects of various value-added products synthesis with the EF process and identifies research gaps for future development.

Keywords: Electro-fermentation, electro-selective fermentation, fermentation, value-added products, biofuel, biorefinery