ABSTRACT
The increasing scarcity of non-renewable sources of energy has propelled various interest in finding research opportunities to exploit the enormous quantities of wastes generated by various industries to produce value added chemicals along with the simultaneous detoxification of the waste. The conventional method of fractional distillation for the recovery of alcohols uses considerable amounts of energy. The aerobic co-culture technique proposed in this thesis would be highly effective at the pilot/industrial scale as fungal-bacterial syntrophic metabolism was shown to be effective for the biodegradation of phenolic compounds and reduction of selenite ions. Oil refinery effluents contain a lot of trace elements like selenite which is an important trace element in syngas fermentation. A bidirectional approach of valorizing the liquid and gaseous wastes of the petrochemical industry was demonstrated in this thesis. The aerobic biodegradation of wastewater containing phenol by two different co-culturing techniques usingPhanerochaete chrysosporium and Delftia lacustris was developed.
