– Increasing the economic viability of utilising CO2 from flue gas to produce biogas and bioplastic with photoautotrophic cyanobacteria
The production of biogas and bioplastics (polyhydroxybutyric acid – PHB) from CO2-rich flue gases is a very promising approach. However, for an economically viable process, it is necessary to optimize the weak points of the process. The most important aim is to increase PHB yields from 5-10% to 30-40% of cell biomass. This will be achieved on the one hand by genetic strain improvement and on the other hand by screening for PHB producing wild type strains and a possible mutagenesis of them. A further approach is mixotrophic growth on fatty acid byproducts from the biogas hydrolysis step. In addition, cheap CO2-sources such as direct flue gas from caloric power plants or biomass combustion plants as well as CO2-rich off-gases from bioethanol production are used for growing cyanobacteria in a pilot-scale photobioreactor.
The project contains the following tasks:
Innovative conversation processes, as anaerobic digestion from renewable resources with algae
Screening and characterisation of suitable algae strains
Production of efficient secondary energy carrier with fermentation
Optimisation of technologies and supply chains of biomethane from biogenic resources
Consideration of value-added chain of production, processing and utilisation
Duration:
1.03.2015 – 28.2.2018
Programme:
Energieforschung - Kooperative F&E-Projekte "Experimentelle Entwicklung
