Fermentative Biohydrogen Production for Sustainable Energy

Currently, the humungous world population is looking toward a sustainable source of renewable energy to support livelihood and developmental entities like industries and automobiles. The existing fossil-based fuels are neither carbon neutral nor unlimited. Hence, scientists across the world gradually directed their attention toward biofuels including biohydrogen. Among various known technologies for hydrogen production at present, the fermentative pathways including photo fermentation and dark fermentation have been reported as most sustainable routes for the obvious reasons of less energy requirement, self-renewability of fermentative microorganisms, cheap availability of feedstock, considerable biohydrogen yield, and negligible process waste generation. This book chapter aims to introduce the basics of hydrogen generation and summarizes various studies with different feedstocks for fermentative biohydrogen. The chapter gives an insight into state-of-the-art technology for energy generation via biohydrogen including integrated approaches like dark fermentation and microbial fuel cell. Several studies have been reviewed to present the developments in fermentative biohydrogen production to date. Toward the end, it presents a brief economic outlook and suggests future prospects for the commercialization of fermentative biohydrogen.