ABSTRACT
Hydrogen can be produced from a wide spectrum of feedstocks (Figure 4.1). Almost 80% of investigation on hydrogen production by dark fermentation was from pure sugars: mono, di, or polysaccharides. However, the cost-effective biohydrogen should be produced from renewable feedstocks (Show et al., 2012). The potential feedstocks could be biomass of certain woody plants, aquatic plants, and algae. Furthermore, they could be the agricultural waste by-products, waste from food processing, livestock efuents, and other industrial waste. In this section, different types of feedstocks are discussed in terms of their availability, applicability, and operational challenges, as well as the motivation for their use in fermentative hydrogen production. Different types of feedstocks with their concentration use for the fermentation along with the process parameters, yield, and rate of evolution of H2 have been presented in Table 4.1.
