Microbial paths to renewable hydrogen production

Abstract

Hydrogen technologies are under intense research and development at present, to enable their future use as a fuel, in particular for the transportation sector. Whilst the engineering of hydrogen storage and use is relatively well developed, with prototype cars already on the road, a viable, sustainable means of renewable hydrogen production is lacking. A number of options for the biological production of hydrogen from abundantly available substrates – water, waste streams and, potentially, lignocellulosic materials – are available. Thus, solar energy can either be directly converted to hydrogen in some scenarios, or fixed carbon compounds generated through conventional photosynthesis can subsequently be converted to hydrogen in others. Much is already known about the underlying biological principles, but each microbial path to hydrogen production presents technical barriers to realization on a practical scale. Here, the key limiting factors in each approach are highlighted and future perspectives for biological hydrogen production are discussed.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many graduate and undergraduate students who have contributed to my research efforts in this area, in particular the students presently in my laboratory, Dipankar Ghosh, Mona Abo-Hashesh, Tugba Keskin and Ruofan Wang.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The author received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Quebec Fund for Research on Nature and Technology for research on biological hydrogen production. The author has no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.