Abstract
AbstractThe shortage of fossil fuels restricts the world supply of reduced carbon compounds and energy sources. Biotechnology offers the most feasible route to renewing the supplies of reduced carbon compounds. This involves recycling of CO2 through photosynthesis. Conventional agriculture has little or no potential for supplying biomass and its derivatives on sufficient scale to offer an alternative to the fossil fuels. The agricultural wastes, on the whole, are intractable to conversion into useful carbon and energy sources and in any case are not available in amounts to provide a significant alternative to the fossil fuels. In contrast, microbial photosynthesis, optimised in photobioreactors, has vast potential to provide organic matter on a scale to match the consumption of fossil fuels. The quantitative study of microbial photosynthesis as a biotechnological route to biomass has been neglected. As a result there is a chaos of conflicting data on fundamental parameters, for example, the photosynthetic efficiency of biomass production. New photosynthetic biotechnology with fully controlled continuous‐culture systems is providing unequivocal values for the parameters. For the scale‐up of microbial photosynthesis a tubular‐loop reactor is proposed.
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