Oil & Gas Research
Open Access

A step towards commercialization of biohydrogen photoproduction by green microalgae

Copyright: © 2020  . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Hydrogen gas as a unique energy carrier and the cleanest
burning fuel, is widely known to be future fuel. Unlike
current electrochemical and chemical methods of H2
production, which are neither commercially scalable nor
environmentally friendly, microalgal H2 photoproduction
has the potential of being a non CO2-emitter and
affordable method. However extreme sensitivity of hydrogenase
enzyme to photosynthetic O2 naturally prevents
large-scale H2 production upon illumination. Although a
two-phase su lfur deficiency method has been established
to deal with this incompatibility, its time and cost demanding,
so that this model lacks commercial maturity.
Despite much effort has been made so far, no proper economic
alternative for the sulfur deprivation model, with
higher or even same productivity and sustainability, has
been presented. Herein we propose a simple and viable
alternative, through introducing a chemical O2 scavenger
system, called oxysorb, to algal cultures.