Marginal lands as an important potential to produce biohydrogen

Abstract

One of the promising approaches for hydrogen production is agricultural biomass crops conversion, which is a renewable-based clean and abundant resource. The main objective of the current study is to assess the contribution of soil beneficial microbes in improving salt tolerance along with the evaluation of possible hydrogen production from sorghum plant biomass. High salinity concentrations in soil stimulate plant roots to enhance the plant desire for symbiosis and association with vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (VAM). Among the VAM species, G.mosseae is one of the significant and effective VAM species, which contribute to plant salinity resistance by expanding leaf salt potential and accumulating nutrients leaves in comparison to other soil microorganisms in plants. Morphological characters of these plants show a higher biomass production during saline conditions up to 2000 kg/ha. Biomass production in the specific alternative thermochemical and biological processes are suggested and finally, gasification processes were chosen as the optimal method which can be practically applied to produce hydrogen from sorghum plants. By producing 10,000 kg biomass in three harvesting periods of Sorghum, almost 3000 kg biomass for bio-hydrogen production can be obtained. This could be an appropriate resource for obtaining biofuels, particularly bio-hydrogen from 3 million hectares of unbearable or poor quality lands in a country such as Turkey by producing 9 million tons of Hydrogen. Obtained data gives an overview of these technologies for hydrogen production from biomass yielding to 28.2 gH2/100 g biomass or 33.17 to 44.26 (gH2). Producing green hydrogen from plants biomass is relatively cheaper, compared to chemo-industrial methods. Achieving the immobilization factors in bioprocesses for microorganisms is obtained in this study. Consequently, hydrogen productivity of the bioprocess can be enhanced by using porous support materials which provide high biomass holding capacity and help better gas retrieve in the process.