Energy Crisis and Environmental Pollution

1476 Words3 Pages

Energy crisis and environmental pollution are highlighted to be one of the major global problems in the 21st century. For the past 200 years, human society has had a ravenous appetite for fossil fuels. The huge increase in human population and also the industrial revolution were the major sources of fossil fuel consumption. However it is becoming obvious that our dependence on fossil fuels is causing many problems that we are going to have to address. Therefore, our greatest challenge is to find means to reduce the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. Fortunately, we have the potential to reduce the CO2 emission from fossil fuels combustion by converting them into renewable, carbon-neutral energy sources that provide the energy services now obtained from fossil fuels (1–3). In this context, a recent technology using microbial fuel cell (MFC) has been introduced to directly produce electrical current from waste streams based on the ability of particular bacteria, to bio-catalyze an oxidation and/or reduction reaction at an anodic and cathodic electrode, respectively (4–6) (Figure 1). The essential of this technology is the usage of a unique type of bacteria, anode respiring bacteria (ARB), which can typically respire electrons from the organic compounds to the anode surface and simultaneously protons (H+) liberate into electrolyte, lead to a negative anode potential. ARB are known only to utilize a few numbers of simple organic electron donors, such as acetate and H2 (7–9). The biodegradation of complex organic substrates in the anode of MFCs, like those present in a domestic wastewater, food processing wastewater, and landfill leachate, must take place through a cascade of reactions under strict anaerobic conditions, resul... ... middle of paper ... ...on pathways/kinetics of soluble carbohydrate and proteins when used as a sole electron donor or in mixture i.e., 100% carbohydrate, 100% protein, 50%:50% carbohydrate:protein,75%:25% carbohydrate:protein, and 25%:75% carbohydrate:protein. In order to achieve the objective, I will use different advanced analytical tools, such as (i) microbial ecology tool (such as pyrosequencing, quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and clone library), (ii) electrochemical analyses tools (such as cyclic voltammetry, linear sweep voltammetry, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and chronoamperometry), and (iii) chemical analyses tools (such as high-performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, ion chromatography, and chemical oxygen demand measurements) to predict the pathways of organic wastes fermentation as well as studying the hydrolysis and fermentation kinetics

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