Abstract
With the plausible depletion of fossil fuels in the near future and its associated environmental impacts, researchers have instigated the search for eco-friendly renewable bioenergy. Moreover, the increase in water pollution by industrial and anthropogenic activities is another alarming global concern. In this regard, the production of renewable and sustainable green bioenergy utilizing wastewater through microbial electrochemical technologies (METs) can alleviate these crucial problems by providing a sustainable solution to meet both the demands of energy and fresh water supply. Moreover, different bio-centered techniques such as nitrification and denitrification for nitrogen removal, and elimination of carcinogenic metals, pathogens, and organic components utilizing microbiota followed by toxicity sensing of different pollutants have been efficaciously exhibited through METs. However, inferior bioenergy production and recovery of low biomass yield in METs with high operational cost are noteworthy bottlenecks that hinder the scalability of this technology. Therefore, this review elaborates different physicochemical factors affecting the performance of METs, microbial interaction for the development of stable biofilm and so forth. Moreover, a broad overview on the production of bioenergy, along with the removal of pollutants from wastewater through different types of METs are also highlighted. Furthermore, the production of biofuels like ethanol, methanol, biodiesel, and gaseous fuel like bio-H2 coupled with power generation using photosynthetic microorganisms via CO2 sequestration through METs are also discussed. Additionally, recent developments with future scope for the field-scale implementation of METs along with their bottlenecks have been discussed, which has not been critically reviewed to date.
Highlights
The growing energy crisis is an inexorable anxiety for human beings because of enlarging industrial activities with the everincreasing global population
The microbial electrochemical technologies (METs) have been extensively utilized for the production of renewable bioenergy like bioelectricity, liquid fuel, biogas, and other valuables
The use of different kinds of METs exhibits a holistic treatment of wastewater due to its proficiency to eliminate organic and inorganic compounds, and pathogens from wastewater
Summary
The growing energy crisis is an inexorable anxiety for human beings because of enlarging industrial activities with the everincreasing global population. In sewage treatment, researchers successfully achieved higher COD removal efficiency of more than 80% via different kinds of lab-scale or field-scale METs (Das et al, 2020a, 2021a; Jafary et al, 2020) In this veneration, Ren et al combined MFC fabricated with graphite brush anode and carbon cloth cathode, with anaerobic membrane bioreactor to attain a high COD removal efficiency of 92.5% for domestic wastewater with an initial COD of 210 mg L−1. Rani et al (2020) employed MEC fabricated with carbon electrode for the treatment of combined leachate and dairy wastewater with the initial COD of 8,400 mg L−1 and attained COD removal efficiency of 73% at an externally applied cell potential of 0.8 V and with the hydrogen production rate of 15 ml L−1 day−1 (Rani et al, 2020). The existence of these nutrients in untreated wastewater provides nutrient build-up in the aquatic environment that delivers a favorable growth condition for algae and other water hyacinths
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