Electro-Fermentation in Aid of Bioenergy and Biopolymers

The soaring levels of industrialization and rapid progress towards urbanization across the world have elevated the demand for energy besides generating a massive amount of waste. The latter is responsible for poisoning the ecosystem in an exponential manner, owing to the hazardous and toxic chemicals released by them. In the past few decades, there has been a paradigm shift from “waste to wealth”, keeping the value of high organic content available in the wastes of biological origin. The most practiced processes are that of anaerobic digestion, leading to the production of methane. However; such bioconversion has limited net energy yields. Industrial fermentation targeting value-added bioproducts such as—H2, butanediols; polyhydroxyalkanoates, citric acid, vitamins, enzymes, etc. from biowastes/lignocellulosic substrates have been planned to flourish in a multi-step process or as a “Biorefinery”. Electro-fermentation (EF) is one such technology that has attracted much interest due to its ability to boost the microbial metabolism through extracellular electron transfer during fermentation. It has been studied on various acetogens and methanogens, where the enhancement in the biogas yield reached up to 2-fold. EF holds the potential to be used with complex organic materials, leading to the biosynthesis of value-added products at an industrial scale.