ABSTRACT
The carbon-based fossil fuels, including coal, oil and natural gas, are currently the world’s primary energy sources, which have fueled global economic development over the past century. However, fossil fuels are finite resources and the fast depletion of them has been mainly responsible for the energy crisis and for causing global warming. In the face of such a situation, renewable energy resources inevitably become the only solution to resolve existing problems for the sustainable development. Among the renewable energy alternatives being explored, hydrogen is one of the ideal energy carriers because it has numerous advantages of excellent combustion performance, cleanness, high efficiency, and a three times higher caloric value than petroleum (Akkerman et al., 2002; Das and Veziroglu, 2001). In spite of its attractiveness, the complete replacement of fossil fuels by hydrogen is still far away from widespread industrial application as a result of the bottleneck of large-scale hydrogen production. Present hydrogen production methods that can be scaled up, including steam reforming of natural gas, thermal cracking of light oil, coal gasification and electrolysis of water, etc., still rely on fossil fuels or huge electricity consumption, which are clearly unsustainable. Besides, these methods have other intrinsic drawbacks: i) complex process and high cost of equipment investment, ii) environmental pollution (Asada and Miyake, 1999). Therefore, the development of a safe, economical, and sustainable way to produce hydrogen is the key to the realization of hydrogen energy. Biohydrogen production is such a technology that can overcome the above barriers and offer the significant advantages in that it is cost-effective, pollution-free and environmentally compatible (Levin et al., 2004). Typically, biohydrogen production technologies can be classified into two types: dark hydrogen fermentation and photobiohydrogen production. As compared to dark hydrogen fermentation, photobiohydrogen production can convert solar energy into hydrogen using water and simple organic compounds as the hydrogen sources, and enable carbon dioxide reduction and waste treatment. Over the past decades, therefore, extensive efforts have been devoted to the improvement in the performance of the photobiohydrogen production. This chapter will summarize recent advances in the photobiohydrogen production technology.
