Photobiohydrogen production and high-performance photobioreactor - Solar Energy Sciences and Engineering Applications - page 343

Photobiohydrogen production and
high-performance photobioreactor
Qiang Liao 1 , 2 , Cheng-Long Guo 1 , 2 , Rong Chen 1 , 2 ,
Xun Zhu 1 , 2 &Yong-ZhongWang 1 , 2
1 Key Laboratory of Low-grade Energy Utilization Technologies and Systems,
Chongqing University, Chongqing, China
2 Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China
11.1 INTRODUCTION
The carbon-based fossil fuels, including coal, oil and natural gas, are currently the
world's primary energy sources, which have fueled global economic development over
the past century. However, fossil fuels are finite resources and the fast depletion of them
has been mainly responsible for the energy crisis and for causing global warming. In the
face of such a situation, renewable energy resources inevitably become the only solution
to resolve existing problems for the sustainable development. Among the renewable
energy alternatives being explored, hydrogen is one of the ideal energy carriers because
it has numerous advantages of excellent combustion performance, cleanness, high effi-
ciency, and a three times higher caloric value than petroleum (Akkerman et al., 2002;
Das and Veziroglu, 2001). In spite of its attractiveness, the complete replacement of
fossil fuels by hydrogen is still far away from widespread industrial application as a
result of the bottleneck of large-scale hydrogen production. Present hydrogen produc-
tion methods that can be scaled up, including steam reforming of natural gas, thermal
cracking of light oil, coal gasification and electrolysis of water, etc., still rely on fossil
fuels or huge electricity consumption, which are clearly unsustainable. Besides, these
methods have other intrinsic drawbacks: i) complex process and high cost of equip-
ment investment, ii) environmental pollution (Asada and Miyake, 1999). Therefore,
the development of a safe, economical, and sustainable way to produce hydrogen
is the key to the realization of hydrogen energy. Biohydrogen production is such a
technology that can overcome the above barriers and offer the significant advantages
in that it is cost-effective, pollution-free and environmentally compatible (Levin et al.,
2004). Typically, biohydrogen production technologies can be classified into two types:
dark hydrogen fermentation and photobiohydrogen production. As compared to dark
hydrogen fermentation, photobiohydrogen production can convert solar energy into
hydrogen using water and simple organic compounds as the hydrogen sources, and
enable carbon dioxide reduction and waste treatment. Over the past decades, there-
fore, extensive efforts have been devoted to the improvement in the performance of
the photobiohydrogen production. This chapter will summarize recent advances in the
photobiohydrogen production technology.
The organization of this chapter is as follows. First of all, the general descriptions
of photobiohydrogen production as well as the critical issues related to this hydrogen
production technology are given in Section 11.2. Then, the comprehensive introduction